State Agricultural Society. 25 



Having called attention to some of the facts and features connected 

 with the Agricultural College about which we think the agriculturists 

 and mechanics have a right to complain, we commend the whole subject 

 to the good judgment of the Legislature. 



IRRIGATION AND RECLAMATION. 



The season of eighteen hundred and seventy-one was a season well cal- 

 culated to call general attention to the benefits and prove the necessity 

 of the adoption of some general plan of irrigation throughout each of the 

 large open valleys of the State. The year eighteen hundred and sev- 

 enty-t^vo is ushered in under circumstances equally as well calculated to 

 call general attention to the benefi s and prove the necessities of some 

 general plan of reclamation from i uinous overflow of a very large por- 

 tion of these same valleys. 



An experience of twenty years, during which time the State and indi- 

 viduals have squandered beyond redemption in efforts at special recla- 

 mation millions of money, and the floods have swept away millions of 

 property and caused an incalculable amount of suffering and the loss of 

 many lives, has pretty effectually proved the utter uselessness of any 

 effort to reclaim any considerable portion of the swamp and overflowed 

 lands of the interior of the State on any plan or system that shall not 

 embrace within its scope all of this class of lands bordering on the Sac- 

 ramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their tributaries, including the 

 islands about their confluence. 



The same expei'ience has proved the utter impracticability of any 

 plan or system for such reclamation that shall not contemplate addi- 

 tional channels to conduct the water through the great valleys which 

 are by nature necessarily the receptacles of the vast quantities of water 

 that fall on the great extent of rapidly sloping watersheds that so 

 closely surround them, as well as additional outlets into the bays or tide 

 water at points some distance from the one at which all these waters 

 are now by the natural channels concentrated and, as it were, heaped up 

 together. These propositions suggest the propriety and importance of 

 considering a joint plan of reclamation and irrigation that shall embrace 

 in mutual interests and mutual benefit, and consequently mutual duties 

 and joint expense, the entire portion of the State lying between the 

 Coast Range and Sierra Nevada Mountains, and north and east of the 

 Bay of San Francisco. This district of country embraces an area of not 

 less than five million acres of land — the largest portion of which, owing 

 to the droughts and floods to which it is so frequently subject, is not 

 sufficiently reliable as an agricultural country to support above the 

 contingencies of occasional loss and suffering any very large amount of 

 population, but which, securely reclaimed from destructive overflows, 

 and supplied with the facilities of necessary irrigation, can be made to 

 support more easily and in a condition of greater permanent prosperity 

 than the present inhabitants enjoy, one person to every acre of land 

 within its limits, or five million of people. 



The longer the adoption of some plan for general irrigation and 

 general reclamation is delayed, the greater the difficulties in which the 

 subject will be involved. Local plans and special systems will engage 

 the attention and enlist the energies and means of the people, conflict- 

 ing rights and vexatious questions of water privileges will grow up to 



