CLIMATE OF NORTH AMERICA HUNTINGTON. 389 



villages were unoccupied and all the water normally used by them were 

 brought many miles downstream in canals. Tliis is scarcely possible, 

 for the universal tendency in all irrigated regions is to use the water 

 as far upstream as can be done profitably under the existing state of 

 skill in the science of irrigation. In the good years, to be sure, the 

 people of these villages might raise crops, but in the dry years they 

 would starve. 



Farther down the Santa Cruz River, b}^ wliicli I mean the dry bed 

 wherein a httle water occasionally flows, a small ruin lies at the 

 mouth of the Canada del Oro, or Little Canyon of Gold. A httle 

 farther downstream, at the so-called Point of the Mountains, 17 miles 

 northwest of Tucson, there is another large ruin known as Charco 

 Yuma. In the spring of 1910 we found that the nearest source whence 

 peojile hke the Hohokam, who could not chg deep wells, could have 

 obtained water was 8 miles upstream at the Nine-mile Water Hole. 

 There the amount was sufficient for drinking purposes, but not for 

 irrigation. K anchors engaged in raising cattle informed us that no 

 water whatever had come down the river during the preceding winter, 

 although during the summer of 1909, when the rainfall for the hot 

 season was close to the average amount of 7 inches, floods came down 

 after 15 or 20 showers. In some cases the flow of water lasted only 

 two hours; in the height of the rainy season, however, that is at the 

 end of July and beginning of August, a brook of more or less size 

 flowed steadily for two weeks. The average duration of the floods 

 was said to be about 36 hours. From tliis we infer that during a 

 summer of average rainfall, surface water flows as far as the old village 

 of Charco Yuma for 25 or 30 days during July and August. This 

 conclusion is confirmed by the statements of Socoro Ruelas, a Mexican 

 cattle rancher, who in boyhood and early manhood lived at the old 

 stage station located in the midst of the ruins. In winter, according 

 to liis statement, water rarely reaches the place, and even the heavy 

 showers of summer sometimes fail to send it so far. When he was a 

 boy in the late seventies or early eighties the spring at the Nine-mile 

 Water Hole increased so much as to send out a stream that was used 

 for irrigation for a year or two. But at other times it completely 

 dried up, so that there was no surface water witliin about 12 miles of 

 Charco Yuma. From the spring of 1885 to August, 1887, according 

 to the dates given by the Mexican, no water whatever, either in sum- 

 mer or winter, came down as far as the ruins, and people like the 

 Hohokam who depend upon summer floods would have had no crop 

 in 1885 and 1886, and only a poor one when the late rains of 1887 

 arrived. 



In spite of what has just been said, tliere is a little cultivation on the 

 opposite side of the Santa Cruz VaUey, a mile nortii of the ruins of 

 85360°— SM 1912 26 



