16 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



numbers of fat hogs in the fields show that 

 they do not live on Chicago canned beef 

 or flavor their coffee from tin cows. It is 

 the farming that the American farmer 

 must drift back to. He must quit listening 

 to those who tell him that any system of 

 finance or any abundance of money will 

 enable him to buy everything he can raise 

 himself, hire work that he can do himself, 

 and enjoy, simply because he is an Ameri- 

 can farmer of the nineteenth century, 

 luxuries that the richest dirt never yet has 

 justified in any other country. The irri- 

 gating farmer can restore farming to its 

 ancient respectability and he is probably 

 the only one that can. It must be so re- 

 stored, or there is little increase of pros- 

 perity in store for the great United States. 

 The farm must be made attractive to the 

 boys, and the irrigated farm now comes 

 too, near being the only one where they 

 can see that they are not working for 

 nothing. On the irrigated farm the girls, 

 too, can see something beside work ahead, 

 and the old folks feel while pulling the 

 sled uphill that there is a chance for them 

 to ride down before they die. 



Following the winding Kaweah up the 

 foothills and into the great canyon, down 

 which it foams from the lofty Sierra Ne- 

 vada, I found many places where every 

 variety of irrigation was attempted. Tu- 

 lare county too has its "orange belt," and 

 its a hard county in California that has 

 not. This belt, though not over large, is 

 unmistakably good but suffering from bad 

 irrigation which the orange is sure to do. 

 The looks of the trees told the tale well 

 enough. Many of the oranges and some 

 of the lemons were indicating foot rot on 

 ground that was naturally well drained, 

 an almost unfailing sign of over-irrigation. 

 One man was making a vigorous attempt 

 to irrigate with small furrows. The soil 

 was plainly fine enough in texture to en- 

 able him to do it, but the ground was 

 sloping about twenty-seven different ways 

 in wavy lines, and the water had evidently 

 become so tired trying to get somewhere 

 that it had finally given up the job and 

 settled down permanently in the middle. 

 By the time he finds he wants the ground 

 graded to an even slope on every face on 

 which the water is to run, the orchard will 

 be too old to change and then the swear- 

 ing period will fairly begin. 



I found some people irrigating by plant- 

 ing along the ditch in the old Indian way 



and others letting the water wallow around 

 over the ground to suit itself and plant- 

 ing on the dry bumps it had left, but no- 

 where a decently irrigated place, although 

 there was abundance of fine soil and an 

 over-abundance of the finest water. But 

 the place at which I spent the night, well 

 up in the canyon, skimmed the cream of 

 the whole entertainment. The owner was 

 a rich old settler with money out at inter- 

 est in all directions. He had a ditch car- 

 rying about four feet of water, or two 

 hundred inches. This ran through his 

 store making, at one side of the door, a 

 drop of some five feet upon an overshot 

 wheel which turned a large fanning wheel 

 in the center near the ceiling. In the 

 breeze of this, the old gentlemen sat and 

 drank beer and smoked away the summer 

 days while waiting for customers. Pass- 

 ing on some hundred yards or so, the 

 water spread upon a gravelly flat of five 

 or six acres. This was filled with alfalfa 

 and fruit trees. There were peaches, 

 prunes, pears, apples, silver prunes and 

 nectarines all ripe, and we were badly in 

 need of fruit, especially on the return from 

 a fishing trip near Mt. Whitney where it 

 is a little cool for fruit. The alfalfa 

 and fruit trees were all in a huddle to- 

 gether and the evident design was to get 

 both irrigated at one stroke to economize 

 labor. The labor of shutting off the water 

 was evidently objectionable and therefore 

 never done as far as appearances went. 

 The whole of this enormous head was run- 

 ning upon this five or six acres all the 

 time we were there, and coming and going, 

 and there was good reason to believe it 

 had been running all the season. There 

 was a fair stand of alfalfa on it in spite of 

 the cows nibbling, but the fruit was every- 

 where sour, insipid, and small. It was 

 about the worst I have seen in California 

 and that is saying a good deal, for while 

 California can raise the best fruit in the 

 world with good care, it never makes a 

 failure of raising the most abominable on 

 earth when it tries. 



Now the point I wish to emphasize is 

 this this was a wash of coarse gravel 

 standing on a slope so great that in spite 

 of the great head of water it all drained 

 away underneath, the top showing no sign 

 of swampiness anywhere. Here, then, was 

 the choicest of conditions for growing the 

 best fruit on earth, climate and all being 

 as perfect as the drainage. The alfalfa 



