270 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



The Fresno Canal was constructed by Friedlander, Chap- 

 man, and Howard, to take the water from Fresno River, 

 where it strikes the plain. The main canal is ten miles long 

 and forty feet wide, with a grade of eight-tenths of a foot to 

 a mile, with capacity to irrigate 40,000 acres ; and it is to be 

 supplied with a reservoir a mile and a half long, a hundred 

 feet wide, and ten feet deep. The district to be irrigated is 

 known as the Alabama Settlement, south of the Fresno River. 



Chapman, Miller & Lux have made a canal, tapping the San 

 Joaquin twelve miles above the bend, and running north war J, 

 nearly parallel with the stream below the bend. It is thirty 

 miles long, thirty-five feet wide, and three feet deep, with a 

 grade of a foot to a mile, and capacity to irrigate 50,000 

 acres. The land covered by this ditch belongs to the three 

 ditch-builders. 



There are several considerable irrigating ditches in the east- 

 ern part of San Joaquin County, and in Kern and Yolo Coun- 

 ties. 



Assertions have been published repeatedly that the con- 

 struction of large canals would tend to throw the land irri- 

 gated into the same ownership with that of the water supply, 

 and thus would not only prevent the sale of the large tracts 

 now held by single individuals to small farmers, but would 

 compel the sale of many tracts to the ditch-owners. G. P. 

 Marsh claims to have observed such results in Lombardy, but 

 he may have misunderstood the causes. All the experience of 

 our continent tends to prove that the number of independent 

 land-owners increases with the substitution of tillage for pas- 

 turage, and again with the substitution of horticulture for 

 grain-farming on dry soil in a dry climate. The cultivation 

 of irrigated land is horticultural in its tendencies. Twenty 

 acres of irrigated land may demand as much labor, and pay 

 as much gross revenue, as two thousand do without artificial 

 water supply, if kept merely for wild pasturage. The size of 

 the farms depends on the quantity that a farmer can afford to 



