306 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



any of them had learned the business before them by exper- 

 ience. The work was done when labor was very high ; the 

 price for common laborers being $8 per day, and lumber was 

 $100 per thousand feet. Before the canals were finished, 

 wages had fallen 50 per cent, or more, and the work done was 

 worth in the market only half its cost. Besides, in 1851 and 

 1852 the common price for water was 50 cents or $1 an inch, 

 and the ditch companies made their calculations upon charging 

 those figures ; but before the completion of the ditches the best 

 claims in the ravines had been exhausted, and there was not 

 enough rich ground left to pay high prices for all the water. 

 Flumes which do not last more than ten, and sometimes become 

 worthless in six years, were used to cross deep chasms where 

 iron pipe would have been much better and cheaper. Some of 

 these structures were wonderful works. The Golden Rock 

 flume near Big Oak Flat was 256 feet high, and supported by 

 an immense trestle-work ; and after it was blown down, a 

 durable iron pipe at less than a quarter of the cost supplied 

 its place equally well. On account of the bad engineering 

 and the inexperience of the early ditch builders, the exhaus- 

 tion of the placers, and other causes, the mining ditches which 

 cost not less than $20,000,000 are now worth probably not 

 more than $2,000,000. The total number of mining ditches 

 in 1871, according to the State Surveyor General's report, was 

 516, and their aggregate length 4,800 miles, and their daily 

 supply of water 171,000 inches. 



226. Measurement of Water. Water is sold by the inch, 

 and usually an inch is the amount which escapes through an 

 orifice an inch square, with the water six inches deep above 

 the top of the orifice. That is called a six-inch head or 

 pressure. If a large quantity is sold, the orifice may be two 

 or three inches high. The mode of measurement, however, is 

 not uniform. In some places the pressure is nine or ten inches ; 

 in others there is no pressure, but the quantity that escapes 

 .through an orifice an inch wide, and three inches high, with- 

 out pressure, is called an inch. 



