156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tricts already organized are meeting with bitter opposition from 

 large land-owners who do not wish to sell, nor to pay higher taxes 

 upon more valuable because more fruitful land. The average 

 farmer with his hundred or five hundred acres, where crops fail 

 one year in three or two in five, is compelled to have water or be- 

 come bankrupt. The owner of fifty or a hundred thousand acres 

 pastures cattle there and makes a living that suits him. If the 

 small farmers form an irrigation district, the cattle baron is apt 

 to fight it on general principles, and if they outvote him and 

 include any of his land in the taxable area, he fights them to the 

 end. Several of the most promising district ditches of California 

 are lying unfinished at the present time because of the stub- 

 born opposition of the large land-owners, some of them living in 

 Europe. 



Private ownership of irrigation canals exists more or less in 

 every county of California. It is too soon to decide the compara- 

 tive cost of water under the two systems, but the logic of the 

 situation requires supervision of private enterprises by either the 

 State or the General Government. The danger in many private 

 schemes is the sale of more water than can be supplied in seasons 

 of drought, and the consequent loss of crops planted in the ex- 

 pectation of receiving an abundance. There is a golden mean 

 between this extreme and the other, now less frequent than for- 

 merly, of claiming ten times as much water as can be used and 

 allowing it to go to waste. One of the greatest corporate irriga- 

 tion enterprises in the United States is in Merced County. The 

 late Charles Crocker, of San Francisco, was the leading stock- 

 holder. Three and a half million dollars has now been spent upon 

 a fifty-mile canal from the Merced River, with a hundred and fifty 

 miles of lesser ditches ; a giant reservoir, Lake Yosemite, covering 

 a square mile thirty feet deep, and the purchase of large tracts of 

 land. The company now has water to irrigate six hundred thou- 

 sand acres. The carrying capacity of the main canal is not less 

 than four thousand cubic feet per second. Colonies are springing 

 up along the line of the canal, and thousands of acres have been 

 planted to crops that justify irrigation. 



A still better illustration of what private enterprise has done 

 in this field is shown in the Kern region. Seven hundred miles 

 of large irrigating ditches have been dug in this imperial county, 

 which contains more than five million acres. The annual rain- 

 fall is from three to five inches, so that irrigation is absolutely 

 necessary. Thirty large canals have been taken out of Kern 

 River, which rises in the highest part of the Sierra Nevada Moun- 

 tains. The most famous of these canals is the Calloway, eighty 

 feet wide on the bottom and one hundred and twenty feet wide at 

 the top, seven feet in depth, and usually full to within a few 



