312 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



tokens of improvement and, what is better, con- 

 tentment ; though one or two men I talked with had 

 complaints to make on the score of their financial 

 burdens under the Government irrigation plan. 



Half a mile after meeting the main canal, which 

 is forty or fifty feet in width, I came to the river and 

 the head-works of the great Laguna Dam.^ From 

 the weir that stretched across the wide stream went 

 up a roar of falling water. The massive head-gates 

 bore again the mark U. S. R. S., like the symbol of a 

 conqueror or the S. P. Q. R. of ancient Rome. Ad- 

 joining the dam on the California side is a Mexican 

 village on the site of a former mining-camp of some 

 note. It bears the pleasing name of Potholes, refer- 

 ring, I think, to the fact that the pay-dirt was found 

 here to occur in "pots" or "pockets." 



It was too late for me to hunt saguaros that day. 

 I camped amid a confusion of old boilers and other 

 debris of the construction time, using for sleeping- 

 place the bed of a disused wagon, the only clean and 

 level spot I could find. Mosquitoes kept me in mis- 

 ery, and I was glad when the rising of an arc of wan- 

 ing moon told that daylight and relief were at hand. 

 At this spot, however, where a rocky bluff brings a 

 break in the almost continuous thicket that borders 

 the river, this pest was nothing in comparison with 

 what I endured in other places. Whenever I entered 

 the jungle of willow, cottonwood, and arrowweed, so 

 delicious to the eye at a distance, I became the prey 



* It is worthy of note that Captain Anza, in 1774, remarked upon 

 the possibilities of a dam somewhere hereabouts. The old Spanish 

 adventurers, both priests and soldiers, had a range of ideas much 

 wider than their particular province. 



