IRRIGATION IN THE ARID STATES. 159 



inches of the top of the bank. It irrigates two hundred thousand 

 acres through sixty-five laterals, of an aggregate length of one 

 hundred and fifty miles. 



But the glory of Kern is the enormous irrigation system upon 

 the Kern Delta, constructed by two San Francisco capitalists — 

 Lloyd Tevis and J. B. Haggin. All in all, it is the largest enter- 

 prise of the kind of which I have any knowledge. The total 

 expenditure has been fully four million dollars. For this the 

 owners have obtained a system of twenty-seven main canals 

 with an aggregate length of three hundred miles, besides about 

 eleven hundred miles of permanent laterals. Six hundred thou- 

 sand acres can be watered from these artificial rivers. The sandy 

 plain slopes south and west upon a grade of five or six feet to the 

 mile. Very little of the land requires leveling. The great reser- 

 voir, a former lake basin, covers twenty-five thousand acres and 

 contains fifty billion gallons of water. The various canals of this 

 company and others take from Kern River alone a total of twelve 

 thousand cubic feet of water per second. 



Twenty years ago the value of such land was less than a dollar 

 an acre. No settler could live on a quarter section, and like Fres- 

 no, Tulare, and in fact most of the San Joaquin Valley, it was 

 used only for pasturage. To-day there are fields of hundreds of 

 acres of alfalfa, where the best of Jerseys and Holsteins are kept ; 

 there are orchards of peaches, apricots, prunes, and almonds — 

 thousands of acres — loaded each year with fruit ; cotton, sugar 

 beets, the sugar cane of Louisiana, tobacco, corn, cassava, and a 

 multitude of the products of the temperate and semitropic re- 

 gions thrive here and can be grown as staple crops. 



Irrigation is often ^supposed to belong only to the arid lands. 

 There, it is true, it produces the most surprising changes and the 

 greatest proportionate increase of values. Water poured upon a 

 rainless desert makes it blossom under the tropic sun as if some 

 magician's wand had been waved over it. Vines, fruits, flowers, 

 green lawns, golden wheat, and silver barley, for miles on miles, 

 all lifted by the sparkling rivers above the fluctuations of the 

 season — such are the changes the irrigator brings to the desert. 

 But thousands of valleys and hillsides in the arid regions have 

 enough rainfall to enable farmers to struggle along, and not 

 enough to make their crops a certainty every year. Here there 

 is an even more immediate need of water to supplement the nat- 

 ural supply. No available statistics can illustrate the extent to 

 which pioneers in the Rockies, Sierras, and Coast Range are de- 

 veloping cheaply and easily a local supply of water for their 

 ranches. The last census, which says there are about thirteen 

 thousand irrigators in California (there are really twice as 

 many), is very incomplete in this direction. Besides the organ- 



