Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/426

 406 a dangerous breed of wild hogs, descended from vagrant deserters from the ranches. In such fragmentary glimpses as are had between and over the tules an expanse of dreary surface appears which may be either water or the alkali-whitened bed from which the water has receded. The vicinity swarms with wild fowl. Their multitudinous chatter has a kind of metallic clang in it. Now white, now dark, as they are before or against the sunlight, they flutter above the reeds and stubble-fields like autumn leaves blown by the wind.

The drying up of the lakes is occasioned by the diversion of the surplus waters of the Kern River for the redemption of desert lands. This gave rise to a controversy, lately settled by a legal decision which is a step in the crystallization into shape of a system of water jurisdiction for California. The great firm of real-estate men and ranchmen, Miller & Lux, owned the lands below; the almost equally great firm of Haggin, Carr & Tevis, those, for the improvement of which the water was taken out, above. The first-named complained of the diversion of the waters as a detriment to them, and an infringement of their riparian rights. Riparian right, it will be remembered, in the English common law, gives to the resident on a stream the right to have it flow as it was wont through his grounds without diminution or alteration.

The contest at first promised to be one of physical force. Miller & Lux endeavored to close the sluices at which the water was taken out. Just, as in Scripture, the herdsmen of Gerara strove against the herdsmen of Isaac, saying, "It is our water," the hardy vaqueros of Haggin, Carr & Tevis were mustered in opposition to them, with orders to lasso and throw into the canal anybody who should interfere with the sluices. This deter-