Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/432

 412 chandise and supplies. A dormitory and a dining-hall have been erected for the laboring hands. A tower-like water-tank, surmounted by a windmill, and accommodating a milk-room below, rises at one side. There are shops for the mechanics, capacious barns, and long sheds filled with an interminable array of agricultural implements. It is worth while to take a walk past this collection of reapers, threshers, sulky-ploughs, and rakes, and study out their uses. The immense "header and separator" rises from the rest like a leviathan. A whole department is devoted to "road-scrapers," "buck-scrapers," and ploughs of various sorts used in the construction and dredging of the irrigating ditches. The soil is, fortunately, free from stones, and the work, for the most part, easy. One enormous plough is seen which was designed to be drawn by sixty yoke of oxen, and to cut at once a furrow five feet wide by four deep. Like the famous Great Eastern, it has defeated itself by its own mass, and its use has been abandoned.

More than $500,000 has been expended in the item of fencing alone. An average of four hundred laborers is employed, and, in the harvest season, seven hundred. The rate of wages is from two and a half to three dollars per day for mechanics, and a dollar per day for common hands. This seems low as compared with information from other sources, and the chronic complaints of the scarcity of farm labor, in the California papers.

No great portion of this domain appears to be in the market for settlers of small means, though the intention is avowed of offering some of it in this way when thoroughly reclaimed. Tracts, however, are occupied on favorable terms by "renters," who take from 120 to 600 acres. Very many of these are Portuguese and Italians. They are usually unmarried, and work in companies of