Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/383

Rh The act was not intended to put such large bodies of land in the possession of so few men. But any law is apt to work that way. Where the stock of the water company is held by all the land-owners using, the land is often hypothecated as security for the assessments, and in default of payment could only fall into the company's hands. What sort of land monopoly will grow up under it, the whole business of irrigation is too new to foreshadow. There is a bitter feeling already against certain large owners and syndicates. But it is doubtful whether the still heavier enterprises of damming waters up in the cañons will ever be carried out by private purses, unless those who go into them are well assured of fee simple in still larger bodies of land. And that, I judge, is about what far Western people mean when they say they don't want the Government to dam the waters, but only to "encourage private enterprise."

The landscape effects of some of these irrigating systems are quite striking; sometimes pretty and sometimes depressing. Many of the main ditches are fifty feet wide. Such a stream of water, or a much narrower one, must form no insignificant part of the picture on the eye of the traveler. If it is straight, sluggish, green, bare, it may be a nightmare in its oppressive ugliness. But where it winds about like a natural stream, as it often does in order to keep on high ground, and is shaded by trees planted hap-hazard along its banks, it is a thing of beauty.

You drive along a lovely lane, lined on both sides by tall poplar-trees, between fertile fields, gardens, orchards, shady groves, and now and then you come to one of these artificial brooks. You may have to go up hill to cross it. In fact, the sides of the ditch are naturally and properly above the level, so that the water will run out over the land. So you have the funny sensation of crossing a creek on a hill-top, and even then driving upward to get over it. The bridge is natural as life, and likewise the milldam and the mill. A drive through the country between Hanford and Fernone is as pretty as the imagination can picture it. Its beauties are wholly artificial. Ten years ago that was a desert; to-day it is ahead of the Mohawk Valley in everything that goes to make a fine-looking agricultural region. Its one fault as a landscape is that it is as level as a billiard-table.

It is a disputed question whether irrigation induces disease. Certain it is that the irrigated portions of the San Joaquin Valley are malarious. But Mr. Nordhoff says they are less so than before they were irrigated. I have talked with some hundreds of the inhabitants, and they seem as a rule to think otherwise. They do say, however, that there is an improvement in the general health since they learned to drink deep-well water instead of the surface water which seeps through from the ditches. Some