Page:The Indian Dispossessed.pdf/248

 are situated wherever a spring or small stream of water exists, scattered through a large tract of otherwise desert country. Thus they have a village at Potrero, twenty-five miles from here. Twenty miles in another direction is another village; fifteen miles farther another village, and so on. Till recently all these places were on unsurveyed public lands, and unclaimed. Now white men have set up claims of more or less valid character upon almost every acre of these lands, and they are liable to be taken away unless there is prompt and energetic action by the Government. Each Indian family at these villages has a house and cultivates a patch of ground, varying from one acre to four or five. A field of five acres cultivated by one family is rarely found. Fruit-trees and well-kept vines are not unusual. The Indian men plant their fields in the spring, give them a more or less thrifty cultivation till a season comes when they can get temporary employment on ranches, and then they leave their homes in charge of the squaws and old men, and go out to labor, very much as the young men in Canada flock over into 'the States' in haying-time to work for the New England and New York farmers. A much greater number of the Mission Indians were formerly included in this class, and oftentimes the Indians described in the first class owned and cultivated the very lands where they are now only tolerated as day-laborers. They