tentive of moisture, so that if wet thoroughly in winter it will, by the aid of the rising moisture from the bottom, hold water enough in the top to mature such crops as grain that ripen very early in the spring, and it will come very near ripening even corn that runs far into the summer. Alfalfa, whose roots quickly go down to this permanent moisture, only needs a good stimulus of water in the top soil to start it more quickly, after the cold nights of midwinter have checked its growth.

GRAIN.

On this ground grain is sown dry. It is then plowed in, or rather scratched in, for there is no apparent advantage in deep plowing on this particular soil, as it is all loose enough except the crust, which will be formed on any fertile soil by excess of water. It is then irrigated so as to fill the top soil with enough water to sprout and carry it until ripe, in connection with the winter rains, of which there are always some of value, even in the driest times; one-third of an acre foot of water put in the ground will do this, for there is no loss of moisture downward, the entire subsoil being saturated instead of dry. If you will note how quickly a piece of dry, unplowed ground saps the moisture for several feet from a freshly irrigated piece beside it, you will understand how, with a dry subsoil, more moisture (not water only) will be lost downward than is lost upward by evaporation. But if there is no loss of this kind, grain well started with the top soil filled with water matures before the summer heat has its effect in drying out the top soil. Very heavy crops are raised in this way on this ground.

On the upland, where it is many feet to water, and where the subsoil for yards is as dry as the top soil, unless soaked from the ditches, all flooding is postponed until the grain is so large that it cannot be easily injured. The different quality of the soil is the principal cause of this. It is a fine granite wash, containing enough fine material to make a tough paste without enough humus to prevent its formation. On the swamp land there is so much vegetable matter mixed with the fine granite flour that it cannot make as hard a paste. To flood this upland after the grain is planted and before it has started would be to kill half or more of it at once. Dependence is therefore placed on the slow, gentle

rains, which do not beat down and puddle the ground. If the ground were thoroughly irrigated before plowing it would retain moisture enough to insure the starting of the crop in fine shape, but for grain at present prices this is considered too expensive, even when the farmer does his own work with his own teams. He would rather put in a larger area and gamble on a good rainfall, and from his standpoint of large farming it is hard to say he is not right. Therefore he plows his ground dry

that is, without irrigating. It may or may not be moist from the first rain, and generally is as dry as powder when plowed. Then it is checked for future irrigation if there are no permanent checks on the tract. Many of these checks are temporary only, especially where one is working rented land, as many do. Then the seed is sown for the rains to sprout and carry up to the point where it will stand flooding. This flooding is postponed as long as there is no danger of the crop suffering, and often it receives no water until headed out and even in the milk, while it is rarely irrigated until in the boot, unless in winters very short of rain. A second irrigation is rarely needed, but can be given if required. The water is applied sparingly and not left on the ground, even as long as for alfalfa. Even when quite old, grain of all kinds will quickly scald if the sun is hot, and great care must be used. While a delicate operation, large crops can be raised by irrigation with certainty and success, and tens of thousands of acres are thus raised here every year. Corn, and all summer crops like Egyptian corn and similar things, are raised in large quantities under the same system, though the yield to the acre is not what it would be if less water and more plow were used. But there is certainly a limit on fine work, and where land and water are so plenty and cheap it no doubt pays to work a larger area with a lower yield.

None of the land of Lux & Miller is yet for sale, but that of the Kern County Land Company is for sale for much less than any one person or ordinary aggregation of persons could ever put on the water from any source-from forty to sixty dollars an acre for as good land as the sun shines upon, with an annual payment of a dollar and a half a year on the greater part, runing, under some of the canals, to two and a half. The water right is a cubic foot a

second to 160 acres, or about an inch to three acres, or nearly five acre feet. Several thousand acres have been sold and settled, and the work of the settlers is very instructive as showing what human nature will do when it has a good chance. They have almost to a man selected good land. There their wisdom generally stops. There are a few places from which a stranger might find something to imitate, but they

are rare.

TOO MUCH WATER.

The

The Land Company, desiring to accommodate all its customers, and having all the time an excess of water, has put no restrictions upon consumers. The allowance of a cubic foot to a quarter section is already too great for anything but alfalfa, and not really needed even for that, but the rule has been to let all have all they want and in heads of any size they want. result of this mistaken kindness can be seen all over, in damaged orchards, and in the few places where there is any hard pan or stratum of fine material underlying top soil, alkali is on the top soil to a ruinous extent. Soil and climate, and all conditions, show that as fine fruit can be grown here as in any part of California, which means in the world. Many places where some care has been used prove that it is so, the yield and quality both being beyond criticism. But many more show suffering trees that cannot bear good fruit, and that before long will bear little or nothing, and all because they have plenty of water. Every one floods for everything. Where the soil will carry small streams, and where they would be cheaper, more healthful, and in every way better, you see none of them and no attempt to do anything but flood. Imitating the work of the great farms, they make the checks too deep, put more water in them than is needed and keep it there too long.

The only cultivation is scratching the head to see how work with the plow and cultivator can be dodged. The effort has been very successful. I hate to say there is not a well cultivated orchard in the county. Therefore I will not say so, but that is my only reason. Even the flowers around the house are planted in checks of all shapes and sizes that are never broken, the ground being as hard as the floor of a brick yard. There are some orange trees near Bakersfield that are good enough to

show that a fine orange could be grown there. But no one seems to know that they are treated in the exact method in Vogue twenty years before, two hundred miles south of them, and that never failed to produce a dry, insipid, sour, spongy, thick-skinned orange-to-wit, incessant flooding with no cultivation. A gentleman who has been there over twenty years, told me that scores of men had bankrupted themselves and had to leave in three years, by the excessive use of water. Some do it because they think they are getting ahead of the company, although it is by its favor that they are able to do so. Others do it because they imitate these others. Some do it because they think water cheaper than work, a principle that is sometimes a very good slave but always a very bad master. Still others do it because they think turning on water is all there is of farming by irrigation. Some do it because they don't think at all, and some because, having the water turned on, it is too much like work to go to the gate to shut it off, California being full of people who came here to play and not to work.

But wherever the water has been used with any care you may see prosperity at once, in spite of the want of cultivation. Cultivation would make it still better but even without it it is plain that flooding pays. Good orchards and fine alfalfa patches may be seen in all directions, plenty enough to prove that intelligent handling of the water is all that is needed to make this the largest garden of California. The misuse of the water has proved that not more than one hundredth of one per cent of the land can be alkalied and the way the alfalfa stand, the incessant tramping of the big bands of cattle, especially on the large ranches where they are never taken off of it, shows a vitality and toughness that in many other places it does not have.

FARTHER NORTH IN THE VALLEY.

Going farther north on the San Joaquin we soon reach the fertile fields of Tulare county. Here, even on the larger farms, we find the checks like those of the smaller places in Kern county, very much. smaller and more shallow than those of the immense places above described. Most of them are square or rectangular, though many of them are conformed some

But there

what to the contour of the land. has been no such systematic laying out of the land as I have described. Many of the checks are not over five acres, running up to twenty and even forty acres, while on the ten and five acre tracts they run down to a quarter of an acre or even half of that. Most of them are made with the plow and scraper and on some quite level ground they are apparently made with the plow alone. Fifteen and eighteen inches are about the maximum heights, with many not over a foot. All are made broad at the bottom and almost all are permanent and can be driven over with machinery of any kind.

Gates from one check to another are here very rare and the main reliance is on cutting the check. But in many cases they do not feed one another and the checks are arranged in lines along laterals. In many cases the only waste ditches are natural depressions which retain much of the water to the joy of the mosquito. The average depth of water in the checks is less than is too often used in Kern county, and seldom exceeds six inches. The land here is extremely rich for many leagues and prosperous farms of alfalfa and general crops, with fruit farms of all deciduous fruits are about one. The neverfailing and beautiful Kaweah pours every year, across the land, a bountiful supply of water and what was once a vast park of immense oaks is now in long lines of farms, with only a little park of the ancient oaks about the house or out in the pasture, to shade the thousands of cattle from the heat of a summer's noon. It is a lovely land to look upon, but here too the fatal gift of plenty of water has wrought ruin on many an acre of the deep rich mould of the old park and undone many a two-legged hog who thought he was getting ahead of his neighbors or cheating the water company.

ALKALI.

Thousands of acres are now useless from alkali on the surface, where it is evident from the surroundings and the character of the subsoil in adjoining cuts that there was no excuse for it. Most all of it can be reclaimed for there is plenty of drainage, but even such temporary ruin is shameful. It is but a few feet to good sheet water under the greater part of the land, with no hard pan of consequence be

low the top soil. There is only a sheet of finer material over the greater part of it two or three feet below the top. With water so near the surface and the rainfall much greater than in Kern county there is no need of using any more water than is used south of the Tehachipi mountains where the finest work of the world is done.

On the greater part, furrows could be used as well as elsewhere, and the water now in the ditches could do twice or thrice the work it now performs. Yet everywhere you see where fields have been turned into swamps by allowing the water to run long after it should have been shut off, orchards with the top soil condensed to a cement by too deep, as well as too long standing water, others where the waste has been allowed to stand in the last checks because there was no waste ditch or because it was clogged up and the owner was too lazy to clean it, still others where the soil looks as if it was wet every week and never had a chance to dry. As I remarked about the other place, I don't like to say there is no attempt at good cultivation, therefore I won't.

But in spite of all this there are so many places that show unmistakable success in making, not only a living but also some money that, in spite of the gross waste of grand opportunities this settlement must be considered a great triumph of irriga tion.

There is no place in the lands depending on the rainfall direct that can show any such wealth to so few acres and certainly none that can show so many farmers out of debt and with a comfortable balance in bank. There are unmistakable signs of prosperity, in spite of the hard times,that he who runs may read, and nowhere are they more positively written all over a section than over a great majority of the alfalfa fields and orchards here. On the alfalfa farms and especially those mixed with a little fruit and vegetables, with corn and pumpkins, Egyptian corn and some other things, you can see at a glance that certain living that once made the American farmer the most independent of mortals, as he was then called, and the neglect of which has reduced too many to the most dependent. In the fat cattle and the baled hay, in the corn in the bin, in the hens cackling around the straw stack, and the turkeys strutting about the road, you see a surplus for pin money, while the big udders on the cows and the great

numbers of fat hogs in the fields show that they do not live on Chicago canned beef or flavor their coffee from tin cows. It is the farming that the American farmer must drift back to. He must quit listening to those who tell him that any system of finance or any abundance of money will enable him to buy everything he can raise himself, hire work that he can do himself, and enjoy, simply because he is an American farmer of the nineteenth century, luxuries that the richest dirt never yet has justified in any other country. The irrigating farmer can restore farming to its ancient respectability and he is probably the only one that can. It must be so restored, or there is little increase of prosperity in store for the great United States. The farm must be made attractive to the boys, and the irrigated farm now comes too, near being the only one where they

can

see that they are not working for nothing. On the irrigated farm the girls, too, can see something beside work ahead, and the old folks feel while pulling the sled uphill that there is a chance for them to ride down before they die.

Following the winding Kaweah up the foothills and into the great canyon, down which it foams from the lofty Sierra Nevada, I found many places where every variety of irrigation was attempted. Tulare county too has its "orange belt," and its a hard county in California that has not. This belt, though not over large, is unmistakably good but suffering from bad irrigation which the orange is sure to do. The looks of the trees told the tale well enough. Many of the oranges and some of the lemons were indicating foot rot on ground that was naturally well drained, an almost unfailing sign of over-irrigation. One man was making a vigorous attempt to irrigate with small furrows. The soil was plainly fine enough in texture to enable him to do it, but the ground was sloping about twenty-seven different ways in wavy lines, and the water had evidently become so tired trying to get somewhere that it had finally given up the job and settled down permanently in the middle. By the time he finds he wants the ground graded to an even slope on every face on which the water is to run, the orchard will be too old to change and then the swearing period will fairly begin.

I found some people irrigating by planting along the ditch in the old Indian way

and others letting the water wallow around over the ground to suit itself and planting on the dry bumps it had left, but nowhere a decently irrigated place, although there was abundance of fine soil and an over-abundance of the finest water. But the place at which I spent the night, well up in the canyon, skimmed the cream of the whole entertainment. The owner was a rich old settler with money out at interest in all directions. He had a ditch carrying about four feet of water, or two hundred inches. This ran through his store making, at one side of the door, a drop of some five feet upon an overshot wheel which turned a large fanning wheel in the center near the ceiling. In the breeze of this, the old gentlemen sat and drank beer and smoked away the summer days while waiting for customers. Passing on some hundred yards or so, the water spread upon a gravelly flat of five or six acres. This was filled with alfalfa and fruit trees. There were peaches, prunes, pears, apples, silver prunes and nectarines all ripe, and we were badly in need of fruit, especially on the return from a fishing trip near Mt. Whitney where it is a little cool for fruit. The alfalfa and fruit trees were all in a huddle together and the evident design was to get both irrigated at one stroke to economize labor.

The labor of shutting off the water was evidently objectionable and therefore never done as far as appearances went. The whole of this enormous head was running upon this five or six acres all the time we were there, and coming and going, and there was good reason to believe it had been running all the season. There was a fair stand of alfalfa on it in spite of the cows nibbling, but the fruit was everywhere sour, insipid, and small. It was about the worst I have seen in California and that is saying a good deal, for while California can raise the best fruit in the world with good care, it never makes a failure of raising the most abominable on earth when it tries.

Now the point I wish to emphasize is this this was a wash of coarse gravel standing on a slope so great that in spite of the great head of water it all drained away underneath, the top showing no sign of swampiness anywhere. Here, then, was the choicest of conditions for growing the best fruit on earth, climate and all being as perfect as the drainage. The alfalfa