the mining district rises high into the region of snow, where the moisture that falls from the atmosphere in winter is condensed and retained until summer and fall. But without the ditches this moisture would do little good to the miners, since there are few camps near springs or on the immediate banks of constant

streams.

EXPENSIVE CONSTRUCTION.-The first experiments in ditching in 1850 were magnificently successful. The canals were short and small, and the water was either sold at a very high price, or was used in working out rich claims. It was not uncommon for several years for little ditches to repay the cost of construction in a couple of months. It was supposed that the right to the water of a good stream would be worth a fortune. The merchants in each town considered it their interest to encourage and assist the miners to bring in water, so as to increase the population, gold production, and trade. The country was full of enterprise and money, for which there was not much other use. Numerous ditch companies were formed to bring water from the elevated regions in the mountains, and many had invested too much to withdraw before any of them had learned the business before them by experience. The work was done when labor was very high; the price for common laborers being $8 per day, and lumber was $100 per thousand feet. Before the canals were finished, wages had fallen 50 per cent. or more, and the work done was worth in the market only half its cost. Besides, in 1851 and 1852 the common price for water was 50 cents or $1 an inch, and the ditch companies made their calculations upon charging those figures, but before the completion of the ditches the best claims in the ravines had been exhausted, and there was not enough rich ground left to pay high prices for all the water.

BAD ENGINEERING.-The ditch companies did not find good hydraulic engineers. Many of the canals were constructed under the influence of carpenters who wanted to turn their skill in wood-work to account, and wherever it was possible they constructed wooden flumes, even in places peculiarly favorable for ditching, and where the latter would have cost less than fluming. The flume loses value every year, while the ditch, by getting more solid, gains. The flume must be rebuilt about once in six, eight, or at most ten years, and the ditch, never. The flume soon leaks, and the ditch after a time loses very little by leakage.

HIGH FLUMES.-But the mistake in constructing flumes resting on the ground was little compared with the loss suffered by constructing high flumes, which were wonderful specimens of engineering skill, and still more wonderful samples of bad investments. It was common to see flumes 100 and 200 feet high, and there is one now standing near Big Oak Flat, in Tuolumne county, 256 feet high. These high flumes are very costly, and are frequently blown down. The water could, in most cases, have been conveyed in iron pipe, which is much cheaper, and far more durable, and in many instances it could be and has been conveyed in ditches, constructed at small cost round the head of a ravine. As the yield of the mines decreased, the charge for water became onerous, and the miners formed combinations to compel a reduction of rates, and these strikes were accompanied sometimes by malicious injuries to ditches and flumes.

UNPROFITABLE INVESTMENTS.-The big ditches, almost without exception, proved unprofitable. Some of them have paid more than their cost, but not near so much as the same money would have paid at the current rates of interest. It is estimated by competent men that not less than $20,000,000 have been invested in the mining ditches of California, and that their present cash value is not more than $2,000,000. In many cases they broke the men who undertook them. Most of them have been sold by the sheriff, some of them several times over; breaking the first purchaser, as well as the builders. Bean's "History of Nevada County, speaking of the South Yuba ditch as a remarkable work, says: "While nearly all the canal enterprises of the country have passed from the control of the men who conceived and executed them, the South Yuba canal remains a triumph, as well of

the engineering as of the financial ability of its managers, still remaining in possession of the fathers of the enterprise, and owned without an incumbrance or enemy, all the men who assisted in any degree in the construction of the works having long ago been paid to the uttermost farthing."

DECLINE IN VALUE.-There is a steady decline in the value of the ditches, as there is a steady decrease in the yield of the placer mines, which consume nine-tenths of the water. The Truckee ditch, which was completed in 1858, at a cost of $1,000,000, to supply the towns on the Blue lead, near the southern border of Sierra county, has gone to ruin. Forty miles of the new ditch, at Columbia, have been abandoned, and 11 miles of the Amador ditch are abandoned. Besides these costly main trunks of large canals there are hundreds of miles of branches, each large enough to carry 100 inches or more, that once supplied water to thousands of miners, who have now left their camp, and the ditches are dry and broken. The Mokelumne Hill Ditch Company is now constructing a branch ditch to Cat Camp; the Sears Union Ditch Company, in Sierra county, are constructing a branch to Poverty Hill and Scales's Diggings, and the proprietor of the South Fork canal, in Eldorado county, is talking of building a new ditch, to be 50 miles long, and to carry 5,000 inches of water; but it is probable that more miles will be abandoned during the next three or four years than will be built. The receipts of the Bear river and Auburn canal show a steady decline from $90,000 in 1863 to $40,000 in 1866. One of the best-informed ditch miners in Tuolumne says that the receipts of the ditches in that county decrease six per cent. every year on an average, while there is no correspondent decrease of expenditures. The decrease in the State generally is probably not less than 10 per cent.

THE SUPPLY OF WATER EXCEEDING THE DEMAND.-Many of the companies are seriously troubled by inability to sell all their water, and some have commenced to buy up mining ground to wash on their own account. It not unfrequently happens that miners finding their claims will not pay, after having run in debt to the water company, transfer their claims in payment, and the company, by hiring Chinamen, and requiring the ditch tenders to devote their spare hours to the labor of superintendence, and using water for which there is no sale, manage to make a good profit where the original claim owners could make none.

SMALL DITCHES.-Although the large ditches, as a class, are unprofitable, many of the small ones pay very well. The minor ditches are short, constructed on favorable ground, have no high flumes to be blown down by the wind, or to be broken by the snow, or swept away by avalanches, and not unfrequently they pick up water that escapes from a ditch higher up, so they avoid many of the most serious expenses of the larger ditches. They usually run dry easily in the summer, and supply single claims or little camps of no note, and so they are relatively of little importance to the mining industry of the country.

FLUMES.-Flumes are usually made with boards, an inch and a half thick for the bottom, and an inch and a quarter for the sides. At intervals of two and a half feet there is a support for the flume box, consisting of a sill, posts, and cap. The sills are four inches square; the posts three by four inches, and the caps one and a half by four inches. To erect a flume 25 feet high, costs about twice as much as to lay one on the level of the ground, and at 60 feet it costs four times as much. The annual repair of a flume is about one-eighth of its original cost, in favorable circumstances. If the flume is left dry several months, the repairs may be more, for the sun warps and splits the boards, and draws the nails. A flume box, 40 inches wide by 20 inches deep, with a grade of 13 feet to the mile, will carry about 800 inches, and such a flume built on the surface of the ground will cost now at the rate of $4,000 per mile, near a saw-mill. The boards are put in the flume rough, but are always battened, and sometimes caulked. The cheapest flume costs twice as much as the cheapest ditch of the same capacity, and the repairs of a flume cost 90 per cent. more than those of a ditch. The duration

of a high flume is on an average about six years, and of a low one 8 or 10. For the first two or three years after the construction of a ditch there is much trouble from gopher holes and slides.

The flumes in the highest portions of the Sierra, and especially about Howland Flat and La Porte are much troubled by the snow, and much labor is spent on them every winter. The weight of the snow is so great that after every snowstorm, or while it is in progress, a man must go along and clear the flume with a shovel. In cases where the flume is on a hill-side it is necessary to shovel away the snow from the upper side of the flume, for the mass moves down hill with tremendous weight, though with very slow motion, and no flume could resist it.

IRON PIPE.-The use of iron pipe in the form of an inverted siphon, instead of high flume, for the purpose of carrying water across ravines, has been a great improvement and saving in the ditch business. Near Placerville, water is carried across a depression 190 feet, and 1,600 feet long, in a pipe that cost $900, whereas a flume would have cost $25,000. Not only is it cheaper, but it can be used where fluming is peculiarly impossible, as in crossing ravines 400 feet deep.

The sheet-iron used in making pipe comes in sheets two feet wide and six feet long. The common sizes of pipe are 7 inches and 11 inches in diameter, made in joints two feet long. A sheet makes two joints of 11-inch pipe, and three of seven-inch, and 11 joints are riveted together to make a section 20 feet long. At the end of each section, as pipes are usually made, there is an ear or hook riveted on each side, and when the foot of one section is thrust into the head of another, a wire is wrapped round the opposite ears or hooks to tie the sections together. In case the pipe is laid on a hill-side running down, each section is tied at the head to a post to keep it in place; and the post may be supported by a board placed edgewise and crosswise in the ground. allowed for the lap at the end of the sections. The ends need to be made with About an inch and a half of space is precision, so that they will be water-tight, without packing. The pipe should be put together in a straight line, and the sections should be driven together with a sledge-hammer, striking a board laid across the end of the section. The pipe needs to be coated with tar to preserve it, and if very large it may be coated inside as well as out.

The cost of 11-inch pipe made of No. 20 iron is about 75 cents per foot. The thickness of the iron depends upon the amount of pressure and the size of the pipe. The larger the pipe the thicker the iron should be. The pressure at 190 feet is 88 pounds per square inch, and No. 20 iron is strong enough for that, if the pipe be not more than 11 inches in diameter.

The capacity of an inverted siphon depends mainly on the three elements of diameter, head and depression. The deeper the depression the greater the friction and the slower the current. A straight pipe 11 inches in diameter will carry five times as much water as an inverted siphon of the same size and head with a depression of 200 feet.

DITCH LAW.-The rules of the common law relative to the rights to water were unsuited to the wants of California, and therefore the courts have, by their decision, established a new code, which was original here. Among the principles of the California water code are the following:

The water of a stream may be led away from its natural bed and never returned. Water becomes the property of the first claimant; but it becomes his property only for the purpose for which he claims it, and to the amount which he appropriates.

The holder of a claim has a right to use the water without from later claimants, who may, nevertheless, use the water, if they return it clear any obstruction and uninjured above the point where the first claimant takes it.

If a miner after claiming and using water abandons it, and allows it to run into a channel claimed by another, the latter becomes the owner.

WEST OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

If a ditch is cut for drainage alone, another may claim the water for mining. When the waters of an artificial ditch are turned into a natural stream with the intention of taking out the same amount at a lower point on the stream, they may be so taken out, though the stream had already been claimed by another title. No person has a right to take the water from the bed of a stream in which there is a prior mining claim that cannot be worked without the water.

Section 9 of the act of Congress of Angust, 1866, relative to ditch companies, makes a material change in the rights of ditch companies. It provides:

That wherever, by priority of possession, rights to the use of water for mining, agricultural, manufacturing, or other purposes, have vested and accrued, and the same are recognized and acknowledged by the local customs, laws, and the decisions of courts, the possessors and owners of such vested rights shall be maintained and protected in the same; and the right of way for the construction of ditches and canals for the purposes aforesaid is hereby acknowledged and confirmed: Provided, however, That whenever, after the passage of this act, any person or persons shall, in the construction of any ditch or canal, injure or damage the possessions of any settler on the public domain, the party committing such injury or damage shall be liable to the party injured for such injury or damage.

Under this act a ditch company acquires a title to the land on which the ditch is made, and to as much more on each side as may be necessary for the safety or business of the ditch. The company has, beside, the right to run a ditch over mining claims and farms on the public domain, on the payment of the actual damage done. Previous to the passage of this act, if a ditch was located over a mining claim of prior date, the miner had a right to wash away all his ground, and if the ditch was damaged the ditch company had to bear the loss; but under the new law the ditch company has a better title than the mining claims of prior location; and if the miner washes away the ditch or injures it, he becomes respon sible for the damage.

CONFLICT BETWEEN DITCHERS AND MINERS.-The first conflict or case under the law arose at Gold Run, in Placer county, where there was a large extent of ground suitable for hydraulic washing, but it remained long inaccessible for want of water or of outlet. Several ditch companies ran their ditches over mining claims, and the miners notified the ditch companies that the ground there would, after a time, be washed away. The ditch companies replied that they recognized the prior right of the miners and would move the ditches at their own expense when the washing should get near to the line. Before that time came, the act of 1866 was passed giving to the ditch companies superior rights. Early in this year one of the miners, over whose claim several ditches ran, notified the companies that he was rapidly approaching their lines with his pipe, and the bank would soon be washed away. One company replied that they would move at their own expense; another gave him notiee not to come within 50 feet, or they would hold him responsible for all damage done. He has been compelled to stop because his profits would not have been large enough to cover the damage. PROPOSED GRANT OF LAND ALONG DITCHES.-The ditch companies have solicited from Congress a grant of at least 100 feet on each side of their lines; and their wish upon this point deserves attentive consideration. If such a grant, at least along the main trunks where not less than 500 inches of water are carried for six months in the year without disturbing the claims of miners located previons to the location of the ditch, would encourage the construction of new ditches, or would give longer life or greater size to those now in existence, it would be politic. These companies, by whose assistance $700,000,000 have been taken from the ground, at a loss of $10,000,000 to themselves, deserve to receive some favors, which will cost nothing to the government, do no injustice to individual raines, and increase or keep up the supply of water.

Before the passage of the act of 1866, granting the right of way to the ditches, the Pacific Railroad act had been passed, giving to that road alternate sections of public land for a width of five miles on each side of the line, and thus the Central Pacific Railroad Company has become the owner of many miles of

ditch belonging to different companies along its line; and although it has not seen fit to demand anything from them, still it is very unpleasant to the ditch companies to know that they are at the mercy of another association of later date. The act of 1866 giving a right of way for the ditch companies secures them against losing their lines by future railroad grants, but it leaves them subject to fears that the land immediately alongside may be taken in such a way as to prevent changes and improvements that might be required. In some places where there are high flumes a strip 100 feet on each side of the line would not be too much to be granted to the ditch companies; but in those places where there is a plain ditch or iron pipe on a plain surface, there would seem to be no good reason for granting more than room enough to drive a wagon along.

MEASUREMENT OF WATER.-Water is sold by the inch, and usually an inch is the amount which escapes through an orifice an inch square, with the water six inches deep above the top of the orifice. That is called a six-inch pressure. If a large quantity is sold, the orifice may be two or three inches high. The mode of measureinent, however, is not uniform. In some places the pressure is nine or ten inches; in others there is no pressure but the quantity that escapes through an orifice an inch wide, and three inches high, without pressure, is called an inch.

In calculations made by machinists it is often necessary to use the term "an inch of water," and by common consent that phrase is accepted now to mean a supply of 4.032 cubic inches, or 145.86-100 pounds per minute; 3,360 cubic feet, 10,656 gallons in 24 hours; and 1,226,400 cubic feet, 30,410 tons of 40 cubic feet each, or 6,020,540 gallons in 365 days of 24 hours each. If an inch of water pass 200 feet fall it supplies an amount of power about one-tenth less than one-horse power.

4054 10000

At the last session of the legislature of California a bill was introduced to provide that "where the question shall be involved as to the quantity of running water sold, purchased, delivered, or used, and described by "miner's inch," it shall be held and declared that a 'miner's inch' of water shall consist of two and one-third cubic feet of water passing a given point in one minute of time, or seven and gallons of water passing a given point in a minute, or 145 86 pounds of water passing a given point in a minute." The bill was referred to the committee on mines, which reported a substitute, providing that "a legal inch of water sold for mining, agricultural, or other purpose, is hereby declared to be what water may pass through an orifice of one inch square, through plank of one inch in thickness, with a pressure of seven inches measured from the centre of the orifice to the surface of the water: Provided, the water shall be delivered from a box in which the water has no motion except that caused by the flow of the water to be delivered from that particular box." Both the original bill and the substitute were indefinitely postponed. The objections to the substitute were that it might be as well to let the miners and ditch companies agree upon their measurements as well as upon their prices, and that some companies which had long adopted other modes of measurement would be inconvenienced.

EUREKA LAKE AND YUBA CANAL COMPANY'S DITCHES.-The property of this company, under the present organization, is a consolidation of the ditch and mining property formerly owned by a number of different companies. It extends over a vast range of country, and embraces many valuable mines. The main ditches were constructed during the years 1855 to 1859, inclusive. Purchases of the smaller ditches and consolidation of the larger have taken place at different times during the last eight years; that between the Eureka Lake Water Company and the Middle Yuba Canal and Water Company was on the 1st of August, 1865. All the property of this company has since been transferred to a corporation organized for the purpose in the city of New York, the transfer having taken effect on the 1st of January, 1866. The following statement is derived from the superintendent, Mr. Richard Abbey: Capital stock, $2,250,000. The first cost