These canals are a striking characteristic of the entire mining region.
As you traverse a wild and broken district, perhaps miles from any human
habitation or sign of present husbandry, they intersect your dusty,
indifferent road, or are carried in flumes supported by a frame-work of
timber twenty to sixty feet over your head. Some of these flumes or open
aqueducts are carried across valleys each a mile or more in width; I
have seen two of them thus crossing side by side. The canals range from
ten to sixty or eighty miles in length, and are filled by damming the
streams wherefrom they are severally fed, and taking out their water in
a wide trench, which runs along the side of one bank, gradually gaining
comparative altitude as the stream by its side falls lower and lower in
its cañon, until it is at length on the crest of the headland or
mountain promontory which projects into the plain, and may be conducted
down either side of it in any direction deemed desirable. Several of
these canals have cost nearly or quite half a million dollars each,
having been enlarged and improved from year to year, as circumstances
dictated and means could be obtained. One of them, originally
constructed in defiance of sanguine prophecies of failure, returned to
its owners the entire cost of its construction within three months from
the date of its completion. Then it was found necessary to enlarge and
every way improve it, and every dollar of its net earnings for the next
four years was devoted to its perfection. In some instances, the
projectors exhausted their own means and then resorted to borrowing on
mortgage at California rates of interest; I learn without surprise that
nearly or quite every such experiment resulted in absolute bankruptcy
and a change of owners. Of late, the solvent and prosperous companies
have turned their attention to damming the outlets of the little lakes
which fill the hollows of the Sierra, in order to hold back the
superabundant waters of the spring months for use in summer and autumn.
This course is doubly beneficent, in that it diminishes the danger from
floods to which this city is specially subject, but which is also
serious in all the valleys or cañons of the mining region wherein there
is anything that water can injure. I judge that the cost and present
cash value of these mining canals throughout California must be many
millions of dollars, paying in the average a fair income, while their
supply of water is at this season, and from July to November, utterly
inadequate. Water is sold by them by the cubic inch—a stream four inches
deep and six wide, for instance, being twenty-four inches, for which, at
fifty cents per inch, twelve dollars per day must be paid by the taker.
A head of six inches—that is, six inches’ depth of water in the flume
above the top of the aperture through which the water escapes into the
miners’ private ditch or flume—is usually allowed. The price per day
ranges from twenty cents to a dollar per inch, though I think it now
seldom reaches the higher figure, which was once common. Were the supply
twice as copious as it is, I presume it would all be required; if the
price were somewhat lowered by the increase, I am sure it would be. Many
works are now standing idle solely for want of water.