Perhaps to get into the mood of the waterways one needs to have seen old Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with his gun, guarding his water-right toward the end of a dry summer. Amos owned the half of Tule Creek6 and the other half pertained7 to the neighboring Greenfields ranch8. Years of a "short water crop," that is, when too little snow fell on the high pine ridges9, or, falling, melted too early, Amos held that it took all the water that came down to make his half, and maintained it with a Winchester and a deadly aim. Jesus Montana, first proprietor10 of Greenfields,—you can see at once that Judson had the racial advantage,—contesting the right with him, walked into five of Judson's bullets and his eternal possessions on the same occasion. That was the Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might become classic, but the jury found for manslaughter. It had the effect of discouraging the Greenfields claim, but Amos used to sit on the headgate just the same, as quaint11 and lone12 a figure as the sandhill crane watching for water toads13 below the Tule drop.
Every subsequent owner of Greenfields bought it with Amos in full view. The last of these was Diedrick. Along in August of that year came a week of low water. Judson's ditch failed and he went out with his rifle to learn why. There on the headgate sat Diedrick's frau with a long-handled shovel14 across her lap and all the water turned into Diedrick's ditch; there she sat knitting through the long sun, and the children brought out her dinner. It was all up with Amos; he was too much of a gentleman to fight a lady—that was the way he expressed it. She was a very large lady, and a long-handled shovel is no mean weapon. The next year Judson and Diedrick put in a modern water gauge15 and took the summer ebb16 in equal inches. Some of the water-right difficulties are more squalid than this, some more tragic17; but unless you have known them you cannot very well know what the water thinks as it slips past the gardens and in the long slow sweeps of the canal. You get that sense of brooding from the confined and sober floods, not all at once but by degrees, as one might become aware of a middle-aged19 and serious neighbor who has had that in his life to make him so. It is the repose20 of the completely accepted instinct.
With the water runs a certain following of thirsty herbs and shrubs21. The willows24 go as far as the stream goes, and a bit farther on the slightest provocation25. They will strike root in the leak of a flume, or the dribble26 of an overfull bank, coaxing27 the water beyond its appointed bounds. Given a new waterway in a barren land, and in three years the willows have fringed all its miles of banks; three years more and they will touch tops across it. It is perhaps due to the early usurpation28 of the willows that so little else finds growing-room along the large canals. The birch beginning far back in the canon tangles29 is more conservative; it is shy of man haunts and needs to have the permanence of its drink assured. It stops far short of the summer limit of waters, and I have never known it to take up a position on the banks beyond the ploughed lands. There is something almost like premeditation in the avoidance of cultivated tracts30 by certain plants of water borders. The clematis, mingling31 its foliage32 secretly with its host, comes down with the stream tangles to the village fences, skips over to corners of little used pasture lands and the plantations33 that spring up about waste water pools; but never ventures a footing in the trail of spade or plough; will not be persuaded to grow in any garden plot. On the other hand, the horehound, the common European species imported with the colonies, hankers after hedgerows and snug34 little borders. It is more widely distributed than many native species, and may be always found along the ditches in the village corners, where it is not appreciated. The irrigating ditch is an impartial35 distributer. It gathers all the alien weeds that come west in garden and grass seeds and affords them harbor in its banks. There one finds the European mallow (Malva rotundifolia) spreading out to the streets with the summer overflow36, and every spring a dandelion or two, brought in with the blue grass seed, uncurls in the swardy soil. Farther than either of these have come the lilies that the Chinese coolies cultivate in adjacent mud holes for their foodful bulbs. The seegoo establishes itself very readily in swampy37 borders, and the white blossom spikes38 among the arrow-pointed leaves are quite as acceptable to the eye as any native species.
In the neighborhood of towns founded by the Spanish Californians, whether this plant is native to the locality or not, one can always find aromatic39 clumps40 of yerba buena, the "good herb" (Micromeria douglassii). The virtue41 of it as a febrifuge was taught to the mission fathers by the neophytes, and wise old dames42 of my acquaintance have worked astonishing cures with it and the succulent yerba mansa. This last is native to wet meadows and distinguished43 enough to have a family all to itself.
Where the irrigating ditches are shallow and a little neglected, they choke quickly with watercress that multiplies about the lowest Sierra springs. It is characteristic of the frequenters of water borders near man haunts, that they are chiefly of the sorts that are useful to man, as if they made their services an excuse for the intrusion. The joint44-grass of soggy pastures produces edible45, nut-flavored tubers, called by the Indians taboose. The common reed of the ultramontane marshes46 (here Phragmites vulgaris), a very stately, whispering reed, light and strong for shafts47 or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which makes a passable sugar.
It seems the secrets of plant powers and influences yield themselves most readily to primitive48 peoples, at least one never hears of the knowledge coming from any other source. The Indian never concerns himself, as the botanist49 and the poet, with the plant's appearances and relations, but with what it can do for him.
It can do much, but how do you suppose he finds it out; what instincts or accidents guide him? How does a cat know when to eat catnip? Why do western bred cattle avoid loco weed, and strangers eat it and go mad? One might suppose that in a time of famine the Paiutes digged wild parsnip in meadow corners and died from eating it, and so learned to produce death swiftly and at will. But how did they learn, repenting50 in the last agony, that animal fat is the best antidote51 for its virulence52; and who taught them that the essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis), which looks to have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in stomachic disorders53. But they so understand and so use. One believes it to be a sort of instinct
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