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Charles C. Townsend in the publication referred to above, that I take pleasure in reproducing it entire. One mile north of the little village of Mosca, Colorado, in San Luis valley, lives the family of J.C. Gray. On the Gray ranch there is an artesian well which empties into a small pond about 100 feet square.
When they started next morning the tank wagon was taken on a way and left, for, with the lake at the highest point of the pass, and the artesian water at the desert ranch on the other side, they would be well supplied for the remainder of the trip.
In Nature we often find these basins with the equivalent of the sandy layer in the model just described rising hundreds of feet above the valley, so that the artesian well, so named from the village of Artois, near Paris, where the first opening of this nature was made, may yield a stream which will mount upward, especially where piped, to a great height.
"You are right," said Murchison, the engineer; "we must, as much as possible, avoid watercourses during the casting; but if we meet with springs they will not matter much; we can exhaust them with our machines or divert them from their course. Here we have not to work at an artesian well, narrow and dark, where all the boring implements have to work in the dark.
Go on, friend Mulrady, dig and bore if thou wilt, but in a seemly fashion, and not with impious earthquakes of devilish gunpowder." With this concession Alvin Mulrady began to sink his first artesian shaft. Being debarred the auxiliaries of steam and gunpowder, the work went on slowly.
At present the sources of tenderer affection, if they existed, lay so deep below the strata of reason and common-sense that only some artesian process could pierce to the imprisoned spring's and set the "water of life" free, perhaps to bound, geyser-like, into the outer air.
The man of science tells us that living springs exist beneath these sands, and that artesian wells might bring them to the surface; and so in the inmost nature of man, however degraded he may be, Swedenborg tells us there is a shrine that cannot be defiled, through which heavenly influences may come down into his life, and yet save him, if he will receive them ere he passes from this world; but when sloth has become habitual and confirmed, there is almost as little room for hope that this will ever take place as that artesian tubes will ever make the Saharan desert a region of fertility.
It is the transition period of California. Hundreds of thousands of acres only wait for the magic artesian well to smile in plenty. Valois gathers up the reins. Only a few pensioners remain. The nomadic cavalry of the natives has disappeared. The suggestion of "work" sets them "en route." They drift towards the Mexican border. The flocks and herds are guarded by corps of white attendants.
At times it may be seen gushing out like an artesian well, rising three or four feet above the surface of the ice, until the pressure is relieved.
No one should enter an artesian undertaking, except to tap a stratum of known depth, without a long purse.
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