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When he ditched his tule-swamps, instead of contracting the excavation, he bought the huge dredgers outright, and, when there was slack work on his own marshes, he contracted for the draining of the marshes of neighboring big farmers, land companies, and corporations for a hundred miles up and down the Sacramento River.

But the rapid decay of this fragile case led to its total disappearance. A few exceptions must, however, be mentioned. In 1840 some dredgers took from the bed of the Saone, at Apremont, from beneath a bed of gravel five feet thick, the trunk of a tree which still contained the bones that had been placed in it.

The great advantage of this dredger is its capability of working in disturbed water, where the frames of a bucket dredger would be injured by the rise and fall of the vessel. Thus at Lowestoft bucket dredgers are used inside the harbor, and the Bazin dredger at the entrance, where there are sand and gravel, and where the water is more disturbed.

Other trips they made, sometimes accompanied by Dick, to his great dredgers working in the Sacramento basin, or his dam-building on the Little Coyote and Los Cuatos creeks, or to his five-thousand-acre colony of twenty-acre farmers, where he was trying to enable two hundred and fifty heads of families, along with their families, to make good on the soil.

These embankments were formed by the output of the dredgers, and are all faced with granite bowlders brought from Finland; at their outer termination the work is of a more durable kind, the facing is made of squared blocks of granite, so that it may stand the heavy surf which at times is raised by a west wind in the Gulf.

At the same time the actual work of preparing the site was completed with the filling of the tide-land portions by hydraulic dredgers and the removal of the standing buildings. In the same year the department chiefs were named and began their work.

Anything that could float was pressed into service: merchant steamers, dredgers, ferry-boats, scows, barges, canal-boats, tugs, fishing craft, yachts, rowing-boats, launches, even extemporized rafts. There was no attempt to enforce order. The fear-frantic people piled aboard until there was not even standing room on the vessels' decks.

Thus, much alas! how little about the wonders of the deep. We, who are no deep-sea dredgers, must return humbly to the wonders of the shore. And first, as after descending the gap in the sea-wall we walk along the ribbed floor of hard yellow sand, let me ask you to give a sharp look-out for a round grey disc, about as big as a penny-piece, peeping out on the surface.

Julio Kubanoff answered. "You getting everything I'm sending in?" I asked. "Yes. What's that two-em-dashed thing up ahead, one of the harbor dredgers?" "That's right. Hey, look at this, once." I turned the audiovisual down on the claw derrick. "The men on it look like Rodriguez & Oughourlian's people, but they say Steve Ravick sent it. What do you know about it?" "Hey, Ralph!

I looked up ahead, rising to the ceiling again, and saw what was the matter. It was one of the dredgers from the waterfront, really a submarine scoop shovel, that they used to keep the pools and the inner channel from sanding up. I wasn't surprised it was jammed; I couldn't see how they'd gotten this far uptown with it. I got a few shots of that, and then unhooked the handphone of my radio.