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Along the lower slopes of the mountains, where the valleys widened, were primitive little adobe towns, in which the Mexicans lived, each owning a few acres of tillable land. In the summer they followed their sheep herds in the upland pastures. There were not a hundred white men in the whole of Arriba County, and no railroad touched it.
Desolate and inaccessible as the cañon is, many ruins of buildings are found perched upon ledges in the stupendous cliffs. In some instances the mouths of caves have been walled in, and the evidences all point to a race for ever dreading and fortifying itself against an invader. Why did these people chose their embattlements so far away from all tillable land and sources of subsistence?
Perched on the hills overlooking these bottoms, and sometimes located on the lower levels, there was once a number of large and important villages, while in the regions on the south, where the tillable areas are as a rule very much smaller, the settlements were, with one exception, small and generally insignificant.
That didn't help us, for the man who bought it was so poor he didn't pay us for over thirty years. Then the land went up in price and he was able to sell it for a good price and we got our money. Fifty-five acres were selected, the best we could for our purpose. Twenty acres were so situated as to have no value. Thirty-five acres were fairly good, tillable land, the best we could pick out.
"That's because it's worth $2000 more than when you bought it," she laughed, "for with the new ditch you have added fifteen tillable acres and we still have a pond and a better driveway up to the barn. Then, of course, I've included in the improvements the running water and bathroom equipment." "We've not decided to put that in yet," said her husband quickly, to which she made no reply.
It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands in their own boulder fenced gullies but how much farther in the man-made waterways.
A recent magazine writer, holding a doleful view of Japan's agricultural condition, wholly overlooked the silk and tea crops in his search for native products, an error obviously fallen into through the fact that these are not raised on what governmental reports call "tillable ground," meaning that they are produced outside the sixteen per cent. arable area.
It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands in their own boulder fenced gullies but how much farther in the man-made waterways.
A little daughter, about fourteen years old, who lived with her grandmother, was so badly ruptured, that there was no probability of her being cured, or ever being fit to be married. He had bought a piece of land, in common with Arie, his brother-in-law, to make tillable land out of the rough woods. It was to him like dead fruit.
They are interspersed with small islands: these have narrow strips of tillable land, but are generally too low for cultivation; and when the Mississippi is at flood, they are all under water, and most of them many feet.
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