In Pattie's day there was grass everywhere, little erosion, 
a normal river, and bottomlands of sweet well-drained soil. 
Pattie's testimony is really superfluous; there 
is hardly an acre             S-eh     t that does not 
tell its own story to those who understand the speech of 
hills and rivers.                               s 
the skeletons of ancient-      trees, 
toppling one by one into the parched          o     arroyo, A 
year by year          s gnaw away the A     loam of what was 
once a farm. 
That farm was irrigated once,--y   can trace the 
old ditches winding across the remnants of bottomland. If 
irrigated, there must have been a stream. There is 
no stream now, only a trickle in the sand. 
The banks of-timtw   ae must have been shallow 
and gentle, else the water could not have been led upon 
the land. They are not shallow now. The channel is a 
flood-torn chasm. 
If there were ditches, there must have been. 
wide stretches of level friendly soil to irrigate. That 
soil has been dumped as silt into the v      l     ; one 
farm washed away to curse another in the making, - t- c- .4 
zmiit -have- -beou-4Wa  on~  a~~n    mescas; --rich gaa 
wh-i &hk-44 pastur their hers. Is ther  any now? -Thr 
lady-in4he neteat thinks~ there {s- she eze1ais -how 
-6-4