s from seven to
nine thousand dollars per annum. His irrigating brook is about four feet
wide and eight inches deep, flowing about two miles per hour.

On Duckwater Creek, Nye County, Mr. Irwin has reclaimed a tule swamp
several hundred acres in extent, which is now chiefly devoted to
alfalfa. On twenty-five acres he claims to have raised this year
thirty-seven tons of barley. Indeed, I have not yet noticed a meager
crop of any kind in the State. Fruit alone is conspicuously absent.

On the California side of the Sierra grain will not ripen at much
greater elevation than four thousand feet above sea level. The valleys
of Nevada lie at a height of from four to six thousand feet, and both
wheat and barley ripen, wherever water may be had, up to seven thousand
feet. The harvest, of course, is later as the elevation increases. In
the valleys of the Carson and Walker Rivers, four thousand feet above
the sea, the grain harvest is about a month later than in California. In
Reese River Valley, six thousand feet, it begins near the end of August.
Winter grain ripens somewhat earlier, while occasionally one meets a
patch of barley in some cool, high-lying canyon that will not mature
before the middle of September.

Unlike California, Nevada will probably be always richer in gold and
silver than in grain. Utah farmers hope to change the climate of the
east side of the basin by prayer, and point to the recent rise in the
waters of the Great Salt Lake as a beginning of moister times.
But Nevada's only hope, in the way of any considerable increase in
agriculture, is from artesian wells. The experiment has been tried on a
small scale with encouraging success. But what is now wanted seems to
be the boring of a few specimen wells of a large size out in the main
valleys. The encouragement that successful experiments of this kind
would give to emigration seeking farms forms an object well worthy the
attention of the Government. But all that California farmers in the
grand central valley require is the preservation of the forests and
the wise distribution of the glorious abundance of water from the snow
stored on the west flank of the Sierra.

Whether any considerable area of these sage plains will ever thus be
made to blossom in grass and wheat, experience will show. But in the
mean time Nevada is beautiful in her wildness, and if tillers of the
soil can thus be brought to see that possibly Nature may have other uses
even for RICH soi