Twelve years later one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so
very green by now, shot one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that
also might become classic, but the jury found for manslaughter. It
had the effect of discouraging the Greenfields claim, but Amos used
to sit on the headgate just the same, as quaint and lone a figure
as the sandhill crane watching for water toads below the Tule drop.
Every subsequent owner of Greenfields bought it with Amos in full
view. The last of these was Diedrick. Along in August of that
year came a week of low water. Judson's ditch failed and he went
out with his rifle to learn why. There on the headgate sat
Diedrick's frau with a long-handled shovel across her lap and all
the water turned into Diedrick's ditch; there she sat
knitting through the long sun, and the children brought out her
dinner. It was all up with Amos; he was too much of a gentleman to
fight a lady--that was the way he expressed it. She was a very
large lady, and a longhandled shovel is no mean weapon. The next
year Judson and Diedrick put in a modern water gauge and took the
summer ebb in equal inches. Some of the water-right difficulties
are more squalid than this, some more tragic; but unless you have
known them you cannot very well know what the water thinks as it
slips past the gardens and in the long slow sweeps of the canal.
You get that sense of brooding from the confined and sober floods,
not all at once but by degrees, as one might become aware of a
middle-aged and serious neighbor who has had that in his life to
make him so. It is the repose of the completely accepted instinct.
With the water runs a certain following of thirsty herbs and
shrubs. The willows go as far as the stream goes, and a bit
farther on the slightest provocation. They will strike root in the
leak of a flume, or the dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing the
water beyond its appointed bounds. Given a new waterway in a
barren land, and in three years the willows have fringed all its
miles of banks; three years more and they will touch tops across
it. It is perhaps due to the early usurpation of the willows that
so little else finds growing-room along the large canals. The
birch beginning far back in the canon tangles is more
conservative; it is shy of man haunts and needs to have the
permanence of its drink assured. It stops far short of the summer
limit of waters, and I have never known it to take up a position on
the banks beyond the ploughed lands. There is something almost
like premeditation in the avoidance of cultivated tracts by certain
plants of water borders. The clematis, mingling its foliage
secretly with its host, comes down with the stream tangles to the
village fences, skips over to corners of little used pasture lands
and the plantations that spring up about waste water pools; but
never ventures a footing in the trail of spade or plough; will not
be persuaded to grow in any garden plot. On the other hand, the
horehound, the common European species imported with the colonies,
hankers after hedgerows and snug little borders. It is more widely
distributed than many native species, and may be always found along
the ditches in the village corners, where it is not appreciated.
The irrigating ditch is an impartial distributer. It gathers all
the alien weeds that come west in garden and grass seeds and
affords them harbor in its banks. There one finds the European
mallow (Malva rotundifolia) spreading out to the streets
with the summer overflow, and every spring a dandelion or two,
brought in with the blue grass seed, uncurls in the swardy soil.
Farther than either of these have come the lilies that the Chinese
coolies cultivate in adjacent mud holes for their foodful
bulbs. The seegoo establishes itself very readily in swampy
borders, and the white blossom spikes among the arrow-pointed
leaves are quite as acceptable to the eye as any native species.
In the neighborhood of towns founded by the Spanish
Californians, whether this plant is native to the locality or not,
one can always find aromatic clumps of yerba buena, the "good herb"
(Micromeria douglassii). The virtue of it as a febrifuge was taught
to the mission fathers by the neophytes, and wise old dames of my
acquaintance have worked astonishing cures with it and the succulent
yerba mansa. This last is native to wet meadows and distinguished
enough to have a family all to itself.
Where the irrigating ditches are shallow and a little
neglected, they choke quickly with watercress that multiplies about
the lowest Sierra springs. It is characteristic of the frequenters
of water borders near man haunts, that they are chiefly of the
sorts that are useful to man, as if they made their services an
excuse for the intrusion. The joint-grass of soggy pastures
produces edible, nut-flavored tubers, called by the Indians
taboose. The common reed of the ultramontane marshes (here
Phragmites vulgaris), a very stately, whispering reed, light
and strong for shafts or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which
makes a passable sugar.
It seems the secrets of plant powers and influences yield
themselves most readily to primitive peoples, at least one never
hears of the knowledge coming from any other source. The Indian
never concerns himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the
plant's appearances and relations, but with what it can do for him.
