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Show Record river to get a drink and they would sink down sometimes until just their backs were sticking out. This would happen generally on the river up stream from Comb wash to the mouth of McElmo about 30 or 627 35 miles. I have attempted to confine the San Juan River to a definite channel. I did most of that at Bluff and at the trading post at the mouth of Chinle Wash. On one occasion I built a crib over a ledge 12 feet high while the water was there and put a water wheel in it. We got it going and on one morning we went out and found the river one hundred yards away and a filled in sand bar by 628 our water wheel. The river came back to the same place eventually. The last time I saw it the river was right near the crib. It cannot get far away. It is about 100 yards from the crib to the other side of the cliff. I would not undertake to say how many acres of bottom 629 land or farm land there are now around Bluff. There is no land between Bluff and the Colorado River that is now farmed or irrigated that I know of. On the land west of Bluff some years we had lots of cattle and lots of feed, and the next year we would not 630 have one half as many cattle and one half of them would die. Most of this country that I have been speaking of for 10 miles each side of the river from Shiprock down to the mouth of Chinle Creek cane be irrigated and is the finest piece of farming soil, without exception, in any country if irrigated and cultivated, and would support a very large population. It would take a lot of money to irrigate it, but 631 it is feasible. Between Bluff and the Colorado River there is nothing. I have been across the river on the Navajo Reservation quite a lot. There is a great deal of that land that is susceptible to irrigation. Frank H. Hyde testified on cross examination as follows: The area of the country in Utah that I have just spoken of as susceptible to irrigation extends from Bluff south 18 miles, from Bluff to the Four Corners and on into New Mexico. That many miles would make 623 good level farms. On the North side you have the same. I left Juab County to go into San Juan County when a boy probably ten. I was old enough to sit on a pony. I settled at - 98- |