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Show METHODS OF APPROPRIATING WATER OF WATERCOURSES 295 proportion to the capacity of the conduit described in the notice; and that only a small fraction of all the notices posted were followed by actual completion of construction. As a natural result of these conditions, statements of claims in the notices were frequently indefinite and liberal.370 The California experience.-The California experience with posting and filing methods of appropriating water was publicized in 1901, with frank and sometimes sarcastic comments by the field agents about the absurdities that they encountered. This was done in reporting a study made by the United States Department of Agriculture in important areas of the State under the direction of Elwood Mead, who during much of the preceding decade had been the first State Engineer of Wyoming and had led that State in embarking upon its unprecedented pattern of water appropriation law.371 It is indeed true that some of the aggregate recorded claims of appropriative water rights in the California areas that were studied border on the fantastic. For example, in the Cache Creek area, a portion of only one group of 64 recorded claims aggregated 147,600 second-feet (cubic feet per second). The claims were stated variously in miner's inches, cubic feet per second, inches per second, and cubic inches under a 4-inch pressure.372 In the San Joaquin Valley, there were six different notices, each one of which claimed all the water of San Joaquin River. The total claims on the main San Joaquin River alone amounted to more than 700,000 second-feet, which is many times greater than the maximum floodflow of this stream.373 In the Honey Lake Basin, notices of appropriation aggregated over 700,000 second-feet; yet at the rate which the field agent who wrote this report considered a permissible duty of water for this area-1 inch to 8 acres-62 second-feet would have been enough to supply the 20,000 acres then under irrigation.374 In writing about the "absurd" claims recorded in two counties respecting Cache Creek and tributaries, and the total absence of record of many appropriations that were then actually being exercised, the investigator stated that such a situation was not exceptional. "In every county in California which I have had occasion to investigate and in every other State where this system of posting and filing prevails, the same conditions hold."37S In his introduction to the California study, Dr. Mead wrote that "the aggregate of all claims in California represents enough moisture to submerge the continent. * * * The evil comes in the failure of the law to afford any adequate protection to those who comply with its provisions."376 370Harding, S. T., "Water Rights for Irrigation," pp. 36-37 (1936). 371U. S. Dept. Agr. Bull. 100, "Report of Irrigation Investigations in California" (1901). 372Id. at 170. 373/d at 232-233. 374/d at 88-89. 375/d at 170. 316Id. at 36. One of the investigators in the study, a professor of civil engineering in the University of California, wrote that as a result of investigation and study of irrigation |