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Show Record those. The next people we saw were about three Indians who lived in Piute Canyon. We saw no other person. The people we saw did not have any boats. We saw no boats other than our own. 3760 While on the San Juan River I noticed a condition on the river which might be termed a changing of the channel. At a camp near Clay Hill Crossing the main channel in the river shifted positions during a flood that came down the river from the middle of the channel to the bank and then back to the middle of the channel in the course of a few hours. At Piute Farms, where the channel is a little over three thousand feet wide, the main current was observed to shift from some place near the middle of the channel over to the bank and then back to the middle of the 3761 channel, and when the current was over next to the bank, and we estimated that something like a strip of land 75 feet wide was washed away next to our camp. When some of these changes were taking place at Piute Farms the river did not flow with a steady current. We could look up stream and see a splashing wave coming down the river. This splashing wave was at the front of fairly deep water. When this deep water would come the river would be about a foot higher than it would be a few hours later. In other words the river flowed in surges. On the crest of one of those surges logs would be transported down stream, and all the islands in the channel would be concealed; in the troughs between the surges, the islands would appear and the logs would mire in the sand. When I said the channel was 3000 feet wide, I meant 3762 from bank to bank and most of that would be covered with water. When I speak of the current I mean the deeper part of the channel. Nobody went out to learn how deep the water was there in the deeper part of the channel. We had no opportunity to find out how deep the water was. As to the depth of the water about Piute Farms, we rode down the channel in boats in places in fairly low stages of the water, but not in flood stages. One day there was a flood and we |