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Show Early in the afternoon Steve shouted hoarsely. I joined Father at the brink to see a bright trickle fingering through the dark gravel exposed below. Mother and El Vera hurried from the house at our summons. There, little more than 16 feet down, was water in our well! All of chattered jubilantly-water so near us, and sweet cold water too, when we let a bucketful settle for a minute. We guessed that on the lower side of our homestead the water-bearing gravel must be only five or six feet below the surface. It seemed a pledge that the new country was kind and generous. Father lowered a wooden casing, open top and bottom, made to hold out the gravel and sand as Steve delved into the water-bearing layer. Standing on the edge the digger used his weight to help force the open box down as he scooped gravel from inside. Soon we had sufficient depth of water so that we could cover the well with a plank platform and bolt a hand pump to the planks. No one who dug for a well failed. With water everywhere beneath us we scoffed at people who slandered our valley with the word desert, then a synonym for Sahara sand dunes, sterility, death. We floated, we fancied, on a vast underground sea. Everything seemed possible to the early Nada pioneers. To ride out into the sage and announce to the world, "I take this ranch a mile long for my own, pledging only to do what I long to do to make me and my family wealthy!" To dig anywhere without folderol of water-witching or science and find your own well of pure water! Corn?-wheat?-alfalfa?-cattle?-swine?-all of them, no doubt. And the imaginative talked of soy beans, sorghum, kaffir corn, stranger crops. Although the homesteads were sliced out of the Escalante by surveyors as uncaring as their transits, each settler possessed the richest soil, the purest water, the most inspiring view. South of us, over the trail leading through the sand to a sorry little cabin, stood that gallant sign I mentioned, "Grandview Ranche." Beyond the line enclosing each settler's claim, he thought values dropped suddenly. I was willing to fight boys who came to the store with their parents, if they sneered at our land and asserted superior merits in theirs. |