Brush

Plaintiff brought this action, alleging that the defendants so negligently constructed, and maintained, a bridge over a waterway, or “wash,” extending from the San Dimas Canyon, in the Sierra Madre Mountains, that during an unusually heavy rainfall, in the months of January and February, 1914, large quantities of trees, rocks, orchard cuttings, railroad ties, planks, and other debris were carried by the water, and accumulated against and between the piling of said bridge, clogging up the waterway, causing the water to dam up for a distance of eight hundred feet back of the bridge, destroying seventy-five orange trees, and injuring five hundred others; also causing gravel to be deposited over about six acres of plaintiff’s land, to a depth of one to three feet. Judgment was entered for the plaintiff for the sum of seven thousand two hundred dollars, after a verdict for that amount by a jury, and the defendants appeal.

In defense of the action the defendants set up that the lands described in plaintiff’s complaint were, as a matter of fact, part of the natural course and bed of the San Dimas wash, which the plaintiff set about to reclaim; that, by reason of the construction of a…