Gopher-trail Swindle Mulcts the Country.
Following the discovery that Teodoro Rosas, a Mexican youth, of Phoenix, Ariz., had been conducting a gopher farm and mulcting the county out of fifty to one hundred dollars a month, the supervisors abolished the bounty of five cents which they had long paid on each gopher tail.
Farmers regard gophers as pests, and at their request the bounty was made. Bounty claimants were required only to present the tails of rodents, it being presumed that the animals the tails had belonged to were killed. Young Rosas presented several hundred tails a month.
One of the supervisors chanced to pass by the Rosas farm and saw that it was honeycombed with gophers’ bur[{62}]rows. He saw a number of gophers without tails, and questioned Fosas, who admitted that he had never killed a gopher, but, after removing their tails, turned them loose for breeding purposes.