Starr's quote isn't what you'd said. The precolumbian population of California was less than one tenth the present total, and equivalent to a large town, not even a city. Say, Stockton.
It had about a third of the native population of what is now the USA.
Which to me means, take what is now the USA, find out what the native population was, and then find a third of that.
I wasn't saying that it was anything close to the population of modern California, just that California is not inhabited because of the irrigation, but that the irrigation is there because it is a place that people want to inhabit.
At the time Columbus landed London only had ~100,000 people. For the time, California was pretty busy and if Europeans had not taken over the western USA, I am pretty sure there would still be massive irrigation networks in California today.
I was actually just trying to work out what you thought I had meant. I can be pretty childish, but I wasn't doing anything other than stating what I meant by that sentence. You don't have to tell me what you thought I had meant but it would be nice.
