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J.J. ,lAND'

BY PATH AND
TRAIL

DEAN HARRIS

PUBLISHERS

CHICAGO NEWSPAPER UNION
CHICAGO
1908

J.J.M.UHDY
Hfi
UEEN W.
1Ö
.n."T'"

oc:
1'"'
3

TO
",-'IY DEAR FRIEND
REV. R <.) B E R T K E R

RECTOR OF
T. CATHARIIÇES AND CHAPLAIN TO THE 19TH REGIMENT
DEDICA TE THIS REcmm OF MY TRAVELS
"BY PATH AND TI{AIL"

CONTENTS.

CHAP'i;JtJIl I.

PAGE

ORIGIN OF THE FIGHTIKG YAQUIS.... . . . . . . .. .. . . .. . . . . . . .,. 5

CH_1PTER JI.

O
TIlE WAY TO THE EAIaL\.NCA............................. 13

CHAPTER HI.

BATTLE OF THE ELE
IE1\TS.................................. 25

CIIAPTEll IF.
V ALLEY OF 'l'HE) CHURCHES... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 33

CHAPTER L

FRIEXD OF THE
IOüX'l'AIXEER... ........................... 39

CHLtPTEIl VI
THE RL'S
EHS OF THE SIERRA........... ...... .............. 45

CHAP1'ER rH.
TIlE PInEST AXD THE YAQUIS............................... 67

CHAPTBU rIll.
"TIIEIm
IAX E
TEns
\T IllS l'EHIL......................... fií

vii

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER IX.
l'Hltj DEJAD OF THE DESERT.................................. 7:)
OHAPTER X.
THE .I!'IGHT FOR LU'E......................................... 8;:;
OH.flPTER Xl.

THE "DIGG.I!}R INDIA.NS"...................................... 91

CHAPTER XlI.

JESUI'I'S A
D DIGGER INDL\.NS............................. .103

OHAPTEn
YIIl.

'1'ilE VAOA DE LUMßRE...................................... .lú

OH APTER XIV.
TIlE PRADERA AND GUANO BEDS..... .......... ............ .121

ORA-.PTER XL
ORIGIN OF 'rHE "PIOUS FUND". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .127

OHA.rl'Ell Xl'I.
TIlE REPOSE OF THE GRAVE................................ .135

CHAPTER XVII.
SOLDIERS OF THE NE"\Y 'I'EST A
IEKT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .141

dii

CONTENrrs.

CII.lPTER xnn.
A LASD OF SCE
IC WOXDERS... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1;:;3

CII.1PTR1-:' XIX.

YEGETATIO
OF THE DESEHT............................... .161

CIL1PTEP. XX.
TE
IPLES OF THE DESERT................................... .1m

CH.-lPTER XXI.

A
IIRACLE OF N
\.TUHE..................................... .18L

CHAPTER XXII.
THE PItE-HISTORIC UUIX.................................... . IS!)

CH.!lPTER XXIII.
A CITY IX THE DESEUT..................................... .W7

CH.\PTER xxn.
CA
IP OF THE COXSC
IPrIYES............................... .
03

CIIAPl'ER XXY.

THE OSTRICH F .\lUl. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . :?1:1

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS.

FACING PAGE

YA.QC"l FIGHTERS OF THE BACATET}
MOUNTAINS. .... ...... . .. .. .. ... ;)

TARAH"GMARI INDIANS, KORTHERN MEXICO.......................... 4ü

HALF-BLOOD COWBOYS, LOWER CALIFORNIA... ... . .. .. .. .... .,. . . . ... 91

A "DIGGER INDIAN," LoWER CALIFORNIA....... .... . . ...... ......... 94

IOQLI LOVERS. CLIFF PEOPLE............. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15(>>

P APAGO ""TIKI"GP" ...............................................170

n UI
S. AJS"CIENT AND
IODF.RN..................'.'.'."'."'."" .1!H

""'lUTE EAGLE" AND "THE PUMA" APACHES ON PARADE. .. . . .. .. . . . .20

xi

BOOK J I.

IN THE LAND OF THE YAQUI

A SI-IORT T.L-\LI( 'VITH TIlE READER

The romance and weird fascination which belong to
immense solitudes and untenanted ,,-ilds are fading away
and, in a -few years, will be as if they were not. The in-
tangible and the immaterial leave no memories after
them.
The nlarch of civilization is a benediction for the fu-
ture, but it is also a devastation before which savage na-
ture and savage man must go down. 1Jnable or unwilling
to adapt hinlself to new conditions and to the demands
of a life foreign to his nature and his experience original
man of North Anlerica is domned, like the wild beast he
hunted, to extinction.
For centuries he
tubbornly contested the white man's
right to invade and seize upon his hunting grounds; he
was no coward and when compelled, at last, to strike a
truce with his enemy, he felt that Fate was against him,
yielded to the inevitabl
and-all was over. In the Baca-
tete mountains, anlid the terrifying solitudes of the
Sierras of Northern :ßIexico, the Yaquis-Iast of the
fighting tribes-is disappearing in a lake of blood and
when he is subnlerged the last dread war-whoop will
shriek his reql1ielu. It win neyer ag::lÏn be heard upon
the earth.
The lonely regions of our great continent, over which
there brooded for unnun1bered ages the silence which
"Was before creation, are disappearing with the vanishing
Indian; a new yegf'table and a new anin1allife are sup-
planting the old now on the road to obliteration. The
ruin is p:lthetic, but inevitable.

2

BY PATH AND TR.UL.

So before the old shall baye entirely vanished, it is well
that we should look upon what yet renlains and h:lnd
down to an unprivileged future a description and a Yer-
bal photograph of what the country was in days gone
by. Lower California, Sonora and the illimitable pine
forests of the Chihuahua Range of the Sierras J\fadres
yet remain in their primitive isolation and magnificent
savagery, but, before our century expires, the immense
solitudes, the unbroken desolation of wilderness and the
nlelancholy fascination which belong to the lonely desert
and towering mountain and to sustained and unhroken
silence will be no more. r ale, vale, acterne valc-good-
hy. good-by for eyernlore. ,Y. R. H.

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CHAPTER I.

ORIGIN 0]' THE FIGHTING YAQUIS.

The "Gran Barranca" of the U rique river in south-
eastern Sonora is one of the greatest natural wonders
of the earth. "And where is Sonora T" In a northern
corner of the territorially great republic of
lexico, just
south of the line separating Arizona from J\Iexico and
washed on its western limits by the waters of the Gulf
of California, is the state of Sonora. Its scenic wonders,
its superb climate, its mineral and agricultural possibili-
ties will eventually place it in the front rank with the
greatest and richest states of the Mexican republic. As
yet it is practically an unsettled land and almost un-
known to the l\lexicans themselves. It awaits develop-
ment, but promises a liberal return on invested capital.
The Cananea copper mines are now attracting wide-
spread interest, but while the smeltings of these mines
and the mines themselves are rich, it is well known that
III any other prospected and as yet unopened regions con-
tain superior ore of inexhaustible richness and abund-
ance. Owing to the almost insurmountable difficulty of
freighting machinery and shipping the ore these mines
cannot now be operated on a paying basis. Gold, sil-
ver, copper, lead, onyx, marble, hard and soft coal have
been found and are known to exist in large deposits, con-
verting Sonora into a veritable storehouse of nature. The
lowlands and broad valleJ
s of the state yield two crops
a year, and these semi-tropical lands grow and maturø
nearly all the fruit and vegetable varieties of the tropical
and teulperate zones. Like the Garden of Eden. Sonora

6

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

is watered by five beautiful rivers, and when irrigation
is more generally introduced and the river wealth of the
land utilized, the districts of Hermosillo, l\Iayo, Altar,
:Magdalena and above all, the Sonora Valley, will outrank
in luxuriant vegetation, productiveness and richness of
soil many of the lnarvelously fertile lands of Lower 1\Iex-
lCO.
Still, the developnlent of all these mineral and agricul-
tural resources has been slow and is yet very much re-
tarded by a combination of natural and hitherto unsur-
mountable obstacles. To construct durable bridges oyer
the chasms, to tunnel giant hills, cut beds into the faces
of adanlantine mountains and build railroads into the
great mining districts of the Sierra :ßIadre, call for such
a prodigious expenditure of llloney that the state and
capitalists hesitate and nlove slowly.
But the absence of modern methods of transportation
has not been the only drawback to the development of
Sonora, nor, indeed, the most serious one. A_mid the
lofty mountains and rugged hills of this wild region, the
last of the fighting tribes of the American Indians has
built his Torres \T edras-the fort of the broken heart
and desperate hope-is making his last stand and fight-
ing his last battle. You have heard of the Yaquis, the
war hawks of the wilderness, the mountain lions of the
Sierra :ßladre, the tigers of the rocks. They are all
these in their desperate courage, in their fierceness, in
their endurance and treachery, in their cunning and de-
spall'.
In this desolation of wilderness, behind impregnable
rocks, these fierce men have fought the soldiers of Spain
and the rangers of
1:exico to a "standstill." These are
they who say to
Iexico, "Until you make peace with us,

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

7

until you grant our conditions, until you settle with us,
no
Iexican, no American will work the mines or till the
soil in our land."
And who are these nlen who challenge the strength
of Mexico
\Vho and what are the Yaquis1 Before
coming to Sonora I endeavored to inform myself on the
nÎstory of this extraordinary tribe, for, like the Rmnan
Terence, whatever is human interests me-" homo
SUJn, hltl1'lani nihil a me alienu1n puto." I had read in
tRe AUlerican and l\lexican newspapers. from time to
time, terrible things about this 11lountain tribe. I read
in "Ell\Iundo," a :ßIexican paper of the date of Febru-
ary 28,1907, that "a Yaqui Indian "Who had just mnptied
a fifteen-pound can of cyanide of potassiUlll into the mu-
nicipal waterworks reservoir .at Hernlosillo was caught
in the act and shot by the authorities. A. new terror is
added to the situation in the Sonora country since the
Yaquis have learned the deadly nature of the poison
which is so largely used in mining operations and is so
easily accessible to desperadoes like the Yaquis." Late
in Decenlber, 1907, I read in another paper published in
Torin: "A marauding band of Yaquis entered the vil-
lage of Lencho, killed six men and two women and
wounded four other
lexicans. As soon as the firing was
heard at Torin, three miles from where the massacre oc-
curred and where 2,000 troops are stationed, General
Lorenzo Torres took the field in pursuit of the Yaquis.
The soldiers will remain out until the Indians are killed
or captured." I(illed or captured! \Vell, for 400 years
of known time the Spanish or
fexican troops have, with
occasional periods of truce, been killing and capturing
this solitary tribe, and strangp to relate the warriors of
the tribe will not stay killed or captured. On June 12,

8

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

1908, a Guaymas morning pa per published this dis-
patch: "A special from Hermosillo, says 4,000
Iex-
ican soldiers under the personal command of Gen.
Lorenzo Torres, are in the country in hot pursuit of the
Yaqui Indians. All negotiations looking toward the
signing of the peace treaty were sudde_nly broken off
this afternoon. The Yaquis insisted on retaining their
arms and ammunition, after having acceded to every
other stipulation of the J\lexican government. The ]\iexi-
can officers stood steadfast, and the Yaquis withdrew
from the conference. Immediately orders were dis-
patched to the
lexican troops in the field to resume hos-
tilities. It .is not believed that the campaigb will last
long as the l\iexican troops have all the water holes in
the Yaqui country surrounded."
For the past fifty years, on and off, the Mexican sol-
diers in battalions, companies and isolated comlnands
have been chasing through the mountains these stubborn
and half-civilized fighters. In the few last years the
Yaquis have become more dangerous and daring, lnore
cunning in their methods of attack, and as they are now
armed with modern rifles they are a most serious menace
to the progress and development of central and southern
Sonora.
Who, then, are the Y aquis
Back in the days when the
race, known to us as the American Indian, was the sole
owner of the two great continents of North and South
America, an immense region, in what is now north\'ìest-
ern Canada, was possessed by a great nation known as
the Athasbascan, from which the territory of Athabasca
and the great river flowing through it take their names.
One division of this numerous nation are known to-day
as Tinnes or Dínnés, and may have been so called in

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

9

those early days. For some cause unknown to us, a
tribal family, numbering perhaps a thousand, quarreled
with their kinsmen or became dissatisfied with their
lands, separated from their brothers and went in quest
of new hunting grounds. They crossed a continent, pass-
ing in peace through the lands of other tribes and cut-
ting a passage for themselves through hostile nations.
They arrived at last, it may be in a hundred, two hun-
dred years, in the land now known as New Mexico and
Arizona, possessed and tined by an agricultural and
peaceable people, differing in customs, manners, super-
stitions, and in origin and language. They decided to
settle here. The Zuni, 1\ioki, Yumas-call them what we
may-contested the right of the Dínnés to live in their
country. The invaders, compared to the established na-
tions, were few in numbers, but they were trained fight-
ers. They were lanky men of toughened fibre and mus-
cle, the sons of warrior sires who had fought their way
through tribe, clan and nation, and willed to their sons
and grandsons their only estate and property, courage,
endurance, agility, strategy in war and cun-ning in the
fight. The Dínnés, let us call them by their modern
name the Apaches, woefully outclassed in numbers by
the people upon whose lands they had intruded, were
wise. Fighting in the open, if they lost but ten men in
battle and the Zuni and Ì\loki lost forty, in the end the
Zuni and 1\ioki must win out. The Apaches took to the
mountains. The Zuni had no stomach for mountain
fighting. The Apaches raided their villages, attacked
like lions and disappeared like birds. They swept the
Salt River valley clean and where at one time there was
a sedentary population of 50,000 or 60,000 there was now
a desert. Those of the original owners who escaped fled

10

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

to the recesses and dark places of the Grand canyon or
to the inaccessible cliffs where the Spaniards found them
and called them "burrow people," and where hundreds
of years afterward the Americans discovered them and
christened them "cliff dwellers."
There are no records on stone or paper to tell us
when these things happened; there is no tradition to in-
form us when the Dínnés entered the land or when the
devastation began. \Ve only know that when the Span-
iards came into Arizona in 1539, the "Casa Grande,"
the great house of the last of the early dwellers, was a
venerable ruin.
The Apaches now increased and multiplied, they
spread out and divided into tribes. One division trav-
eled south and settled along the slopes of the Bacatete
mountains and in the valley of a river to which they gave
their name. \Vhen this settlement took place we do not
know, we only know that when Father J\larcos de Nizza
entered Sonora, the first of white men, in 1539, this tribe
of the Apaches called themselves Yaqui, and possessed
the land. So now you can understand why the Spaniards
found the Yaquis tough customers to deal with and why
the J\fexicans after sixty years of intermittent war have
not yet conquered them. The Yaqui claims descent from
the wolf, and he has all the qualities and characteristics
of the wolf to make good his claim.
Centuries of training in starvation, of exposure to
burning heat, to thirst, to mountain storms and to suffer-
ing have produced a man almost as hardy as a cactus, as
fertile in defense, as swift of foot and as distinctly a
type of the wilderness and the desert as his brother, the
coyote.
From the earliest Spanish records we learn that this

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

11

fierce tribe resisted the intrusion and settlenlent in their
country of any foreign race. One of the conditions of a
treaty made with them by the early Spaniards permitted
the exploitation of the mineral wealth of the country.
Villages were built and camps established from time to
time, but when the Yaquis or 1Iexicans broke the peace,
these camps and towns were left desolate.
It is impossible, for one who has not seen Sonora to
imagine the ravages wrought in a country for which na-
ture has done so much.
The name "Infelix"-unhappy-given to it by the
early missionary fathers, in sympathy with its misfor-
tunes, was portentous of its lniseries. The ravages
of the Yaquis were everywhere visible a few years ago,
and in many places, even to-day, the marks of their ven-
geance tell of their ferocity. By small parties and by
secret passes of the mountains they sweep down upon,
surprise and attack the lonely traveler or train of trav-
elers or a village, slaughter the In en and carry off the
women and children. Then, in their mountain lairs and
in the security of isolation, the mothers are separated
from their children and the children incorporated into
the tribe, and in time become Yaqui mothers and Yaqui
warriors. This is the secret of the vitality and perpe-
tuity of the Yaqui tribe. If it were not for this practice
of stealing children and incorporating thenl into the
tribal body, the Yaquis would long ago have been anni-
hilated. 1Iarcial, Benevidea, Bandalares, prominent
Yaqui chiefs, were child captives and many of their
council and war chiefs are half-breeds. And now here is
an extraordinary, and, perhaps, an unprecedented fact in
the history of the human race outside of the Ottoman
empire. Of the Indians warring against a civilized anù

12

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

a white nation, one-third are whites, one-half half-castes
and lnany of the rest carry in their veins white blood.
On the other hand, the civilized troops who now, and for
the past fifty years, have been waging war on the Yaquis,
folIowing them to their haunts, hunting them in the fast-
ness of their mountain, are all Indians and half-breeds.

CHAPTER II.

ON THE WAY TO TIlE BAP.RANCA..

To the traveler from the northern and eastern regions
of America,
Iexico is and always will be a land of en-
chantment. Its weird and romantic history, its unfa-
miliar and gorgeously flowering vines, its thorny ånd
mysteriously protected plants called cacti, its strange
tribes of unknown origin, its towering mountains, vol-
canoes and abysses of horrent depths prepare the mind
for the unexpected and for any surprise. Still, the stag-
gering tales I heard here, at Guaymas, of the wonders of
the Gran Barranca and the matchless scenery of the
Sierra 1Iadre gave.me pause. The Sierras lVladres are a
range of mountains forming the backbone of 1Iexico,
from which all the other ridges of this great country
stretch away, and to which all isolated spurs and solitary
mountains are related. This stupendous range of moun-
tains probably rose from the universal deep, like the
Laurentian granites, when God said' 'let there be light,
and light was," and will remain till the Mighty Angel
comes down from heaven and" swears by Him that liv-
eth forever, that time shall be no more."
From the breasts and bosom of this tremendous range
rise mountains of individual greatness, towering one
above the other. Here are sublime peaks of imperishable
material that lift their spires into ethereal space, and
whose snow roofed sides receive and reflect the rays of
an eternal sun. Here, also, are horrent gorges which ter-
rify the gaze-vast abysses where there is no day and
where eternal silence reigns; dead volcanoes whose cra-

14

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

tel'S are a desolation of emptiness and whose sides are
ripped and gashed down to the very foothills, black with
lava and strewn with scoriae. Of the time when these
mighty hills belched forth flame and fire, reverberated
with explosive gases, and the crash of the elements that
rocked the earth and sent down scoriae torrents which
devoured life and overwhelmed and effaced valleys no
tongue may speak. Through that part of the wonderful
Sierra dividing the states of Chihuahua and Sonora,
flows, through depths immeasurable to man, the U rique
river, whose flow when in flood is an ungovernable tor-
rent, and when in repose is a fascination.
Thousands of years ago the streams and rivulets
formed by the thawing of the mountain snow on the
Sierra's crests and slopes zigzagged, now here, now there
searching a path to the sea. On their seaward race they
were joined by innumerable recruits, springs issuing
from the crevassed rocks, brooks stealing away from
dark recesses, runlets, rills and streamlets, till in time
the confederate waters became a formidable river which
conquered opposition and fought its way to the sea.
This is the U rique, and for untold ages there has been no
"let up" to its merciless and tireless onslaught on the
porphyritic and sandstone walls that in the dark ages
challenged its right to pass on. Through these formid-
able barriers it has ripped a right of way, and into their
breasts of adamant it has cut a frightful gash of varying
width and, in places, more than a mile deep. This aw-
ful wound is known as the Gran Barranca, and with its
weird settings amid terrifying solitudes is, perhaps, the
greatest natural wonder in America.
I have visited the Grand Canyon of .L
rizona, and am
familiar with Niagara Falls and its wondrous gorge, but

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

15

now, that I have returned after passing eight days amid
the towering peaks, the perpendicular walls, the frightful
abysses, the dark and gloomy depths of precipitous can-
yons, and, above all, the immense and awful silence of
the Great Barranca, I confess I feel like one who has
come out of an opiate sleep and doubts he is yet awake.
From the quaint and tropical town of Guaymas on the
Gulf of California-still called by the
Iexicans the Gulf
of Cortez-I began my journey for the Gran Barranca.
Accompanied by a
Iayo guide I joined, by invitation,
the party of Don Alonzo Espinosa, who, with his son and
daughter, was leaving to visit his mine in the La Dura
range. vVith us went four rifle bearing Yaquis, Chris-
tianized members of the fierce mountain tribe that hàs
given and is yet giving more trouble to the 1\Iexican gov-
ernment than all the Indians of the republic.
The distance from Guaymas to the Gran Barranca
is about 200 miles, and it is idle to say that through these
rough mountain lands, there are no railroads, no stages,
nor indeed facilities for travel save on foot or mule
back. Noble and serviceable as the horse may be, no
one here would dream of trusting his life to him on the
steep and narrow trails of the Sierras. The small J\Iexi-
can burro or donkey is as wise as a Inountain goat, as
sure of foot as a Rocky Mountain
heep, and when left
to himself will, day or night, safely carry you by the
rim of the most dangerous precipice. We left Guaymas
at 4 a. m. At Canoncito we met a train of loadéd burros
driven by men cloathed in zarapes, white cotton pants
and sombreros, and, like ourselves, taking advantage of
the early morning and its refreshing coolness. N ow and
then we passed a solitary "jackal" or hut from whose
door yelling curs saBied forth to dispute our right of

16

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

way. We were now entering the land of the cactus, that
mysterious plant so providentially protected against the
hunger of bird or beast. Bristling from top to root with
innumerable spines of the size and hardness of a cam-
bric or darning needle, the Mexican cactus is a living
manifestation of a prescient, omnipotent and divine per-
sonality. From the diminutive singa, which grows in
waterless regions, and whose bark when chewed gives re-
lief to the parched tongue, to the giant Suhauro towering
to the height of forty or fifty feet, and whose pulp holds
gallons of water, the cactus in its 685 species or varieties
is a marvel of diversity and a fascinating study for the
botanist.
At 10 o'clock we halted for breakfast at the home of
Signor Mathias Duran, an old and hospitable friend of
Don Alonzo. Here I noticed with pleasure and edifica-
tion the survival of an old Spanish greeting which has
outlived the vicissitudes of time and modern innovations.
Mr. Duran was sta:Q,ding on his veranda shouting a
welcome to his friend, who, dismounting, shook hands
with his host and exclaimed: "Deo gratias" (thanks be
to God) and Duran, still holding his guest's hand, spoke
back: U Para siempre benidito sea Dios y la siempre
Virgin Maria; pase adelante, amigo mio." (Forever
blessed be God and the holy Virgin Mary; come in, my
friend.) To me, coming from afar, this language sound-
ed as an echo from the Ages of Faith, and I marvelled at
the colloquial piety and childlike simplicity of these cul-
tured and valiant gentlemen. Late that afternoon we
entered the tribal lands of the Yaquis, and our armed
escort now became somebodies and began to preen them-
selves on their courage and vigilance. And they were no
ordinary men, these civilized Yaquis. On a long journey

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

17

they would wear down any four men of the J a phetic
stock. Of sensitive nostril, sharp ear and keen eye, noth-
ing of any import passed unnoticed, and if it came to
a brush with Mexican "hold-ups" or mountain bandits
these Indian guards could be trusted to acquit themselves
as brave men.
Half of the fierce and one time numerous Yaquis were
long ago converted to Christianity by Spanish priests
and have conformed to the ways of civilized man. They
work in the mines, cu1tivate patches of ground and are
employed on the few rancherias and around the hacien-
das to be found in Sonora. Others are in the service of
the government, holding positions as mail carriers and
express runners. In places almost inaccessible to man,
in eeries hidden high up in the mountains, in cul-de-sacs
of the canyons, are mining camps having each its own
little postoffice. The office may be only a cigar box
nailed to a post, or soap box on a veranda, but once a
week, or it may be only once a month, the office receives
and delivers the mail. Night or day the Yaqui mail run-
ner may come, empty the box, drop in his letters, and,
like a coyote, is off again for the next camp, perhaps
thirty miles across the mountains. Clad only in bullhide
sandals and breechclout, the Yaqui mail bearer can out-
run and distance across the rough mountain trails any
horse or burro that was ever foaled. Don Alonzo tells
me-and I believe him-that, before the government
opened the road from Chihuahua to EI Rosario, a dis-
tance of 500 Spanish miles (450 of ours) a Tarahumari
Indian carried the mail regularly in six days, and after
resting one day, returned to Chihuahua in the same time.
The path led over mountains from 4,000 to 6,000 feet
high, by the rim of deep precipices, across bridgeless

18

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

streams and rivers, and through a land bristling with
cacti and thorny yucca.
Nor will this extraordinary feat seem incredible to
readers familiar with Prescott's History of :ßlexico. It
is recorded by the historian that two days after the land-
ing of the Spaniards on the eastern coast of
iexico, pic-
torial drawings of the strangers, of their ships, horses,
Inail and weapons were delivered into the hands of I\Ion-
tezuma by express runners, who covered the distance
from Vera Cruz to the .A.ztec capit.al-263 miles-in
thirty-six hours. In that time they ascended from the
ocean 8,000 feet, traversing a land broken with depres-
sions and ravines and sown with innumerable hills, bar-
rancas and aroyos.
As we advanced, the trail gre-" ever steeper, ever
rougher, ever more confused by the inexplicable wind-
ings and protruding elbows that pushed out from the
granite wall;:; as if to challenge our advance. How the
ancient., angry waters must have roared through these
narrow passages when the torrential rains were abroad
on these high peaks, and the swollen streams, leaping
from ledge to level, swelled the rushing flood! Above
our heads there rose three thousand feet of porphyritic
rock, but we had no consciousness of it, no foreboding of
danger, no fear, no chill.
'Ve were now in a gorge of the Bacatete mountains,
where, a year ago, the Yaquis ambushed and slaughtered
the
leza party, l
aving their mangled bodies in this
narrow gorge between Ortiz and La Dura. The report
of the massacre was brought to Ortiz by an Indian ex-
press runner, who passed through the defile at break of
day and identified the bodies. Senor Pedro bieza, a
wealthy mine owner and one of the most prominent men

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

19

in the district, accompanied by his wife and daughters,
Senoritas Carmen, Elvira, Eloisa and Panchetta-six-
Senoritas Carmen, Elvira, Eloisa and Panchetta-sixteen,
eighteen, twenty and twenty-three years-left Guaymas
early one morning for La Dura. At Ortiz they halted for
refreshments, where they were joined by Senor Theobold
Hoff, his wife and son, a young nlan twenty-three years
old. r.rhere was apparently no reason for alarm, for the
Mexican troops and the Yaqui warriors were .fighting it
out eighty n1Ïles to the east.
When the Indians ambushed them, the men of the party
charged desperately up the slope to draw the Yaquis'
fire, shouting to the ladies to drive on and save them-
selves. The women refused to abandon the men, and
when a company of ::Mexican Rurales (mounted police) ar-
rived on the scene, Pedro :ßleza, his family and guests
were numbered with the dead.
As I propose' in another place to give a brief his-
tory of this formidable tribe, I confine myself here to
the statement that the Yaquis are now and have been for
the past three hundred years, the boldest and fiercest
warriors within the limits of J\fexico and Central Amer-
ica.
I passed the night under the friendly roof of Don
Alonzo, and early the next morning with my Mayo guide
and companion continued my journey to the Gran Bar-
ranca. Far away to the southeast tower
d the volcanic
mount, the Sierra de los Ojitos, whose shaggy flanks alld
heaving ridges are covered with giant pines, and on
whose imperial crest the clouds love to rest before they
open and distribute impartially their waters between the
Atlantic and the Pacific, through the Gulfs of J\Iexico
and California.

20

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

The trail now becomes steeper and narrower, carrying
us through an inspiring panorama of isolated mounts,
huge rocks and colossal bowlders standing here and there
in battlemented and castellated confusion. Stretching
away to the south and extending for hundreds of miles,
even to the valley of Tierra Blanca, was the great conife-
rous or pine forest of the Sierras 1fadres, the reserves
of the paleto deer, the feeding grounds of the peccary or
wíld hog and the haunts of the mountain bear and the
jaguar or J\Iexican spotted tiger. This great pine range
is the largest virgin forest in North America, and for
unnumbered ages has reposed and still reposes in its
awful isolation.
In the early :ßIiocene age, when God was preparillg
t.he earth for the coming of man, this immense wilder-
ness was the feeding ground of mighty animals now ex-
tinct and, at a later period, of the fierce ancestors of
those now roaming through the desolation of its solitude.
The decay of forest we
lth and the disintegration of Its
animal life eternally going on have superimposed upon
the prinlitive soil a loam of inexhaustible richness. Un-
fortunately there is no water to river its timber, but
when the time comes, as come it will, when its produce
can be freighted, this forest will be of incalculable com-
mercial value to l\Iexico, and as profitable to the republic
as are her enonllously rich mines.
The mountains, isolated cones and the face of th

land, as we proceeded, began to assume weird and fan-
tastic shapes. vVind and water chiseling, carving and
cutting for thousands of years, have produced a pano-
rama of architectural deceptions bewildering to man.
These soulless sculptors and carvers, following a myste-
rious law of origin and movement, have evolved fn";}

Bi PATH AND TRAIL.

21

the sandstone hills an amazing series of illusions and
have cut out and fashioned monumental designs of the
most curious and fantastic forms. Here are battlements,
towers, cathedrals, buttresses and flying buttresses.
A.way to our left are giant figures, great arches and ar-
chitraves, and among heaps of debris from fallen col-
umns there is flourishing the wonderful n1adrona or
strawberry tree, with blood-red bark, bright green and
yellow leaves, and in season, covered with waxen ,yhite
blossoms, impossible of imitation on wood or canvas.
The wild turkeys are calling from cliff to cliff and the
wilderness is yielding food to them. The intense silence
weighs upon tIle soul, the stupendous hills bear to the
mind a sensation of awe and sublimity. I look around
me and see everywhere titanic mountains roughly garbed
in hoary vegetation; the vision carrys me back to a for-
mative period before time was, "when the earth was
void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the
deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the waters and
said let land appear."
And now, as we advance, the scenery suddenly becomes
grander and more sublime, surpassing great in its awful
solitude, its tremendous strength and terrifying size.
The spirit of man, in harmony with the majesty of his
surroundings and the matchless splendor of these silent
Inonuments to God's creative power, ought to expand
and grow large, but the soul is dwarfed and dominated
by the sense of its own littleness in the presence of the
infinite creative l\Iind which called from the depths and
gave form to this awful materiality, and, down through
the ages there comes to hiln the portentous call of the
l-Ioly Spirit, "'Vhere was thou, 0 man, when I laid the

22

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

f01mdations of these hills, when the morning stars sang
together and all the sons of God shouted for joy
"
Late in the afternoon we came out from a dense forest
of lofty pines and at once we stood upon the very edge
of the precipice and gazed into and across the "Gran
Barranca. " J\1y position was on a broad rock platform
overhanging the great canyon, and from it I looked down
a sheer three thousand feet to where the palms and pines
meet and part again. Here was the zone of separation,
the pine moving up to the "tierra tria," the cold land,
and the palm sloping down to its own home, the "tierra
caliente, " the hot land. The melancholy ll1urmur of the
winds ascending from the sepulchre of the silent river,
flowing three thousand feet below, but made the sense of
loneliness more oppressive. From the table of the
mountain that sloped above me and down to the
waters of the dark-red river below, was six thousand
feet of almost perpendicular depth. Away to the south
was the Vale of the Cl]J.lrches, so-called from the weird
architectural monuments carved and left standing in the
wilderness by the erratic and mysterious action of the
winds intermittently at work for ages.
From where I was standing the mining camp of EI
Rosario appeared as if pitched in an open plain, but it
is really on a promontory between two "barrancas" or
ravines, and beyond it the land is broken and falls away
in terraces_ till it meets the purple mountains of Sahuar-
ipa. Indeed, the little village on this tremendous ridge is
surrounded by lofty mountains. Looking down and be-
yond where the graceful palms have placed themselves,
just where an artist would have them in the foreground
of his picture, the view is a revelation. Far away is the
long mountain range, gashed with ominous wounds, out

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

23

of which in season streams flow, where formidable prom-
ontories reach out, and peaks and cones of extinct craters
tell 01 elemental wars. To my right, stretching away for
miles, the land is one vast tumultuous mass of giant bowl-
ders, of stubborn cacti and volcanic rocks. I\tlany of these
erupted rocks still carry the black marks of the fire from
which they escaped in times geologically near.
How many thousands of years, we know not since
these porphyritic hills were heaved up and wasted to a
dark wine purple or these adamantine ledges burned to
a terra cotta orange. Here, scattered along or cropping
out of the faces of the towering cliffs, are metamorphic
rocks and conglomerates-slates, shales, syenites and
grit stones-and here and there dust of copper, brim-
stone and silver blown against the granite walls and
blackened as if oxidized by fire. The porphyritic hills
bear ugly marks upon their sides, cicatriced wounds re-
ceived in the days when "the deep called to the deep and
the earth opened at the voice of the floodgates"."

CHAPTER III.

BATTLE OF THE ELEMENTS.
The Gran Barranca or Grand Canyon of Sonora is
without contradiction one of the great natural wonders
of the earth.. It is not known to the outside world; it
has no place in the guide books or in the geographies of
Mexico, and is seldom visited by men possessed of a
sense of admiration for the sublime or appreciation for
the wonderful works of God. The Arctic explorer, Lieu-
tenan t G. A. Schwa tka, in his "Cave and Cliff Dwellers, "
devotes a chapter to the awesome region, and, so far as
I know, is the only writer who has ever visited and re-
corded in English his impressions of the great canyon
and its stupendous setting.
Nor is this absence of information to be considered
something surprising. Sixty years ago the Grand Can-
yon of Arizona was practically unknown to Europe and
indeed to the United States. F'ew ever heard of the
stupendous gorge, and of these few there were those who
deemed the reports of its wonders greatly exaggerated.
Indeed, Arizona itself half a century ago was an unex-
plored and unknown land to the great mass of the Ameri-
can people. Even to-day there are regions of the im-
mense territory as savage and unknown as they were one
hundred years ago. Back of the mining camps in the
gulf districts and the river lands under cultivation, So-
nora to-day is an unsurveyed and indeed an unexplored
land. The fighting Yaquis are yet in possession of vast
regions of Sonora, and until they surrender or are con-

26

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

quered by the 1fexicans there will be no civilization for
the state.
Tf we accept the Grand Canyon of Arizona as it was
:fifty years ago, there is not upon the earth any forma-
tion like that of the Gran BarJianca. The railroad, the
modern hotel and the endless procession of mere and
very often vulgar sightseers, have commonized the Gral'ld
Canyon and its wonderful surroundings. The curio
shops, the hawkers of sham aboriginal "finds," the ob-
trusive guides, the inquisitive tourist, have vulgarized the
approaches to the Arizona wonder, and robbed it of its
preternatural solitude, its awful isolation and weird ro-
mance. Again the exaggerated and distorted descrip-
tions of railroad folders, of correspondents and of maga-
zine writers, have created in the public mind perverted
and unreasonable expectations impossible of realization.
Take away from any of the great natural wonders of
the earth the dowers and gifts of the Creator, the haze
of sustained silence, tþe immense solitude, the entire
separation from human homes and human lives, the sav-
age wealth of forest growth and forest decay-dissolve
these and, for all time, you mar their glory and matchless
fascination. This is what the greed of man and his lust
for gold have done' for the Garden of the Gods, for the
Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. But what avail our
regrets and protests f Kismet, it is fate; we must sur-
render to the inevitable, "and to lament the consequence
is vain."
Here among these untenanted wi1ds, surrolmded by
igneous and plutonic hills of immeasurable age, the
Gran Barranca of the Urique reposes in all its savage
magnificence and an its primeval solitude. Never had I
seen a panorama of such primitive loveliness and of

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

27

such wild and imposing appearance. The absence of all
sound was startling, and the sense of isolation oppres-
sive. Tennyson's lines in his "Dream of Fair Women,"
yisi ted me:

"There was no motion in the dumb, dead air,
N or any song of bird or sound of rill.
Gross darkness of the inner sepulchre
,Vas not so deadly still."

In heaven or on earth there was not a sound to break
the uncanny stillness, save alone the solitary call of
some vagrant bird which but made the silence more

evere.
Three miles to westward were the cones of the Sierras
thrown up and distorted by refraction into airy, fantas-
tic shapes which, at times, altered their outlines like unto
a series of dissolving views. Above them all, high in air;
rose the Pico de N avajas, now veiled in a drifting cloud
of fleecy whiteness, but soon to come out and stand clear
cut against a sapphire sky. Here and there the moun-
tains were cleft apart by some Titanic force, leaving
deep, narrow gorges and wild ravines, where sunlight
never enters and near which the eye is lost in the twilight
oÎ a soft purple haze. ,Vith a field glass I swept the ter-
rifying solitude, and the landscape, expanded by the lens,
now grew colossal. Around me, and afar off, in this des-
olation of silence and loneliness, stood in isolated majes-
ty, w;eird architectural figures, as if phantoms of the
imagination had materialized into stone. Huge irregu-
lar shafts and bowlders of granite and gneissoid, left
standing after the winds and rains had dissolved the
softer sand and limestones, assumed familiar, but in

28

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

this untenanted wilderness, unexpected examples of the
builder's art. In this tumultuous land, lonely and forbid-
ding rose "cloud capped towers and gorgeous palaces,"
vast rotundas, cathedral spires and rocks of shapeless
forms.
Between me and the valley which bloomed with tropi-
callife far down by the flowing waters, lay a lava lake,
where tumbling waves of fire in ß;Iiocene times were
frozen into frigidity, as if God had said, "Here let the
billows stiffen and have a rest." Over this desolate
plain of black, igneous matter, in a sky of opalescent
clearness, two eagles, playmates of the mountain storm,
were crossing and apparently making for the pine lands
of Iquala, whose lofty peak is suffused with roseate blush
long before the mists and darkness are out of the val-
ley. Sometime in the palasozoic age, in the days when
God said, "Let the waves that are under the heaven be
gathered together into one place and let the day and
land appear," these great mountains were heaved up,
invading the region of the clouds. And the clouds re-
sented the intrusion, and at once began an attack on the
adamantine fortifications. In this war of the elements
the clouds must "win out," for before the morning
of eternity the clouds will have pulverized the mountains
into dust. These wandering, tempest-bearing clouds,
with restless energy, are ever hurling their allied forces
of wind and rain against the fronts and flanks of their
enemies and, with marvelous cunning, are gnawing away
their porphyritic strength, cutting deep gashes in their
sides, separating individual bodies and fashioning them
into towering masses of isolated and architecturally won-
derful formations.
The torrential rains and melting snows have rushed

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

29

down the rugged slopes and opened ghastly wounds in
the sides of the mountain
. These wounds are the deep
gulches, the dark ravines and abysses of horrent and
gloomy depths where sunlight never enters. The run-
lets, streams and hurrying waters were rushing to a com-
mon meeting and as they fled they left scars on the face
of their enenlY and the clouds were avenged. And when
these fluid auxiliaries met together each one of them car-
ried to the common center large contributions of sift
and sand, spoils torn from the foe. The mountains rolled
huge rocks upon their enemies, poured liquid, fiery tor-
rents of molten masses which hardening into metal1ic
shrouds covered the land and obliterated the courses and
beds of the streams. But raw auxiliaries and recruits
eame from the region of the clouds, opened new chan-
nels, massed their strength, and together cut into and
through the great mountains a frightful gash one mile
deep and many miles long. Through this gash flows the
Urique river as blood flows from a gaping wound, and
as I looked down and into the dark abyss, I thought I
saw I{ubla I{han gazing into the gloomy depths of
Anadu-

'Vhere Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns, measureless to man,
Down to the silent sea.

Before, above and aroluld me was a panorama of un-
surpassed sublimity, a tremendous Inanifestation of the
creative will of God, a co-n1Íngling of natural wonders
and elemental forces proclainlÍng to man the omnipo-
tence of God and the glory of the Lord. To the material
mind the land around me is "desert land, a place of hor-
ror and of waste wilderness, which cannot be sowed, nor

30

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

bringeth forth figs, nor vines, nor pomegranates," but to
the man of meditation and of faith it is a land where the
majesty of omnipotence is enthroned and the voice of
Creation supreme.
From the granite spur, on which I stood, I looked upon
and into the Gran Barranca, the great canyon of the
U rique, into and over as grand a view of massive crags,
sculptured rocks and devastation of fire and water as
ever the eye of man gazed upon. Surrolmded by shaggy
mountains of towering height, by plutonic hills of im-
measurable age and of every geological epoch, by meta-
morphic formations, weird and unfamiliar, the Gran Bar-
ranca reposes in majestic isolation, waiting for the
highly civilized man to approach, wonder and admire.
The savage who has no ideals, has no sense of that which
answers and conforms to what civilized man calls the
beautiful, the terrific or the sublime, and for him the
creations of God have no elevating influence on the mind.
The sense of the appreciation of the sublime and the
wonderful in nature is acquired by culture and depends
on complex associations of mental attributes. High taste
for the beauties of harmony and the grand in nature, and
a sensitive feeling for sound or form or color do not be-
long to the man with the bow, or, indeed, to the man with
the hoe.
The Yaqui, who lives surrounded by the hills on which
God has stamped the seal of His omnipotence, where the
departing sun floods the heavens with a cataract of fiery
vermilion, crimson and burnished gold and where tHe
sky is of opalescent splendor, stares unmoved, for he has
not even the pictorial sense, and so this marvelous crea-
tion of God and work of the elements still awaits the ap-
proach of admiration and of praise.

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

31

To describe the stupendous mountain landscape of the
Gran Barranca itself transcends the possibilities of lan-
guage. The grandeur of the panorama and the massi ve-
ness overwhelm you, and though the mind expands with
the genius of the place, yet piecemeal you must break to
separate contemplation the might and majesty of the
great whole. Only by so doing may the soul absorb the
elemental glory of the matchless scene.

CHAPTER IV.

VALLEY OF THE CHURCHES.

The greatest of American scenic painters, Thomas
Moran, roamed for three months through the Grand
Canyon of Arizona, making sketches of the strange for-
mations, catching, as best he could, the play of light and
shade and the glory of the sunsets when the heavens
were bathed in chromatic light. He went home and :fin-
ished his famous painting, "The Grand Canyon of the
Colorado River." His canvas was hung in the capitol
at \Vashington-the lllghest recognition of his genius his
country could confer upon him-yet
Ioran proclaimed
that it was impossible for man to paint the splendor of
the canyon when the heavens, at times, are turned to
blood.
I have already mentioned that the porphyritic moun-
tains still bear the marks of elemental wars, of gaping
wounds opened in the Titanic combats of past days.
These are the deep ravines, the narrow :fissures and
strange openings left when the mountains were wedged
asunder, or when torrential storms broke upon the great
hills and, forming into rivers, tore their way to the low-
lands.
In those remote times, gases of enormous power of
expansion were imprisoned in the wombs of these moun-
tains, then air and water entered, the gases became com-
bustibile and were converted into actual flames, till the
rocks melted and the metals changed to vapors and the
vapors liquefied and, expanding in their :fierce wrath,

34

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

burst asunder the walls of their mountain prison and
fought their way to freedom. Then, amid the roar of es-
caping steanl, the gleam of lightning and the crash of
thunder, the molten mass in riotous exultation rushed
down the body of the monstrous hill, hissing like a thing
alive and flooding the land with fire and snloke. Some
awful cataclysm such as this must have occurred in the
tilue and in the land of the patriarchs, in the days when
Isaiah spoke to God, ren1Ïnding him of the past, "'Vhen
thou didst terrible things, which we looked not for. Thou
earnest down and the mountains flowed down at thy pres-
ence. ' ,
But the dominating feature of the terrifying scene was
not so much its transcendent majesty and isolation as its
air of great antiquity. Turning and looking up I saw
a vast structure of adamant, of black gnessoid, shale and
shist, traversed by dykes of granite that were old when
the waters of the great deep subnlerged the domes of the
highest mou.ntains. Gazing upon these mighty hills,
hoary with age, I asked aloud the portentous question
of Solomon: "Is there anything of which it may be said,
see, this is new; it hath alread)T been of old time which
was before us?" The nleasuring capacity of the mind is
unequal to the demands of such magnitude, for there is
here no standard adjustable to the mind; perspectives
are illusive, distances are deceptive, for yonder cliff
changes its color, shape and size as clouds of greater or
lesser density approach it. It seems near, almost unto
touch, yet the finger-stone which you throw toward it
falls almost at your feet, for the cliff is full two miles
beyond you. From the floor of the canyon to the sum-
mit of yonder hill is twelve times the height of the tallest
monument in America. To acquire a sense of intimacy

BY PATH AKD TRAIL.

35

with this Barranca, a mental grasp of detail and a per-'
ception of its inlmensity, you must descend the sides of
the granite rock which walls the awful depths. To the
man who possesses the gift of appreciation of thë ter-
rific in nature, the prospect is a scene of surpassing
splendor. The panorama is ne'''er the same, although
you think you have examined every peak and escarp-
ment.

t\.s the angle of sunlight changes there begins a ghostly
procession of colossal forms from the further side, and
the trees around you are silhouetted against the rocks,
and the rocks themselves grow in bulk and stature.
Down toward the lowlands I saw things, as if alive,
raise themselves on the foothills. These are the giant
Suaharos, the Candelabrum cacti and beside them was
the yucca, a bread tree of the south, whose cream white
flowers shone across the snakelike shadows of the
strange cacti. The sepulchral quiet of the place, the con-
scientiousness of the unnunlbered ages past since time
had hoared those hills and the absence of life and mo-
tion filled me with sensations of awe and reverence.
'Vhen darkness shrouds this region and storms of
thunder and lightning sweep across it, penetrating the
cavernous depths of the great gorge, and revealing the
desolation and frightful solitude of the land, it would
be a fit abode for the demons of Dante or the Djins of
the southern mountains of whom the woods in other
days told terrible tales. No man, after his sensations
of awe have vanished and his sense of the sublime in
nature is satisfied, may continue to gaze upon the scene
around him, and yet admit that his mind has done jus-
tice to the magnificence and glory of this panorama of
one of the supreJnest of eat"th's wonders. To absorb its

36

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

splendor the mind must become familiar with the genius
of the place, recognize the influence of the winds and
storms on the softer material, perceive the variations of
colors, forms and trees, till, expanding with the spirit of
the mountains, the soul itself has grown colossal or

Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that we contemplate.

With my 1Ylayo guide I camped that night on the gran-
ite platform high up on the Gran Barranca. We saw
the sun descend behind the great hills, the fleecy clouds,
suspended and stationary, take on the colors of the solar
spectrum, the stars coming out, and then-at one stride
came the night. Early next morning we began the de-
scent to the Valley of the Churches. The path was nar-
row and steep, around rocks honeycombed with water
or eaten into by zoophytes. It twisted here and there,
through precipitous defiles, where the jagged spurs and
salient angles of the huge cliffs shoved it dangerously
near the rim of the precipice. "\Ve continued to descend,
our path winding around rocky projections, across
arroyos formed by running water in the rainy season,
skirting the danger line of the abysses, till early in the
afternoon when we entered the mesa or table land, where,
in a huge basin reposes "La Arroyo de las 19lesias"-
the vale of the churches. It is a labyrinth of architectural
forms, endlessly varied in design, and at times painted
in every color known to the palette, in pure transparent
tones of marvelous delicacy-a shifting diorama of col-
ors-advancing into crystalline clearness or disappearing
behind slumberous haze.
The foliage had assumed the brilliant colors of SUln-

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

37

mer, and from the mesa, midway between the mountains
and the valley of the U rique, the season was marking, on
a brilliant chromatic scale, the successive zones of vege-
tation as they rose in regular gradations from the tropic
floor. The atmosphere had the crystalline transparency
which belongs to mountain air, and through it the scen-
ery assumed a vividness of color and grandeur of out-
line which imparted to the mind a sense of exaltation,

"Till the dilating soul, enwrapt, transfused
Into the mighty vision passing there
As in her natural form, swelled vast to heaven."

The appearance instantaneously disclosed was that of
an abandoned city, a wilderness of ruined buildings left
standing in an endless solitude. It was a phantom city
within which a human voice was never heard, where coy-
otes and foxes starved and where scorpions, tarantulas
and horned toads increased and multiplied.
The land around was broken into terraces, and looked
like a city wrecked by the Goths and long ago abandoned.
For here was a forest of cathedral spires, of towers,
great arches and architraves, battlements, buttresses and
flying buttresses, dismantled buildings and wondrous
domes. There are times, as the sun is declining, when
these domes and cathedral towers glow with sheen of
burnished gold or repose 'neath a coloring of soft pur-
ple or a mantle of fiery vermilion.
And how did these weird and ghostly monuments
originate, who raised them in this wilderness and when
were their foundations laid

Here is the story as it was told to me. "'\Vhen a mass
or body of nir becomes yery wann from the direct rays

38

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

of a blazing sun or by contact with the hot sand of a
great plain, it looses moisture and rapidly ascends to
higher regions in the heavens; then other and much cold..
er air from the sea or surrounding land rushes in to fill
the void, and as this new atmospheric sea rolls its great
waves into the stupendous space partially left vacant
by the disappearing hot air, sand and grit are taken up
and, with violent force and velocity, carried against a
projecting cliff of soft material, separating it from the
parent body; or again, a great sandstone hill may stand
solitary and alone in melancholy isolation surrounded by
hills of lesser height and magnitude. Then, year after
year and century after century, these sand blasts cut a
little here and a little there, till in time these spectral
forms stand alone, and from afar, resemble in their deso-
lation the ruins of a long-deserted city.
This vast amphitheater, with its great forest of monu-
ments and weird structures, surrounded by volcanic
cones and walled in by towering monuments is a part of
the great Barranca. Y 011 now perceive that you are in
a region of many canyons, and that the whole face of
the country is covered with wounds and welts, and with
sharply outlined and lofty hills of gneiss and quartzite
springing from the floor of the valley. Beyond contra-
diction, earthquakes and volcanoes at one time shook this
place with violence. Only by the aid of an airship may
the Gran Barranca be seen in its majestic entirety, for
much of it lies buried in the vast and gloomy abyss
through which the silent river flows and to which direct
descent is impossible.

CHAPTER V.

FRIEND OF THE MOUNTAINEER.

When I passed out of the Arroyo of the Churches,
it was well on in the afternoon and the sun beat intensely
hot upon the steep trail, while the whole atmosphere was
motionless and penetrated with heat. No man, exper-
ienced in nlountain trails, would trust his life down these
precipitous windings to the best horse that ever car-
ried saddle. The long suffering "burro" or donKey,
with the pace of a snail and the look of a half fool, may
be a butt for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortuue
in animal histories; he may be ridiculed and despised in
cities and on the farm, but in the mountains, amid dan-
gerous curves and fearful, dipping trails the donkey i

king of all domestic animals.
The burro is not, as Sunday school books picture him,
the clown and puppet of domestic beasts. He is the most
imperturbable philosopher of the animal kingdom, the
wisest thing in his own sphere in existence, and the best
and truest friend of the mountaineer. He is a stoic
among fatalists, a reliable staff in emergencies and an
anchor of hope in dangerous places. Like the champion
of the prize ring, Joe Gans, or the sporting editor's
, 'king of the diamond turf," Cy Young, the donkey
, , neither drinks, nor smokes, nor chews tobacco;" in a
word, he's a "brick."
The greatest avalanche that ever thundered down the
sides of the
Iatterhorn, the loudest detonation of vol-
canic Vesuvius, the roll and heave and twist of Peruvian
earthquake; anyone of these or all of them "in damna-

40

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

hIe conspiracy" could not turn a hair on the hide of his
serene equanimity. No mountain goat, leaping from rock
to rock, can give him pointers. He is contentment and
self-possession personified; he will eat and digest what
a mule dare not touch and will thrive where a horse will
starve. Work! I have seen hills of fodder moving on
the highway and thought with Festus that too much
learning had made me mad, till on closer examination I
perceived, fore and aft of these hills, enormous ears and
scrawny, wriggling tails and under the hills little hoofs,
the size of ordinary ink bottles. Down the dangerous
mountain trails his head is always level, his feet sure
as those of flies and his judgment unerring. His IllUS-
cles and nerves are of steel, his blood cool as quicksilver
in January, and his hold on life as tenacious as that of
a buffalo cat. But more than all this, the burro is one of
the pioneers and openers of civilization in J\lexico and
the Southwest. Patiently and without protest or com-
plaint he has carried the packs of the explorers, pros-
pectors, surveyors and settlers of uninhabited plateaus
and highlands. \Yith his endurance, his co-operation and
reliability, it became possible to profitably work the sil-
ver mines of JYlexico and the copper n1Ïnes of Arizona.
He helped to build railroads over the Sierras and across
the plains and deserts of New :ßIexico, California and
Arizona. lIe brought settlers into New J\lexico, into
Arizona and the Pacific lands, and with settlers came
progress and development, peace, education and pros-
perity. Therefore, all hail to the burro! In grateful
recognition of his kindness to me I owe him this commen-
datory tribute. He has done more for civilization in
these lands than many a senator in the halls of the capi-
tol or LL. D. from the chair of I-Iarvard.

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

41

We descended to the land of "Las N aranjos, " of the
orange orchards and banana groyes, and as the sun was
setting entered the picturesque and ancient town of
U rique. Founded the year Champlain first sailed the
81. Lawrence and eight years before the Pilgrim Fath-
ers landed on Plymouth rock. U rique has never known
wagon, cart, carriage or bicycle. Its archaic population
of 3,000 souls, 1l10Stly Indians and l\Iexican half-castes,
has few wants and no ambition for what we call the
higher life. If the wise nlan seeks but contentment,
peace and happiness in this "World, these primitive people
are wiser in their generation than "We. I must confess
that am_ong the civilized and half civilized races of l.[ex-
ico I found a cheerful resignation and more contentment
than I expected. IT nprejudiced study of their social and
domestic life leads me to believe that there is here a
much more equitable distribution of what we call happi-
ness than in much busier and more brilliant life centers.
The fertility of the arable land, the continuously "'"arm
climate, the abundance of wild and domestic fruit ånd
the simple life of the people are bars to poverty and its
dangerous associations. It would be well for nlany of
us if we could change places with these people, drop for
a time the life of rush and hurry and artificial Jiving into
which we of the North have drifted, and take up this
dreamy, placid and uneventful existence. "Ve deplore
what we are pleased to term their ignorance, but are they-
no
happier in their ignorance than we in our wisdom,
and are not we of the North, at last, learning by expe-
rience the truth of what Solomon said in the days of
old, "For in much learning is much grief, and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
The delightful little gardens and patches of vegeta-

0<\

42

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

ble land stolen from the mountain present a dozen con-
trasts of color in the evergreen foliage of the tropical
trees and vegetable plants. The red river of the U rique,
after emerging from the great canyon, flows gently and
placidly through the peaceful village. The river is not
truly a deep, clay red-not the red of shale and earth
mixed-but the red of peroxide of iron and copper, the
sang-du-boeuf of Oriental ceramics. Rushing over ir-
regular beds of gravel and boulders and by rock-rihbed
walls, it cuts and carries with it through hundreds of
miles red sands of shale, granite and porphyry, red rust-
ings of iron and grits of garnet and carnelian agate.
The evening of the next day after entering the quaint
and picturesque town, I stood on a ledge overlooking
the narrow valley and again saw the long, snake-like
shadows of the Suaharos creeping slowly up the side of
the opposite mountain. The air was preternaturally still
and was filled with the reflected glory of the departing
sun, The sky to the east was like a lake of blood, and
under it the ancient mountains were colored in deep pur-
ple and violet. The sun was an enormous ball of fire
floating in the descending heavens and above it were
banks of clouds through which flashes of bloody light
came and at times hung to their fringes. Just before
the sun plunged behind its own horizon its light pene-
trated the motionless clouds in spires, and when the sun
dipped and was lost, the spires of glory quivered in the
heavens and waves of red and amber light rolled over
the atmospheric. sea. Sharply outlined to my right was
the mountain rising above the U rique like a crouching
lion and holding in its outstretched and open paw the
unknown and attractive little village.
It is only nine of !he night, but all lights are out and

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

43

the village sleeps. 1fy window is open, I can hear the
flow of the Urique, and as I listen to its gurgling waters
a cock crows across the river. The crow of the cock
changes my thoughts which carry me back three years,
and bear me to a room of the "seaside cottage" iu the
negro town of Plymouth, :ßfontserrat, 'Vest India Islands.
Unable to sleep I am seated at lilY open window looking
out upon the tragic waters of the Caribbean sea. The
moon swings three-quarters full in a cloudless sky, the
air I breathe brings to me a suspicion of sulphur es-
caping from the open vents of La Soufriere, the vol-
canic mount rising to the west and dangerously near the
negro village. I can hear the wash of the waves combing
the beach and see the "Jumbo lights" in the windo"s of
the negro cabins to remind the ghosts of the dead and
the demons of the night that friends are sleeping there.
It is 2 0 'clock in the morning, a sepulchral quiet posse
sps
the uncanny place, when-the cock crows. Then from
out a large hut, down the shore street, there COUles a
negro well on in )Tears, followed by a young negress, tWO
women and three men. They do not speak, nor Ehrrke
hands, they exchange no civilities, they separate and d\s-
appear. 'Vho were theyW Snake worshipers. Great
Britain owns the island and British law prohibits, under
penalty, the adoration of the serpent. Stronger than
the law of Great Britain is the law of African supersti-
tion and the fear of the demon that dwells in the white
snake, so reverently guarded and fed by the fan1Íly who
live in the hut. Again the cock crows. Where am If
Oh, in U rique. There is no noticeable difference in tlie
crow of the cock the world over. This friendly bird
from over the Urique river warns me it is getting late.
r must to bed, so, "Good night to Marmion."

CHAPTER VI.

THE RUNNERS OF THE SIERRA.

If there be any state in the Republic of :ßfexico about
which it is difficult to obtain accurate or exact statistics,
it is Sonora. Populated largely by Indians and miners,
scattered over the whole state and immune to the salu-
tary influence of law, it is difficult to take its census or
bring its population under the restraining checks of civ-
ilization. Hermosillo, with its 25,000 people, is numeri-
cally and commercially the most important to\Vll in So-
nora. It is 110 miles north of Guaymas. The harbor of
Guaymas is one of the best on the Pacific coast, it is
four nÜles long, with an inner and outer bay, and will
admit ships of the heaviest tonnage, and could, I think,
float the comnwrce of America. 'rhe Yaqui river, of
which I will have occasion to write at another time, en-
ters the Gulf of California, called the Gulf of Cortez by
the
fexicans-eighteen miles below Guaymas. The So-
nora flows through the Arizipa valley, which is known as
the Garden of Sonora on account of its incomparable fer-
tility. Formerly it was dominated by the terrible Ya-
quis, and a few years ago the depopulated villages and
ranches were melancholy reminders of the ruthless ven-
geance of these ferocious men.
The Sonora river valle)T, with its wealth of rich allu-
vial land, its facilities for irrigation and adaptation to
semi-tropical and temperate fruits and cereals, will
eventually support a great population.
That the valley and adjacent lands were in ancient
days occupied by a numerous and barbaric-not savage-

46

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

raèe, there can be no doubt. Scattered over the face of
the country are the remains of a people who have long
ago disappeared.
fany of the ruins are of great extent,
covering whole table lands, and are crumbling away in
groups or in single isolation. Unfortunately, no docu-
ments are known to exist to record the traditions of the
ancient people before the Spanish missionary fathers
first began the civilization of the tribes 400 years ago.
""\Vhen the early Jesuit missionaries were called home, the
/ archives and everything belonging to the missions were
carried away or destroyed. It is, however, possible that
a search through the libraries of the Jesuit and Fra
cis-
can monasteries in France and Spain may yet reward
the historian with some valuable finds.
From an examination of the sites and the ruins, scat-
tered here and there in the Sonora valle)!, I am satisfied
that the ancient dwellers were a sedentary and agricul-
tural people; that they were of the SaIne race as the I;Ioki
and suffered the same fate as that picturesque tribe, and
from the unsparing hand of the same merciless destroy-
ers, the Apache- Y aquis. Long before the time of Cortez
the evil fame of the unconquerable Yaquis had settled
around the throne of the :ßIontezumas. There is a tra-
dition that after the spanish chief had stormed the City
of
Iexico and made a prisoner of the Aztec ruler,
{on':
tezuma said to him: ' 'Y ou may take possession of all
my empire and subdue all its tribes-but, the Yaqui,
never. " To-day the Sonora valle)! is wet with the blood
of slaughtered settlers. Formerly these fierce men con-
fined their depredations to the Sonora valley and the
Yaqui river regions, but the menlbers of the tribe are
now scattered over northern and central Sonora. the
:fighters, however, live in the Bacatete mountains and

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

47

parts of the Sierras. One-half of them are partially civ-
ilized and are peaceable, the other half continue to wage
a guerrilla war in the mountainous regions. These moun-
taineers are men of toughened fibre, of great endurance
and inured to the extremes of heat, cold, and hunger.
They have no fear of anything or anybody, except the
spirits of evil, which bring disease and calamities upon.
them, and the "shamans," or medicine men, who act
as infernal mediators between these demons and their
victims.
Their wild, isolated and independent life has given to
the Y aquis all those characteristic traits of perfect self-
reliance, of boldness and impatience of restraint which
distinguish them from the Mayos and other sedentary
tribes of northern Mexico. Born in the mountains, they
are familiar with the woods and trails. No coyote of the
rocks knows his prowling grounds better than a Yaqui
the secrets of the Sierra ,vilderness. Like the eagle, he
sweeps down upon his prey from his aerie amid the
clouds, and, like the eagle, disappears.
His dorsal and leg muscles are withes of steel, and
with his dog-half coyote, half Spanish hound-he '11
wear down a mountain deer. vVith the possible excep-
tion of his neighbor and kinsman, the Tarahumari of the
Chihuahua woods, he is, perhaps, the greatest long dis-
tance runner in America.
Occasionally, friendly contests take place between the
noted athletes of the two tribes. Six years ago a Tara-
humari champion challenged one of the greatest long-
distance runners of the Yaquis. In a fonner contest the
Yaqui runner won out. He covered 100 Spanish miles,
equal to 90 of ours, over hilly
nd broken ground, in
eleven hours and twenty minutes. Comparing this per-

48

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

formance with those of civilized luan in ancient and mod-
ern times, the Yaqui, all things considered, wins the lau-
rel crown. Pliny records that Anystrs, of Sparta, and
Philonedes, the herald of Alexander the Great, divid-
ing the distance between them, covered 1GO miles in
twenty-four hours. Herodotus tells us that Phieddip-
pides, the pan-Hellenic champion, traversed 135 miles
over very rocky territory, and in gruelling weather, in
less than two days, carrièd to Sparta the news of the
advancing Persians. He almost attained an apotheosis
in reward for his endurance, showing that, even among
the athletic Greeks the feat was deemed an extraordi-
nary performance. History also credits Areus with win-
ning the Dolichos, of two and a half miles, in a fraction
less than twelve minutes, at the Olympic games, and
straightway starting on a homeward run of sixty miles,
to be the first to bear the joyous news to his native vil-
lage. In recent times, Howell. of England, in 188
, trav-
eled 150 miles in twenty-two hours and thirty minutes,
and Fitzgerald, in l\ladison Square Garden, went, in
1886, on a quarter-mile circular track, ninety miles in
twelve hours. Longboat, the Oneida Indian from the
Brantford reservation, Canada, won the Boston :I\Iara-
thon, twenty-six miles. in two hours and twenty-four
minutes. These modern feats, however, were per-
formed over carefully prepared courses and ought not
to take rank with the rough mountain and desert races
of the Yaquis and Tarahumaris.
The race of six years ago was run over the same
course as the former, and was the same distance, that is,
ninety miles. Piles of blankets, bridles and saddles,
bunches of cows, sheep, goats and burros were bet on
the result, and, when the race was over, the Yaqui braves

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-CopyrIght by Underwood &: Underwood, New York.
TARAHUMARI INDIA
S, NORTHERN MEXICO

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

49

were bankrupt. The night before the event the Indians
camped near the starting line, and when the sun went
down opened the betting. An hour before the start, the
course was lined on each side with men two miles apart.
Precisely at 4 in the morning the racers, wearing bull-
hide sandals and breech-clouts, or, to be more accurate,
the G string, toed the mark and were sent awa)T, encour-
aged by the most extraordinary series of hi-yi-yiis, yells,
shrieks and guttural shouts ever heard by civiliz
d man.
The path carried them over rough ground, along the
verge of deep precipices, over arroyos or old river beds,
across arid sands. Ever)T two miles the runners stopped
for a quick rub down and mouth wash of pinola or atole,
a corn meal gruel. Then with a "win for the Yaquis" or
"the Humari women already welcome you," whispered
in his ear, the runner bounds into the wilderness. Three
o'clock that afternoon the lnen were sighted from the
finish line running shin to shin, and at 3 :15 the Tarahu-
mari crossed the mark amid a chorus of triumphal yelps,
retrieving the honors lost in the former contest and mak-
ing his backers "heap rich." The ninety miles were
run by both men in eleven hours and fifteen minutes, and
considering the nature of the ground, it is doubtful if
any of our great athletes could coyer the distance in the
same time.
In addition to his fleetness of foot and sta)Ting powers,
the Yaqui is a man of infinite resources. Years of thirst,
starvation and exposure have produced a human type
with the qualities and developed instinct of the coyote
of the desert. He is the descendant of many gener-
ations of warriors, and is heir to an the acquired infor-
mation of centuries of experience, of bush, desert, and
mountain fighting. There is not a trick of strategy, not

50

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

a bit of savage tactics in war, not a particle of knowledge
bearing upon attack, engagement and escape, with which
he is not fa
iliar, for he has been taught them all from
infancy, and has practiced them from boyhood. He is
the last of the Indian fighters, and, perhaps, the greatest.
The world will never again see a man like him, for the
conditions will never again make for his reproduction.
With him will disappear the perfection of savage cun-
ning in war and on the hunt, and when he departs, an
unlamented man, but withal a picturesque character, will
disappear from the drama of human life, will go down
into darkness, but not into oblivion.
"\Vhat, then, is the cause of the murderous and pro-
longed hostility of the Yaquis to
fexican rule
",Vhy is
the exterminating feud allowed to perpetuate itself, and
why are not these Indians subdued 7 :ßfust Sonora be
forever terrorized by a handful of half-savage mountain-
eers, and must the lnarch of civilization in Sonora be ar-
rested by a tribe of Indians 1
To get an answer to these questions I asked, and ob-
tained an interview with General Lorenzo E. Torres,
commander-in-chief of the First
Iilitary Zone of
1ex-
ico. \Vith my request I inclosed my credentials accredit-
ing me as a person of some importance in his own coun-
try and a writer of some distinction.
Although the general's time was filled with important
military affairs and another engagem
nt awaited him, he
received me with that courtesy and politeness which
seen1 to be an inheritance of the educated members of-
the Latin race the world over. Though a man of full
60 years, the general appears to retain all the animation
and vitality of the days when, by his impetuosity and
dauntless courage, he won his brevet at Oajaca, and the

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

51

tassels of a colonel on the field of
Iien. To the physical
buoyancy and elasticity of younger days were now wed-
ded the conscious dignity of high reward and the no-
bility of facial expression which waits on honorable age.
After an exchange of introductory courtesies, I made
known at once the purport of my visit.
"General, would you kindly give me some informa-
tion about the Yaquisî In my country we have heard
the evidence of one side only, and that was not always
favorable to the A1:exican government. 'Ve would be
pleased to lmow the truth, so as to be able to form a
just and impartial judgment." The general very oblig-
ingly proceeded to satisfy nlY request.
., The feud with the Yaquis," he smilingly replied,
, 'goes back
?ny years. The trouble began in the days
of the conquest of 1\Iexico. In 1539, when the Spaniards
first crossed the 1\fayo river, and penetrated the lands of
the Yaquis, they found the III entrenched on the banks
of the Yaqui river, awaiting the advance of the Euro-
peans, and ready for battle. Their chief, robed in the
skin of a spotted tiger, profusely decorated with colored
shells and the feathers of the trogon, stepped to the front
of his warriors, drew a line upon the ground and defied
the Spaniards to cross it. The Spanish captain protest-
ed th
t he and his men came as friends; they were simply
exploring the country, and all they asked for or wanted
was food for themselves and horses.
" 'We win first bind your men and then we will feed
your horses,' was the answer of the Yaqui chieftain.
While he was yet speaking he unwound a cougar lariat,
and advanced as if he in tended to rope the Castilian of-
ficer. This was the signa] for a hot engagement, which
ended in the retreat of the Spaniards. Later, in 1584,

52

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

Don Martinez de H urdiade tried to conquer them, and
was defeated in three separate campaigns. However,
strange to relate, in 1610, the Yaquis, of their own ac-
cord, submitted to the Crown of Spain."
"Are they braver and better fighters, general, than
the other tribes now at peace with the republic
" "I
think they are," replied Don Lorenzo. "l\iountaineers
are everywhere stubborn fighters. At any rate, for the
past fifty years they have given us more trouble than
all the Indians in l\iexico and Yucatan. Don Diego Mar-
tinez, in his report, made mention of the indomitable
bravery and cunning strategy of the Yaquis of his time.
In his' Relacion,' or report of his expedition, he said that
no Indian tribe had caused hÌln so much trouble as the
Yaqui. After their submission, in 1610, they stayed
quiet until 1740, when they again broke out. The rebel-
lion was quenched in blood, and for eighty-five years
they remained peaceful. Then began a period of inter-
mittent raids. The years 1825, 1826 and 1832 were years
of blood, but the Yaquis were, at last, subdued and their
war chiefs, Banderas and Guiieieres, executed. In 1867
they again revolted, and were again defeated, but de-
spite all their defeats, they were not yet conquered.
"They led a semi-savage life in the Yaqui valley, but
were always giving us trouble, raiding here and there.
The majority of them would seemingly be at peace, but
human life was always more or less in danger in and
near the Yaqui district.
"Isolated bands of them lived by plunder, raiding,
foraging and murdering on the. rancherias and hacien-
das. This condition of things was, to
ay the lea
t, p
-
tremely irritating. No self respecting government can
tolerate within its borders gangs of ruffians def)Ting civ-

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

53

ilization, law and order. The federal governlnent de-
cided to act."
, "Y ere you then the general in command, Don Lo-
renzoî"
"No, I was governor of Sonora; it was later, in 1892,
that I was given command of this zone. 'Yhen war
again broke out between the tribe and the federal troops,
the Yaquis were yery daring, and numerically strong;
some hot engagements took place, and the Yaquis fled to
the Bacatete mountains. From these hills they swooped
down upon the mines, held up the trails and mail routes,
and terrorized the surrounding country. Our troops
pursued them into the mountains, storming their inl-
pregnable strongholds. It took ten years of tedious and
bloody fighting to reduce them and bring them to ternlS.
We struck a peace, and to that treaty of peace the
Iexi-
can government was true, and stood by its terms and
pledges. We gave the Yaquis twenty times 1110re land
than they ever dreamed of cultivating. 'Ve gave them
cattle, tools and money. We fed them and furnished
them seed. We have been humane to a degree unde-
served by the Yaquis."
The general rose from his seat, and, for a few mo-
ments, paced the room as if in deep thought. vVhether
he suspected my sympathies were with the Indians or
that his government was wedged in between the base in-
gratitude of the Yaquis and the censure of the outside
world, I do not know, but he interrupted his walk, faced
me with a noticeable shade of irritation on his fine face
,
and continued:
"I did even more; as religion has a soothing and paci-
fying effect upon the soul and the passions, I obtained
priests and Sisters of Charity for them; I established

54

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

schools among them. But you can't tame the wolf. N ot-
withstanding all our kindness and friendly efforts on
their behalf, the tribe revolted again two ye?-rs later.
'Vith the money we gave them, and the mission funds,
which they took from the priests, they purchased rifles
and ammunition from .American adventurers and l\Iexi-
can renegades, and made for the mountains. In their '
flight for the hills they carried with them one of the
mission priests and four of the Sisters of Charity, hold-
ing them captives for six months. This happened on
July 31, 1897."
"Pardon me, general," I interposed, "but the most
of us who are interested in the :ßIexican tribes, believe
the Yaquis to be Christian."
"They have a varnish of Christianity, it is true, but
this religious wash only helps to conceal a deep sub-
stratum of paganism; at heart they are heathens and
hold to their old superstitions :1nd pagan practices."
"So that, since 1897-that is to say, for ten years-
the :M
exican government has been at war with the
Yaquis?"
"Tha t is not the right word. The Yaquis do not
fight in the open, so that no real battles are fought. In
-detached commands we have to follow them into the
mountains, and, as they know every rock and tree of the
Bacatetes, we are pursuing ghosts."
"How many Y aquis are there, Don Lorenzo f"
"There are now some 4,000 left in Sonora. The ma-
jority of these are peaceful, but sympathize with the
outlaws and assist them in many ways. They all speak
Spanish, dress like poor Mexicans, and as the neutral
Yaquis aid and give shelter to the fighters, we must re-
gard them all as enemies of the republic."

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

55

"So, then, there is no solution to the Yaqui prob-
lem? "
"Oh, yes, there is. We are sending them to Yucatan,
Tabasco and Chiapas, with their families. There they
work in the henequin or hemp fields and make a good
living. Already we have transported 2,0-00, and unless
the other 4,000 now here behave themselves, we will ship
them to Yucatan also. The state of Sonora is as large
as England, and cannot be covered by military troops
and patrols without great expense. The Yaqui problem,
as you are pleased to call it, will be soh-..ed in due time,
and Sonora, when fully developed, will all1aze the world
with its riches and resources."
This expression of hope and faith brought my visit
to a close. I shook hands with the general and took my
leave of a distinguished soldier and a most courteous
gentleman.

CHAPTER VII.

THE PRIEST AND THE YAQUIS.
The war between the l\fexican government and the
Yaquis is not conducted according to methods or prac-
tices which govern civilized nations. It partakes more
of the nature of a Corsican vendetta or a Kentucky feud.
It is a war of "shoot on sight" by the l\Iexicans, and of
treachery, cunning, ambushment and midnight slaughter
by the Yaquis. It is a war of extermination.
In 1861 Governor Pesquira, of Sonora, in a proclama-
tion offering $100 for every Yaqui scalp brought in, calls
them "human wolves," "incarnate demons," who de-
serve to be "skinned alive."
"There is only one way," writes Signor Camillo Diaz,
"to wage war against the Y aquis. We must enter upon
a steady, persistent campaign, following them to their
haunts, hunting them to the fastness of their mount-
ains. They must be surrounded, starved, surprised or
inveigled by white flags, or by any methods human or dia-
bolic, and then-then put them to death. A man might
as well have sympathy for a rattlesnake or a tiger."
And now let me end this rather long dissertation on
this singular tribe by a citation from Velasco, the his-
torian of Sonora. I ought, however, to add that the
Yaqui has yet to be heard in his defense. "Without doubt,"
writes Velasco, "it must be admitted that under no good
treatment does the Yaqui abandon his barbarism, his
perfidy, his atrocity. Notwithstanding his many treaties
of peace with 1Iexico and the memory of what he suf-
fered in past campaigns, yet on the first opportunity and

58

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

on the slightest provocation he breaks faith and becomes
worse than before."
When I returned to Guaymas from Torin I learned
that a desperate engagement between the l\iexican troops
and the Yaqui Indians, in the mountains southeast of
this city, had taken place. I have already mentioned a
raid made by the Yaquis on the railroad station of Len-
eho, Sonora, in which the station master was killed, four
men seriously wounded and three girls swept to the
mountains. Since then the lvlexicans have been on the
trail of the Yaquis; now and then exchanging shots, with
an occasional skirmish, but not until the day before yes-
terday did the enemy and the l\Iexican troops come to
close quarters. One cannot place much confidence in the.
wild reports now circulated on the streets of Guaymas.
A l\Iayo runner, who came in with dispatches this morn-
ing, is reported to have said that the l\iexicans lost
twenty men in the battle, and that many of the wounded
were lying on the field, still uncared for, when he left
He says the Yaquis were defeated, but as they carried
away their dead and wounded when they retreated, it
\vas not known how many Yaquis were killed. Owing to
the inaccessible nature of the country and its remoteness
from here, we do not expect further particulars until
to-morrow. If the Yaquis had time to carry off their
dead and wounded, depend upon it, the
Iexican troops
gained no victory. I had a talk this afternoon with a
governmental official, who had no more information than
myself, about the engagement. He declared in the course
of our conversation that it was the -purpose of the na-
tional government and of the state of Sonora to exter-
minate the Yaquis, and that the troops would remain
in the mountains tin the last of the Yaquis was bayoneted

BY PATH AND TUAIL.

59

or shot. "\Vhen I ventured the remark that the authori-
ties of :ßIexico said the same thing forty years ago, have
been repeating it at measured intervals ever since, and
that the Yaquis seem to be as far from annihilation as
they were in Spanish times, he became restless, rose from
his seat and his color heightened. I thought he was go-
ing to vomit. I steadied him by ordering up the cigars
and a bottle of tequila. He then informed me in a confi-
dential whisper that "the Y aquis were, indeed, terrible
fighters, but now it would soon be all up with them.
Signor Pedro Alvarado, the owner of the greatest silver
mine in l\iexico and the wealthiest man in the republic,
haJ offered to raise and keep in the field at his own ex-
pense, a regiment of :ßiexican I Rurales' for the. exter-
Inination of the Yaquis."
On my way from Torin to Guaymas I called to pay
my respects to the priest in charge of one of the inland
vilJages where I was compelled to pass a night. After
a yery courteous reception and some preliminary talk,
I ('xpressed a wish to ha ,:e his views on the misunder-
!.Standing between the J\Iexican government and the Yaquì
Indians. I adverted to my interview with General L. E.
Torres, and outlined the substance of our conversation.
, '\V ell, " he began, "if an impartial tribunal, like The
Hague convention, could examine the dead and living
witnesses of both sides, and after sifting and weighing
the result of the evidence, the scales of justice might pos-
sibly turn in favor of the Indians. It matters little now
with whom the fault rests. The Yaquis cannot get a
hearing, and if they could what would it avail them'
It's a case of the 'race to the swift, the battle to the
strong, and the weak to the wan.' When the American
troops were carrying extermination to the Apaches in

60

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

Arizona, the Indians were represented in the Eastern
states and l\Iiddle vVest as demons escaped from hell
and incarnated in Apache bodies. It was madness to
offer an apology for the Indians or to hint at the provo-
cation and treatment goading them to desperation. The
public voice had spoken, the case was closed- Roma
locuta est, causafinita est."
"I am a l\lexican, and by force of birth and family
ties, am with my own people, but as a priest of God, I
ought not to tread upon the bruised reed or quench the
smoking flax."
"Are the Y aquis Catholics, padre mio
" I asked.
"Fully one-half of the Y aquis are as devout Catholics
a::; any people of }lexico. The mountaineers, whose an-
cestors were converted to the faith, are outlaws for 200
years and retain, as a tradition, many Catholic ceremon-
ies wedded to old pagan superstitions and practices.
The fact, that when in 1898 they fled to the mountains
and carried with them in th
ir flight the parish priest and
four nuns, and did them no harm, is a convincing proof
that they stiIl retain a reverence for the priesthood and
for holy women."
"
rhen at one time the whole tribe was converted to
the Catholic faith f"
· , Yes, and if the greed and covetousness of politicians
find adventurers had not foully wronged them, the mem-
bers of the Yaqui tribe would to-day be among the best
and nlost loyal citizens of the ßlexican republic.
, 'As early as 1539 Father l\larcos of Nizza visited
the Yaquis in the Sonora valley. Ten years after Nizza's
,isit two Jesuit missionaries took up their abode among
them. Other missionaries followed until, at the time of
(Hondo's expedition in 1683 to Lower California, nearly

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

61

all the tribes of Sonora and Chihuahua, including the
Yaquis, were Christianized.
, 'They were among the first to be converted by the
Jesuits. Originally extremely warlike, on being con-
verted to Christianity, their savage nature was com-
pletely subdued and they became the most docile and
tractable of people. They are invariably honest, faith-
ful and industrious. They are a:so the fishermen and
falnous pearl-divers of the Gulf of California.
"After the Yaquis became Christians they continued
to hold to their tribal unity, while many of the other
tribes were merged in the older Indian population,
known as 'Indios
Iansós.' They yet retain their tribal
laws and clanship, and it is their loyalty to these laws
that has led to much of the trouble between them and our
government. "
,. Does the Republic of
Iexico recognize their status
as an independent body or an ÙnperÍ1l1n in imperio?" I
asked.
"Y ou have touched the crlLX of the whole question,"
he replied. ' 'The
Iexican government has made many
treaties with the Yaquis, tlnls acknowledging in a meas-
ure their separate political entity, if not independence.
But, when a Yaqui violates a
[exican law, the Republic
demands his surrender that he may be tried and pun-
ished by its own courts, while on the other hand, if a

{exican commits an outrage on a Yaqui, our govern-
ment win not admit the right of the Yaquis to try him
and punish him."
, (But win your government punish hinl
"
"If it catches him, and his crinle be proved, yes; that
is if he be a nobody, but if he has nloney or influential

6

BY PATH AND TH.AlL.

.,

friends, he's never caught, or if caught, is rarely con....
victed.
:' The Indian does not understand this way of .doing
things, and he takes the law into his own hands, and then
tile trouble begins."
""\Vhat was the opinion of the early missionary fathers
touching the Y aquis
"
"Among all the wild tribes evangelized and civilized
by the Spanish priests, among the Sinoloans, Chihuhu-
ans, Tarahumaria,
Iayos and others, the Yaquis held
first place, and were rated high for their morality and
attachment to the faith.
"The famous Father Salvatierra, who spent ten years
on the Yaqui mission; Fathers Eusebio Kino, Taravel
ë-lnd others, have left on record their commendations of
the fidelity of the Yaquis and the cleanliness of their

10r:-111ives.' ,
, , It was a Yaqui chief who accompanied Father Ugarte
when he mapped and exPIored Lower California. 'Vhen
tlIp lnission of Father Taravel of Santiago, Lower Cali-
fornia, was threatened by the savage Perucci, the Yaquis
sent sixty of t.heir warriors to the defense of the priest
and his converts. They offered 500 fighting men to pro-
tect the missions of Bija, California, provided they were
called upon and transportation across the gulf fur-
nished thenl. In those days they were famed for their
fidelity to the Spaniards, in fact all the early writers
speak kindly of them, and they were then known as the
'most faithful Yaqui nation.'
, 'V\Then the missions were dissolved b}T the Mexican
government, and the fathers compelled to abandon their
posts, the Yaquis and the
{exicans quarreled. In 1825
they revolted, claiming they were burdened with heavy

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

63

taxes. Banderas, the Yaqui chief, led the uprising and
won material concessions from our government. Ban-
deras headed another rebellion in 1832, in which he was
defeated and slain. The next uprising was in 1884-7,
caused by encroachments on the lands of the tribe, and
the present war is due to the lawless acts of the gold
}]unters and their contempt for the laws of the Yaqui
tribe. They have the misfortune to live on the fringe
of civilization, where provocation is always menacing."
"If I am not trespassing too generously on your cour-
tesy, may I ask why the F'ranciscan fathers abandoned
the missions in Sonora?"
,,; They did not abandon the missions," replied the
priest, "they were exiled-l do not like to use the word
expeHed-from all 1Iexican territory after the declara-
tion and separation of the republic from Spain. You
see, party spirit, or rather, racial divergence, was very
åcute and rancorous in those times. When the M.:exi-
cans achieved their independence, all Spaniards, includ-
ing priests, officials and professional men, were ordered
to leave the country. There were hardly enough native
prie
ts to administer the canonically established par-
ishes, and for twenty-five years the Indians of Sonora
were wÌthout the consoling influence of the Christian
religion or the pacifying presence of the only men who
could restrain the expression of their warlike instincts."
"So you are of the opinion that if the missionaries
had remained with them, the Yaquis would now be at
peace with
fexico?"

'l am sure of it. In 1696, when the Jesuit superior
of the' AHa Pimeria' missions decided to send Father
Eusebio !(ino from Sonora to open the mission to the
'Digger Indians' of Lower California, the military gov-

64

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

ernor refused to let Father l{ino go, saying that the
priest had more power in restraining the Indians of the
Sonora and Yaqui lands than a regiment of soldiers."
i\ly interview with this scholarly and devout priest
was abruptly brought to a close by the arrival of some
visitors. With the kindness and affability which dis-
tinguish all the 1Iexican ecclesiastics that I have been
privileged to meet, he insisted upon accompanying me to
the garden gate, where with uncovered head I shook
his friendly hand, and after thanking him for his gra-
cious hospitality, bade him good-bye. On the way to my
posada, or lodging house, I thought of the honors heaped
upon the Romans by 1facauley, and the adlniration of the
world for men like Horatius, who in defense of their
country, rush to death, asking:

"How can men die nobler,
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of their fathers
And the temples of their Gods Y"

BOOK II.

IN THE LAND OF THE "DIGGER INDIANH

CHAPTER VIII.

WHERE MAN ENTERS AT HIS PERIL.
Reaching out one thousand miles into the Pacific
ocean, elongating itself like a monstrous thing alive,
in futile attempt to separate itself from its parent con-
tinent, there is a lonely land as unknown to the world
as the vast barbaric interior of Central Africa or the re-
pellant coasts of Patagonia. Upon its lmhospitable shores
on the west, the sea in anger resenting its intrusive pres-
ence, has been waring for untold ages, hurling mountain-
ous waves of immeasurable strength on its sandy beach
or against its granite fortifications. At times the waters
of the Gulf of Cortez, rising in their wrath, rush with
fierce violence on its western flank, and the sound of
the impact is the roaring of the sea heard far inland. In
this war of the elements great wounds have been opened
where the land was vulnerable, and indentations, inlets
and deep bays remain to record the desperate nature of
the unending battles of the primordial forces. This aw-
ful and vast solitude of riven mountains and parched
deserts retains the name it received 350 years ago, when
baptized in the blood of thirteen Spaniards slaughtered
by the savages of this yet savage wilderness. This is
Baija, Cal.-Lower California-a wild and dreary re-
gion, torn by torrents, barrancas and ravines, and in
places, disfigured by ghastly wounds inflicted by vol-
canic fire or earthquake.
The exterior world furnishe
nothing to compare with
it. Here are mountains devoid of vegetation, extraor-
dinary plateaus, bewildering lines of fragmentary cliffs,

68

BY FA TH AND TRAIL.

a land where there are no flowing rivers, where no rain
falls in places for years, volcanoes that geologically died
but yesterday and whose configurations and weird out-
lines are inlpossible of description. Its rugged shores
are indented and toothed like a crosscut saw. It is a
land of sorrow almost deserted of man and shrouded in
an isolation startling in its pitiful silence. Save the un-
profitable cactus and the sombre sagebrush, friends of
the desert reptiles, there is no vegetation in regions of
startling sterility.
If there be upon the earth a country lying under the
pall of the Isaiahan malediction, it is here; for here is
the realization and accomplishment of the dread proph-
ecy portending the blight of vegetable life. "I will
lay it waste, and it shall not be pruned or digged, hut
there shall come up "Qriars and thorns. I will also com-
mand the clouds that they rain no rain upon it."
Here in the vast interior loneliness of this forbidding
land are horrent deserts where the traveler may ride
hundreds of miles and fiud no water or look upon other
vegetation than thorny cacti or scattered bushes of the
warning greese-wood, telling him that here is death. The
lonely mountains bordering these deserts are striking in
their visible sterility. Torrential r
ins in seasons over-
whelm the struggling vegetation that in the intervening
months of repose invade the few inviting patcheH, and,
rushing madly to the foothills, sweep all vegetable life
before them.
Then, when the stor.m retires, and the blazing sun
burns the very air, the porphyritic rocks become an ashen
white, and, reflecting the sun's rays, thn:rw off rolli:n
.
billows of unendurable heat. 1\lost of these repellent
ranges are granite, but in Inany places there are found

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

69

outcroppings of gneiss, mica, talc and clay slates. They
underlie the quarternary at the base of the granite hills.
In some sections the levels are overlaid with the detritus
from these rocks. Toward the Gulf of California the
slates are accompanied by metamorphic limestones, and
often appear forming independent ridges or inclining
toward the high granite hills. Near the Pacific coast
the land is sown with volcanic cones, broken by benches
of land termed mesas, dotted with small groups of hills
known as llomas and by long faces of rock called escar-
pas. Immense streams of lava at one time entered the
deserts and now cover, as with a metallic shroud, many
of the sandstone mounds. The petrified waves and
ddies
of the river of mineral and other organic matter, called
magma, zig-zag here and there in the foothills, resem-
bling streams of ink solidified. Here are rocks, aqueous
and igneous, rocks splintered and twisted, and showings
of grit stones, conglomerates, shales, salts and syenite
basalt.
Here, too, are streams poisoned with wearings of cop-
per, with salts, arsenic and borax, and vast beds of sand
and gypsum covered with an alkaline crust, and dry
lakes, white as snow, on whose lonely breasts the sanù
lies fine as dust. The weird solitude, the great silence,
the grim desolation, the waste places and barren deserts
accursed and forsaken of man, abandoned to the horned
toad, the tarantula and the snake, terrify the soul and
raise a barrier to exploration. The only drinking water
to be found over an area of hundreds of miles is in rock
depressions and in holes here and there in the mountains
where the rain has collected in natural tanks hidden from
solar rays and partially protected from evaporation..
But there are seasons when, for years, no rain falls, and

70

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

then in this awesome peninsular furnace, the air is burn-
ing, the sand hot as volcanic ash, and the silence like
unto that which was when God said" Let there be light."
The deserts of this mysterious land are regions of sand
where earth and sky form a circle as distinct as that
traced by a sweep of the compass.
Into this desolation of sterility and solitude man enters
at his peril, for here the deadly horned rattlesnake, the
white scorpion, thirst and sweatless heat invite him to
his ruin and offer a constant menace to life. If with de-
termined purpose he dares his fate and attempts the
crossing of the parched and desolate land, the white
g1are reflected from the treacherous sand threatens him
"ith blindness.
\.t times he encolmters the deadly sand-
8torms of this awful wilderness of aridity, the driving
and whirling sands blister his face and carry oppressio1l
to his breathing. If the water he carries fail hinl, he
may' find a depression half full of mockery and disap-
pointment, for its waters hold in solution alkali, alum or
arsënic, and bear madne;s or death in their alluring ap-
pearance.
If night overtake him and sleep oppress him, he must
be careful where he takes his rest, lest a storm break
upon him and bury him under its ever-shifting sands,
and if he sleeps well he may never awake. And these
storms are capricious, for, after welcoming the unhappy
man to a hospitable grave in the desert and covering him
with a mound many feet high and of liberal circumfer-
ence, they are not satisfied to let him rest in peace, for,
months later, it may be years, they scatter the dune
nd
expose the mUlllmified body. There are here no vultures to
clean the bones, for the vulture is the hyena of the air
and lives on putrefaction, and there is here no decompos-

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

71

ing flesh. The carcass of man or beast is dried by solar
suction, the skin is parched and blackened and tightens
on the bones; the teeth show white, for the lips are gone
with contraction, the eyes are burned out and the sock-
ets filled with sand, and the hair is matted, dry and sand-
sprinkled. If the lonely man be so unfortunate as to es-
cape death by suffocation, he awakes with the dawn.
Dawn on the desert while the stars still glow in cerulean
blue. It is a vision of transcendent beauty, for toward
the east the sky is bathed in a sea of amber, light blue
and roseate. The stillness is intense, illimitable, it is the
preternatural.
The man has lost all appreciation of the beautiful, the
divine silence has no charms for him, it suggest
the
grave. Twilight expands into day, the instinct of life,
of self-preservation, dominates him, he rises and answers
the call of the mountains which allure him by their ap-
parent nearness. The remorseless sun times his pace
with his; if he stands still, the sun stands still, if he
moves forward, the sun moves forward; if he runs, the
sun pursues, and to the lost man staggering in the desert
it is as if the air was afire and his brain ablaze. The
pallor of mental anguish and physical pain are ashening
his skin; his eyes are wild and shot with blood; his fea-
tures are drawn and his face is neighbor to death. And
now he searches for his knife and cuts away his boots,
for his feet are swollen shockingly, his hair is beginning
to bleach, his gait is shambling, and the strong man of
yesterday is aging rapidly. Reason, for some time, has
been bidding him good-bye, and is now leaving him,-it
is gone forever, and only the primal instinct of self-pres-
ervation remains with him in his horrible isolation from
human aid. In this lonely wilderness the cruel sun pours

72

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

down hís intolerable rays till the very air vibrates with
waves of heat. Nothing moves, nothing agitates the awe-
some silence, there is no motion in the heavens, in the
dumb, dead air, on the burning sand. The madman tries
to shout, but his throat can only return a hoarse guttural,
and his blackened tongue hangs out as he gasps for
breath. Hunger is gnawing hÏ1n, thirst is devouring him,
and he does not know it. The cells of his brain are filled
with fire, his body is burning; piece by piece he has torn
away his clothes, and now, from throat to waist, he rips
open his flannel shirt and flings it from him. His sight
has left him, his paralyzed limbs can no longer support
his fleshless body, and blind, naked, demented, he falls
upon the desert and is dead. "\Vho was he! A pros-
pector. 'Vhere was he going? To the mountains. For
what 1 For gold. He follows is as djd the wise men the
star of Bethlehem. It lures the feet of men and often
woos the rash and the brave to death and madness.
When the prospector haJJ achieved the conquest of the
desert and reached the nlountains, retaining his health
and strength, he has accomplished much, but there yet
remain many trials and hardships to test the courage
and endurance of the brave man. Not the least of these
is the wear and tear on the mind .of unbroken silence and
absence of all life. There is nothing that shatters cour-
age, chills the heart and paralyzes the nerves as surely
as some inexplicable sound, either intermittent or persis-
tent. The brain that conceived the "wandering voice"
struck the keynote of terror, and when ß1ilton described
the armless hand of gloomy vengeance, pursuing its vic-
tim through lonely places and striking when the terrified
man thought himself within the security of darkness, he
gave us one of the most awful examples of the fears of

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

73

a guilty soul overcome with helplessness and shook with
nameless horror.
There are those now living in this forbidding peninsu-
la who have dared and conquered the burning heat and
trackless sands of lonely wastes, only to encounter, when
they reached their goal of hope in the mountains, spec-
tres of the imagination and the wraiths of disordered
senses. Of these was Antonio Gallego, a physical wreck,
who was pointed out to me shuffling across the plazuela
in the town of San Rafael.
He was a fine, manly fellow in his day, earning a fair
wage in the Rothschild smelter, when he took the mine
fever and started for the mountains on a prospecting ex-
pedition. He was all alone, carrying his pick and shovel,
water and food. A good deal of desultory wandering
took him :finaHy into a little canyon where he found a
promising" outcropping," and he went to work to locate
a claim. It was a desolate place, but beautiful in away.
On either side of the valley that formed the bosom of the
canyon, the mountain sloped up and up, until the purple
tops merged into the blue sky, while on the rock and
granite-strewn acclivity no vegetation took root.
No game existed there; the very birds never flew
across the place, and it was so sheltered from currents
of air that even the winds had no voice. This dreadful
and unnatural stillness "Was the first thing that impressed
itself upon Gallego. Particularly at night time, when the
stars glittering and scintillating as they always seem in
these solitudes, jeweled the sky, he would sit at the open
door of his hut, and the silence would be so vast and pro-
found that the beating of his own heart would drum in
his ear like the strokes of a trip-hammer. He was not a
man of weird imagination, but unconsciously and grad-

74

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

ually an awe of the immense solitude possessed him.
And little by little, as he afterward told the story,
another feeling stole in upon him. The rock-ribbed gorge
began to assume a certain familiarity, as though he had
seen the place in other days and only partially remem-
bered it, and he could not shake off a subtle impression
that he was about to hear or see something that woula
make this recollection vivid.
There was no human being within a hundred n1Ïles,
and often he was on th
point of abandoning the claim
and retracing his steps. But before he could make up
his mind he struck an extraordinary formation. It was
a sort of decomposed quartz, flaked and flecked with gold
in grains as large as pin heads, and ragged threads that
looked as if they had at one time been melted and run
through the rock. Antonio knew enough to be satisfied
that it would not take much of the" stuff" to make him
rich, and he worked with feverish haste, uncovering the
ledge. On the second day.after his discovery, he was at
the bottom of his shallow shaft, when suddenly he paused
and listened to what he thought was the sou
d of a
church bell. He rested on his shovel, the bell was ring-
ing and the sound was pleasant to his ears. It reminded
him of home, of the Sunday mass, and the fond, familiar
church, but above all, it brought back to him the faces of
the old companion
and acquaintances he met in the
church square Sunday after Sunday, and the veiled and
sinewy forms and faces of the senoritas crossing the
plaza to hear mass. How long he had been dreamily
listening to the church bell he did not know, but suddenly
the thought came to him that there
ould be no church
nearer than a hundred miles. Still he could hear the bell

BY PATH AND TR\lL.

75

distinctly, faint and as if afar, yet perfectly dear. It
sounded, too, like his parish bell.
Antonio sprang out of his shaft and stood listening.
The sound confused him and he could not tell exactly
from what direction it came. It seemed now north, now
south, and now somewhere above him, but it continued to
ring, reminding him it was time for mass. Then the bell
ceased to ring; ah! thought the lone man, "the priest is
a t the altar and mass has begun."
The excitement of the mine had passed away fronI him
as fever from a sick man. A sort of inertia crept over
him and he dropped his shovel and idled for the rest of
the day, thinking about the bell. As yet he was not
afraid, but, that night, seated before his lonely cabin, hè
heard the slow, rhythmic sound of the bell once again;
he felt an icy creeping in his scalp and turned sick with
dread. He was afraid of the awful solitude and afraid
to be alone with the mysterious sound. He knew it could
be no bell, knew that it must be an hallucination, yet be-
fore it stopped, he went nearly mad.
The next time he heard it was in the afternoon of the
following day. He stared about him and the old sense
of familiarity returned ten-fold. The granite gorge
seemed teeming with some horrible secret or a spectre
was soon to appear and speak to him. lIe feared to look
around him lest the awful thing would draw near. And
now the bell begins to toll for the dead, and Antonio
hears a voice from the air saying, "She is dead, she is
dead. " "Ah, Cara
fia," spoke the lone man, "my heart
is dead within me, but I must go to your funeral and see
you laid to rest, and I'll soon be with you." Still the bell
kept tolling. Before it ceased, Antonio was flying out of
the canyon, haggard, muttering to himseJf, wildly ges-

76

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

ticulating, and tears flowing down his cheeks. He made
his way to San Rafael, starting up at night to hurry on,
and pushing over the almost impenetrable c9 untr y at
such a speed that when he reached his destination he was
broken down, a wreck and half demented.
At times the awful solitude, the immeasurable stillness
and isolation from human homes close in upon the lonely
prospector and wear down the texture of the brain. So
stealthily does the enemy of sanity creep in upon the do-
minion of the mind, that the doomed man is not con-
scious, or only dreamly conscious, of its approach. In
the beginning he notices that. he is talking aloud to hinl-
self, then, after a time, he talks as if some one is listen-
ing to him, and presently his questions are answered by,
presumedly, a living voice. Then, at his meals, going and
coming from his cabin, when he is burrowing into the
side of a prospect, he hears a lone voice or many voices
in conversation or in angry altercation. It is no use try-
ing to persuadø himself that his imagination is imposing
on his sense of hearing, the voices are too real and audi-
ble for that. Presently, lonely apparitions float in the
air, mist-like and 111isshapen at first; then, as they ap-
proach nearer, they assume hun1an fonus, descend
to the earth and begin to talk and gesticulate. Then
son1etimes the wraith of a dead companion appears to
him, walks with him to his rude hut a mile aw
y, talks
over old times, sits with him at his meals and sleeps with
him. Nor, when wind-tanned and sun-scorched, he re-
turns to his friends, may he ever be talked out of his de-
lusions. He has heard the voices, seen the spectres, com-
panioned with the dead and there's the end of it. Some-
thing like this happened to Pedro Pomaro who died, a
rich man, a few years ago, in the little burg of Santa

BY PATH AND TRAiL.

77

Rosilla, at the foot of :ß1:onta Reccia. He was prospect-
ing in the Eugenia range with Alphonso Thimm, who per-
ished of mountain fever seven weeks after they made
camp. Pedro buried his friend and companion in a side
of the mountain, said a "de profundis" for the repose
of his soul, and returned to his lonely tent. Three days
after the burial of his companion, he was examining SOlne
ore he had taken out of the shaft, when he saw Alphonso
coming toward him. He dropped the sample and began
to run, shouting for help. He fell at last from exhaus-
tion and lost consciousness. When he returned to his
senses, Thimln was gone and Pedro retraced his way back
to his tent. The next afternoon, at about 4 0 'clock. when
he was working at the shaft, Alphonso again appeared z
and held him by his glittering eye, as did the Aneient
!vlariner the wedding guest. He beckoned to Pedro to
follow him and Pedro followed. The ghost led him away
to the north, over rocky, broken ridges, and at last
stopped. Then he took Pedro by the arm and said,
, 'Come here to-morrow and dig." Thimm vanished, and
Pedro, marking the spot the ghostly finger pointed out,
dragged himself back to his tent. He awoke at noon the
next day, cooked and eat his simple meal, and, shoulder-
ing his miner's pick, returned to the place shown hiIn by
his dead companion. Here he' discovered and located the
"EI ColIado" mine, which he sold to a 1Iexican syndi-
cate for 30,000 pesos. Ghost or no ghost, Pedro found
the mine, and from the proceeds of the sale bui1t him-
self a pretentious and comfortable honlse, occupied to-
day fiy one of his daughters with her husband and chil-
dren.

CHAPTER IX.

THE DEAD OF THE DESERT.

I was privileged last evening to be the guest of Don
Estaban Guiteras and his charming family, and when
it was time to renew the expression of my appreciation
of his hospitality and bid him good night, I deeply re-
gretted that
Iexican etiquette forbade me to prolong
my visit. Don Estaban is now in the evening of a life
largely spent in deserts and mountains, and it is allotted
to few men to pass through his experiences and retain a
fair measure of health, or indeed, to survive. Wind-
tanned and sun-scorched, he is a rugged example of in-
domitable courage and of unshaken determination, to
whom good luck and success came when despair was rid-
ing on his shadow.
I questioned him of the desert, the mountains, the can-
yons, and never was boy preparing for his first commu-
nion more familiar with his catechism than was Don Es-
taban with the gruesome wonders of the lonely places of
the peninsula.
He told me of a region where many men had died of
thirst, and to which flocks of ducks and water fowl came
year after year in the migratory season; of places where
rain is almost unknown, yet where clouds come of a night
and, breaking on some lofty peak, hurl thousands of tons
of water upon the land, altering the forms and shapes of
mountains, ploughing deep gorges here, and there fill-
ing others with great boulders, and changing the face
of the country. He spoke of deserts where men go n1ad
with heat, throw their canteen, h
11f-fìlled with life-saving

80

BY PATH AND TR.\IL.

water, out into the waste of sand, and, tearing and rip-
ping every shred of clothing from their emaciated bodies,
shout at and damn the imaginary fiends mocking them.
He asked me why it was that the skulls of Inen, who per-
ish of heat a.nd thirst on the desert, split wide open as
soon as life has left their trembling limbs 1 I answered
I had never heard of the weird and singular phenomenon.
"Yes," he continued, "I have seen dead men in the
Hormiga desert, and the skull of everyone of them was
gaping. So dry is the air of these regions, so hungry is
it for the heart's blood of its victim, that no sooner do
men die than the hot air envelopes them, and, ]ike a
devil-fish, sucks from their tissues, veins and arteries all
blood and water. I have followed the trail of dead men
by the shreds and rags, the knife, revolver and canteen
flung away and torn from theln in their deliriulll; and
when I came upon their bodies, the hair was ashen gray,
the skulls split open and the bodies stark naked. Of th

skull, the renlorseless hoot makes a veritable steam chest.
and when the sutured bone walls can no longer stand the
awful strain, the skull splits open and the brain pro-
trudes. I was traveling one afternoon with a companion
over the
I[uerto desert when t.he braying of one of my
burros called us to a halt. A walking burro never brays
while the sun shines unless it sees or scents danger.
Lifting my field glass I saw, far away to our left, a man
evidently in distress. We altered our course, and, as we
drew to hailing distauf'e, the man, completely naked, ran
to meet us, wildly gesticulating, 'Ritrarse, ri.trarse'-go
back, go back-he shouted, 'the demons are too many for
us, let us run, let us run.' 'V\T e gave the poor fellow a
few sips of water, and after a while fed him chocolate and
crackers, and brought him with us. Striking out diagon-

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

81

ally across the sands, we found his canteen, three-quar-
ters full of clear, fresh water. vVhen his mind was giv-
ing away he sat down to rest, and, rising, strayed away,
he knew not whither, forgetting his food and water."
, 'Why do men lose their reason in the desert 1 " I asked
Don Estaban.
"Well," said he, "many of these men, by dissipation
and evil habits in early manhood have weakened anf) im-
paired their brains. Others were born with a weak rnen-
tality, so that when the merciless heat beats down up@n
them, when fatigue, and often hunger and thirst, seize
upon them, the weakest part of the human system is the
first to surrender. Then the intense and sustained si-
lence of the desert, the imlneasurable waste of sand
around them, and the oppression on the mind of the in-
terminable desolation and solitude carry melancholy to
the soul, and the weakened mind breaks down.
"It is what happens, at times, to n1en who go out on
the desert; they perish and are heard of no more. The
driftÌng sand covers thern, and when years after their
burial, a hurricane of wind races over the desert, it scat-
ters the sand which hides them,opens thegrave as it were,
and carrying the bodies with it, separates the bones and
drops tIiem here and there on the bosom of the ocean of
sand. A curious thing," continued Don Estaban, "hap-
pens when the strong winds blow on the desert, a some-
thing occurs which always reminds me of the continu-
ous presence of God everywhere and of His providence.
Does not the Bible somewhere speak of the birds which
the Heavenly Father feedeth and the lilies of the field
which He cares for? Well, the desert plants are a living
proof of God's love for all created things.
"When these sandstorms are due, and before they rush

82

BY PATH AND 1 RAIL.

in upon the mighty waste of silence and sand, the cacti
ànd the flower-bearing plants droop down and lie low
along the earth. Then, when the storms have passed, the
plants slowly, cautiously, as if to make sure their enemy
is gone, rise again to their full height. Only the mesquite
and grease-wood of toughened and hardened fibre refuse
to bow down to the tyrant of the hurricane, and unless torn
up by the roots they never yield. But the cacti, save
alone the pitahaya, of giant strength, tremble at the ap-
proach of the storm, contract, shrivel up and lie low.
"I have often, in my tramps across deserts, stopped
and examined a cactus which we call the 'Rodillo.' It
has no roots, is perfectly rounded, and its spires or nee-
dles, for some mysterious reason, point inward, as if its
enemy were within itself. Unless it draws its nourish-
ment from the air, I do not know how it survives. It is
the plaything of the winds. ,Vhen the sand storm riots
in the desert, the wind plays with the 'Rodillo' and rolls
it along forty or :fifty miles."
, 'How often do these storms come, senor 1"
"Well, it's this way; for your winters in the North
you have snow and ice, in the South they have rain; here
on our deserts we have winds, and these winds are with
us for three months, mild as a sea breeze to-day, and to-
morrow rushing with the speed of a hurricane. But to
come back to the 'Rodillo.' vVhen the storm of wind has
lifted, this ball cactus is left on the desert, and if during
the vernal equinox rain falls, the plant throws out a few
rootlets, gets a grip somewhere in the sand till it flowers
and seeds, and is off again with the next wind."
"Is there any hope for a man if he runs short of water
forty or fifty miles out in the desert î"
"A man," replied my host, "who is taught to desert

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

83

ways, never dies of thirst. An Indian will enter a desert
stretching away for two hundred miles, carrying with
him neither food nor water, and yet it is a thing unheard
of for an Indian to go mad on the sandy waste, or die of
hunger or thirst. God in His kindness and providence
has made provision for man and animal, even in the
great deserts. There is no desolation of sand so utterly
bare and barren that here and there upon its forbidden
surface there may not be found patches of the grease-
wood, the mesquite and the cactus. Now the cholla, and
tuna, and the most of the cacti, bear fruit in season, and
from these fruits the Indians make a score of dainty
dishes. Even when not bearing, their barks and roots,
when properly prepared, will support life. N or need any.
man die of thirst, for the pitahaya and suaharo cacti are
reservoirs of water, cool, fresh and plentiful. But then,
one must know how to tap the stream. By plunging a
knife into the heart, the water begins to ooze out slowly
and unsatisfactorily, but still enough comes to save a
man's life. Of course, you know that the man familiar
with thf' moods of the desert never travels without a can,
ma1:ehes and a hatchet. When he is running short of
water he makes for the nearest bunch of columnar cacti,
as the pitahaya and suaharo are called by us. He selects
his tree and cuts it down, having already made two fires
ei gilt or ten feet a part. Then he makes a large incision
in the middle of the tree, cuts off the butt and the end,
Hnd places the log between the fires, ends to fires. The
n
at of the fires drives the water in the log to its center,
,yL.en it begins to flow from the cut already made into
his can. It is by this method the Indian and the expert
desert traveler renew their supply of water."
Communing with myself, on the way to my hotel, I

84

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

thought, "So, after all is said and done, education is very
much a matter of locality. In large centers of popula-
tion the theologian, the philosopher, the scientist, is a
great man; but thrown on his own resources, on the wide
deserts, in the immense forests, he is a nobody and dies.
On the other hand, the man bred to desert ways or
trained to forest life, is the educated man in the wilder-
ness, for he has conquered its secrets. That training,
then, apart from the supernatural, which best prepares.
a llian to succeed in his sphere, which develops the facul-
ties demanded by his occupation or calling, which makes
him an honest, rugged, manly man, is education in the
be
t ncceptance of the often ill-used term."

CHAPTER X.

THE FIGHT FOR LIFE.
Don Estaban Guiteras did n1e the kindness to accept
au invitation to dine with me this evening and pay me a
parting visit, for I leave Buena Vista to-morrow, and
may neVé
again tread its hospitable streets. He ac-
c01npanied me, after dinner, to my hotel room, and after
opening a bottle of Zara
Iaraschino and lighting our
cigars, I indueed him to continue the conversation along
the lines traced out the evening I was his guest.
He spoke of beds of lakes on mountains 4,000 feet above
the sea, and of fossil and petrified skeletons of strange
fish and animals found in the beds; of the singular habit
of the desert rat which, when about to die, climbs the
me'Squite tree and prepares its own grave in the crotch;
of the desert ants, which build mounds miles apart in
tIle desert and open an underground tunnel between
them. He told of the migration of ants to the moun-
tains, the military precision of their movements on the
Tllarch, their racapity, the blight of all vegetable life
after the mYTiad hosts had passed, and of the red and
black ants and their fierce and exterminating battles.
He referred to the strange ways of the "side winder,"
or desert rattle snake, of the wisdom of lizards and
other reptiles, and of animals living and dying on the
great ocean of sand, and of the skeletons of men who
went n1ad and died alone on the wilderness of deso]a.
tion.

86

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

DON ESTABAN'S STORY.

, , Were you ever lost on the desert, Senor Guiteras Y"
"No," he answered, "but when I was a young man
and was not as well acquainted with the ways of the
Disierto as I am now, I had a trying experience, and
nearly lost my life.
"It was on the 'Múerto,' and I wandered ninety miles
over sands so hot that I could scarcely walk on them,
though wearing thick-soled shoes. The Múerto desert is
in circumference 230 miles, and is, in fact, the bed of an
ancient sea, which evaporated or disappeared many thou-
sands of years ago. During the months of July and Au-
gust the 11úerto is a furnace, where the silence is oppres-
sive, the glare of the ash-hot sand blinds the eyes, and
the burning air sucks water and life from the body of
man or beast. I left the 'Digger' camp at the foot of the
Corneja mountain early in the week, intending to in-
spect a copper 'find' discovered by an Indian some fifty
n1Ïles southwest of the- Digger camp. The trail carried
]ne through an ancient barranca, widening into a gorge
which opened into a canyon, through which in season
flows what is called the Rio Rata. Here I made can1p for
the day, cooked a meal and slept, for I had started as
early as 3 o'clock in the morning. The heat within the
canyon marked 90 degrees on a small pocket thern10me-
tel' I carried to test the temperature of the nearest water
to the reported 'find.' As the air about Ine carried only
10 or 12 degrees of humidity, this heat in no way incon-
venienced me. At 4 o'clock that afternoon I awoke, con-
tinued on through the canyon, and in two hours entered
the desert.
, 'You n111st understand that in this country no man Ìn

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

87

his senses attempts the crossing of a great desert during
the day. The sun would roast him, the sands, hot as vol-
acnic ash, would burn him up, and he could not carry
enough water to meet the evaporation from his body. For
half the night I made good progress, so good indeed that
1 began to whisper to myself that before 8 o'clock of the
morning I would strike the foothills of the Sierras Blan-
cas and leave the desert behind me.
"Perhaps I had been pushing myself too much, or it
may be that I was not in the best of condition, but about
3 in the morning I sat down to rest. I was traveling light
and brought with me only enough water and food to last
me fourteen hours, knowing that when I reached the
Blancas I could find the mining camp of Pedro 1Iarrila.
To a meditative man, the desert at night has a charm
deepening into a fascination. The intense and sustained
silence, the great solitude, the limitless expansion óf
white sand glistening under a bright moon, and innum-
erable stars of wondrous brilliancy strangely affect the
mind and bear in upon the soul a sensation of a we, of
reverence and a consciousness of the presence of God.
, 'Mter a time, an inexpressible sense of drowsiness
possessed me. I had often traveled far on deserts, but
never before had I felt so utterly tired and sleepy. I re-
membered saying to myself, 'Just for a half hour,' and
when I awoke the sun was rising over the mountains. I
rose to my feet, blessed myself, and llloved on, knowing
I was going to have a hard fight of it.
"At 10 0 'clock the heat was that of a smelting fur-
nace. As I walked my feet sank in the yielding sand. I
was very thirsty, but I could not touch the water in my
canteen, treasuring it as a miser his gold. The blazing
sun sucked away all perspiration, before it had time to

88

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

become sweat and collect upon the skin. To sweat would
have helped me, but no man sweats in the desert. I now
discarded all my clothing but my undershirt, drawers,
hat and boots, even my stockings I flung upon the dry
sand.
"And now, for the first time, I took a drink from my
canteen, not nluch, but enough to partially quench the
:tire of my parched tongue. I had my senses about me, I
retained- my win, and I took the water, for I knew that
my tongue was beginning to swell. At noon .I struck a
pot-hole, or sink, half filled with clear, sparkling water.
I took some of it up in the lid of my canteen, touched my
tongue to it and found it to be, what I suspected, impreg-
nated with copperas and arsenic. }\fy body was on fir
,
and thinking to obtain some relief, I soaked my shirt,
drawersand shoes in the beautiful cool water, and in my
wet clothes struck for the mountains, looming some
twenty miles ahead of me. I was a new man, and
for an hour I felt neither thirst nor fatigue.
"Then a strange numbness began to creep over my
body. It was not pain, but a feeling akin to what I have
been told incipient paralytics feel when thè demon of
paralysis has a grip on them. I sat down, drank some
water, and for the first time since I left the canyon'8
mouth, took some food. When I tried to rise I fell over
on my side, but I got up, lifted my canteen and looked
around me."
"Pardon me, Don Estaban, was your mind becoming
affected 1 ' ,
"N 0, my brain was clear and my will resolute. They
aay hope dies hard. My hope never died, I pushed on,
resolved if I must die, it would be only when my tired or
diseased limbs could no longer obey my will. Ten miles,

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

89

at least, I walked, the fierce sun beating down .remorse-
lessly upon me. Walked, did I say
I dragged myself
through hell, tor my bones were grinding in the joints,
my skill was aflame and three times I vomited. I fought
the cravings of my body, for if I sat down I might never
arise. Not a living thing was anywhere in sight. I be-
lieve I would have welcomed a brood of rattlesnakes, of
scorpions, of tarantulas, so deathly quiet was the air
around me.
"Out in the lonely desert I deliberately stripped to the
nude, dipped my hands in my canteen and rubbed my
body. I then, as best I could, beat and shook my shirt and
drawers, for I now began to suspect I was being poisoned
by the copperas and arsenic in which I had dipped my
clothes. Dios, how hot the air was, how fiercely blazed
the sun, how the burning sand threw out and into my face
and eyes the pitiless glare and heat.
"I dressed, and, taking my canteen, slowly but reso-
lutely set my face for the mountains, now nearing me.
Once I fell, but in falling saved the water. "\Vith a pain-
ful effort I rose up
took a mouthful of water, and on-
ward I went, wþile the firmament was cloudless 0 'er my
head. ' ,
Don Estaban paused in his painful and fascinating
narrative, took a few sips of maraschino, and said:
"I will 'Yeary you no further with the story of my aw-
ful experience in that accursed waste of sand and heat.
I reached the foothills, how I scarcely know, but I lost
consciousness, not my reason, and those who found me
and cared for me told me they thought I was dead when
they lifted me from the arroyo into which I had fallen."
"Did you ever get over the effects of that awful trip
"
I asked.

90

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

"Oh, yes," he said, "in three months I was as well
as I ever was. W e
Iexicans are tough, and if we only
take care of ourselves when young, we can stand any-
thing. You see, like the Irish, we are the sons of pure
mothers, who obey the laws of God and nature."
When Don Estaban rose to depart, he took from his
pocket a photograph of himself and his family, and
handed it to me, saying: II Espero que le volvere a ver a
usted pronto "-I hope to see you soon again.
I took it gratefully and tenderly from his hand, assur-
ing him of my appreciation of his kindness, my affection
and admiration for himself and his family, and prom-
ised to send him from 1\fexico City a copy of my "Days
and Nights in the Tropics." I accompanied him to the
street, anti, in farewell, shook the hand of a straight and
honest man, whose rugged face I Tl1ay never look upon
agaIn.

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-Copyright by Underwood & Pnderwood. New York.
II.\LF-BLOOD COWBOYS. LOWER CA'LIFORXIA.

CHAPTER XI.

THE DIGGER INDL<\:NS.
.A1though Lower California remains to-day as an awful
example of some tremendous bouleversement in the
fio-
cene age, a land of gloom and largely of abject sterility,
yet it has redeeming features, and there are hopes of
salvation for this gruesome peninsula. For example,
there have lately been discovered on the Gulf coast large,
very large deposits of sulphur, and north of La Paz, im-
nlense beds of almost pure salt. .....
t and around the Cel"-
abo islands, the pearl fisheries, once so productive and
valuable, are again becoming promising. In the northern
part of the peninsula there is much excellent grazing
land, calculated at 900,000 acres, where alfalfa, burr and
wild clover, and fields of wild oats, four feet long and
full of grain, thrive. Along the shores of the Bay of
San l\Iarco they are now quarrying from vast beds the
finest alabaster in America. At Todos Santos there are
large quarries of white and variegated 11larble, and in
the neighboring mountains great deposits of COppel' ore
carrying much silver. At Ensenada the Rothschilds con-
trol the mines, and h:lve erected large smelting works to
reduce the ore.
Lower California has two capitals, Ensenada, on the
North Pacific coast, and La Paz, far down on the gulf.
The tremendous barriers of nlountains and deserts be-
tween the two coasts and the distance by water around
Cape San Lucas, have made two capitals a necessity. La
Paz, at the head of a fine, deep bay of the same name,
has a population of about 3,000. nearly. all:i\IexicHns. It

92

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

is a town of one broad, straight street, with witewashed
houses of stone, one story high, tree-shaded, verandaþed
and jalousied. The Tropic of Cancer cuts through the
San Jose valley to the south. The town and the land
around it for many Iniles are a dream
f joy. Here the
orange groves stretcl1 away for many miles on every
side, bordered witl1 rows of cocoanut pahns which re-
spond to the slightest touch of breeze, and wave their
fern-shaped crowns. In the morning, when the sun is
rising beyond the giant mountains, the air of the valley
is vibrant with the songs of mocking birds and Califor-
nia lllagpies of many hued plumage. Here also, in the
alluvian depressions, arborescent ferns with wide-
spreading leaves, tower forty feet in the midst of tropi-
cal trees, whose branches are festooned with many va-
rieties of orchids and flowering parasites of most bril-
liant hues.
The completion of the Panama canal will mean much
prosperity to tl1e west coa.st, for a railroad will then be
built from l\Iagdalena Bay to San Diego,
outhern Cali-
fornia, connecting with the Southern Pacific for New
Orleans, Chicago and the East. The west coast will then
probably become a great health resort, for the climate
is unsurpassed and chalybate and thermal springs are
everywhere. Sonle far-seeing Boston capitalists, antici-
pating a great future for this section of Lower Califor-
nia, have purchased the Flores estate, 427 miles long by
sixteen wide. The purchase includes harbor rights on
l\fagdalena Bay, and is the longest coast line owned by
anyone man or firm in the world.
The population of Lower California is about 25,000,
principally :ßfexicans and half-castes. There are 600 or
700 foreigners engaged in mining, and some Yaqui and

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

93

Mayo Indians, pearl fishers in tIle large bay of Pechil-
Inque.
To me, the most interesting and pathetically attract-
ive members of the human race in Korth America are the
melancholy remnants of the early tribes of Lower Ca li-
fornia withering away on the desert lands and moun-
tain ranges, and now almost extinct. In the history of the
hUlnan race we have no record of any tribe, clan or fam-
ily that had fallen so low or had approached as near: as
it was possible for human beings to the state of offal
animals, as the wretched Cochimis, or "Digger Indians,"
of Lower California. The Cochimis, unlike any other
family or tribe of American Indians, occupied a distinct
position of their own, and, indeed, may have been a dis-
tinct people. Shut off from the lllainland by the Gulf of
Cortez to the e
st, and impassable deserts on tIle north,
they were isolated, it may be, for thousands of years
from all communication with other aboriginal tribes,
and until the coming of the Spaniards underOtondo, they
knew nothing of the existence of any other people ex-
cept, perhaps, the coast tribes of Sonora and Sinoloa.
Their language and tribal dialects bore no affinity to those
of the northern or southern nations. It is doubtful, in-
deed, if they were of the same race, for their customs,
habits, tribal peculiarities and characteristics allied
them rather to the people of the South Pacific Islands.
Sir William Hunter in his chapter on the "Non-Aryan
Races," describes the Andamans, or "dog-faced man-
eaters," as a fragment of the human race which had
reached the lowest depths of hopeless degradation. After
the Andamans, he classed the "Leaf-wearers," of Wissa.
Dr. I{ane, the Arctic explorer, thought it was not pos-
sible for human beings to fall lower in degeneracy than

9..::

BY PATH AND TR.\.ìL.

the fugitive }1
skimos, the "ICa-!{aakR," whom he Illet at
"Godsend Ledge," where his ship was ice-locked and
where fifty-seven of his dogs went mad from cold and
died. These Indians were foul, verminized and :filthy,
and when he fed them raw meat and blubber" each slept
after eating, his raw chunk lying beside him on the buf-
falo skin, and, as he awoke, his :first act was to eat and
the next to sleep again. They did not lie down, but slum-
bered away in a sitting posture, with the head restin.g
on the breast."
These savages were compelled by the intense cold of
their northern home to cloth themselves and construct
some sort of shelters, and even the Wissa family, or
"leaf wearers," of Sir William Hunter, yielded to an
instinct of shame, but the "Digger Indians" roamed en-
tirely naked and built no temporary or permanent shel-
ters. Their vermin infested hair drooped long over their
faces and backs; they were tanned, by unnumbered years
of sun and wind exposure, to the hue of West Coast
negroes, and, worst of an, they were victims of porno-
graphic and sexual indecencies pitiful in their destruct-
ive results. A member of Otondo's expedition and col-
ony of 1683, writing of Lower California, says : "We
found the land inhabited by brutish, naked people, so-
domitic, drunken and besotted."
The noble savage of Dryden and Cooper is all right
in poetry and romance, but the real man, when you meet
him and know him, is indeed a creature to be pitied,
against whom the elements have conspired and with
whom circumstances have dealt harshly. God deliver us
from the man of nature, unrestrained by fear of punish-
ment, unchecked by public opinion, by law or order, un-
tamed by social amenities, unawed by the gospel of the

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hereafter. The nearer we come to the man who has no
higher law than his own will, nor knows obedience to a
higher authority than hilnself, the nearer we come to a
dangerous animal who eats raw meat, indecently exposes
himself, loves dirt, hates peace, wallows in the filth of
unrestrained desire and kills the weaker man he , does not
like whenever the temptation comes and the opportunity
is present. And low as the man can fall, the woman
falls lower. "Corruptio optimae pessÏ1na"-the corrup-
tion of the best is ever the worst-and all nature exposes
nothing to the pity and melancholy wonder of man more
supremely sad and heartrending t.ha t woman reduced to
savagery.
The Jesuit fathers, who established sixteen missions in
Lower California, beginning in 1683, sent to their pro-
vincial in 1Iexico City from time to time, accurate repo!ts
of the condit.ion of the tribes and the progress of religion
and civilization among them. From the letters of these
great priests which, in places, bear upon the degeneracy
and pitiable condition of the Lower California Indians,
and the appalling degradation to which it is possible, un-
der adverse conditions, for human beings to descend,
we obtain all the information extant of these wretched
tribes. 1fany of these lett.ers or "Relaciones," are yet in
manuscript, and to the average student of missionary
history, inaccessible. The historical value of these "Re-
laciones " has of course been long understood by schol-
ars, but, to the general reader, even to the educated gen-
eral reader, they were and are somewhat of a myth. At
a very early period their value was recognized by that
great traveler and historian Charlevoix, who in 1743
wrote: "There is no other source to which we can resort
to learn the progress of religion :unong the Indians, and

96

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

to know the tribes ,., ,., * of the Apostolic labors of the
missionaries they give very edifyíng accounts." Some
day, it is to be hoped, the l\Iexican government, follow-
ing the exalnple of the Canadian parliament, which in
1858 printed the "Relations of the Jesuits" in Can
da,
will give to the world in editional form the letters of the
Jesuits in 1\Iexico and Lower California. IIowever, from
the books compiled from these letters, such as those of
Fathers Venagas, Clavigero and Verre, we obtain a most
pathetic and melancholy narrative of the woeful state
of the tribes before the c<?ming of the fathers.
Apart from the divine courage and enthusiasm of the
Spanish missionary fathers, nothing has excited my ad-
miration more than the learning and scholarship of the
priests sent by the Catholic church for the evangelizing
of savage tribes and barbarous peoples. From an off-
hand study of the brutish and deplorable ignorance of
many of the tribes, it would be quite reasonable to as-
sume that nlen of simple faith, good health and a knowl-
edge of the catechism of the Council of Trent, would be
best adapted for the redemption of a people" seated in
darkness and in the shadow of death." But Rome, with
her accumulated wisdom of centuries and unparalleled
experience of human nature under adverse conditions,
trains her neophytes destined for foreign missions to
the highest possible efficiency. Weare not, then, when
acquainted with her methods of education, surprised to
find among her priests, living amid the squalid surround-
ings of savagery, men of high scholarship and special-
ists in departmental science. Of these was Father Sigis-
mundo Taravel, a pioneer of the California missions.
In 1729 he established the mission of St. Rose, near the
Bay of Palms. Before volunteering for the California

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

97

missions he was a professor in the University of Alcala,
Spain, and when he entered the desert and mountain sol-
itudes of this peninsula was in the prime of his young
manhood. He was dowered with exceptional talents, and
when commissioned by his superior, Father Echivari, to
collect material for the history of the land and its inhabi-
tants, he brought to the discharge of his task exceptional
industry, unflagging patience and great ability. For
twenty-three years he remained in Lower California, in-
structing and Christianizing the tribes around the Bay of
Palms and visiting the most remote corners of the pe-
ninsula in quest of material for his history. He took
the altitude of mountains, determined the courses of un-
derground rivers, made a geodetic survey of the south-
ern end of the peninsula, and gave names to many of the
bays and inlets. Broken in health, he retired to the Jes-
uit college at Guadalajara,
Iexico, where he completed
his history in manuscript. From this voluminous work,
Fathers Clavigero and Vinegas and less known writers
on Lower California, drew much of the material for their
publications.
I have entered upon this digression that you may un-
derstand the reliability and accuracy of the information
we inherit bearing on the daily life and habits of a peo-
ple which, I believe, to have been the most d
graded
known to history.
There are certain disgusting details entering into the
social life and habits of this unhappy and abandoned
people which I dare not touch upon. Even the barbar-
ous tribes of Sinaloa and Sonora, from their privileged
lands and hunting grounds across the gulf, looked down
npon the half-starved creatures, and held them in detes-

98

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

tation, as did the Puritans the wrecks of humanity that
occupied the soil of Massachusetts.
The Europeans of Otondo's time, who attempted, in
1683, to open a settlement on the Peninsula, were aston-
ished at a condition of savagery lower than they had ev.er
heard of, and their disgust and horror with the land and
its people were so great that they abandoned their inten-
tion of remaining in the country.
Powerless from the awful conditions under which they
were compelled to support existence, knowing nothing of
cultivation of any kind, doomed to imprisonment in a
land carrying an anathema of sterility and where large
game had become extinct, the tribes of Lower California,
among all the barbarous and savage people of America,
"trod the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God, the
Almighty. ' ,
The greater part of the peninsula at the time of the
coming of the fathers, was in possession of the Cochimis,
the Gualcuris and the Pericuis, who occupied the south-
ern part and some of the adjacent lands.
They were a long haired, wild-looking people, scorched
into negro blackness, naked and not ashamed. Morals,
in the technical sense, they had none, they could not be
charged with sin, for they had no knowledge of the law,
and therefore they could commit no breach of the law.
They bored holes in the ears, lips and nose, inserting in
the openings bones, shells or sticks. They bore only
names of common gender, which they received while yet
in the womb. ",Vithout fixed abodes they roamed the
country in searcn of food, supporting life on snakes,
roasted grasshoppers and ants, on wild fruit and roots
dug from the cacti beds, and because of this rooting habit
they were called by the Spaniards" Cavadores"-theDig-

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

99

gel's. Here is what Father Ugarte writes of the things
on which they sustained life: "They live on rats, mice
and worms, lizards and snakes, bats, grasshoppers and
crickets; a kind of harmless green caterpillar, about a
finger long, on roots and barks and an abominable white
worm, the length and thickness of one's thumb." Father
Clavigero adds they never washed themselves, and that
in their filthiness they surpassed the brutes. Their hair
was crawling with vermin, and their stupidity was so
dense that they could not count beyond five, and this
number they expressed by one hand. The different
tribes, Father Basgert tells us, represented by no means
rational beings, but resembled far more herds of wild
swine, which run about according to their own liking, be-
ing together to-day and scattered to-morrow, till they meet
again by accident at some future time. They had no mar-
riage ceremony
nor any word in their language to express
marriage. Like birds and beasts they paired off accord-
ing to fancy. They practiced polygamy, each man taking
as many wives as would attach themselves to him, they
were his slaves and supported him. Their forebears had
exterminated or driven into the inaccessible mountain
canyons the larger game of the peninsula, the deer, the
antelope, the big-horn, the ibex. They tracked the flight
of buzzards, with greedy eyes, and followed to share with
them the putrefying carcasses of animals dead from dis-
ease or killed by pumas or mountain lions.
'Vhen, by good luck, they captured a hare or a jack-
rabbit, they attached a small morsel of the raw and bleed-
ing flesh to a fiber cord and, after swallowing it, drew it
out after a few minutes, and passed the partially di-
gested mass to another, who repeated the foul act. Yet
they were not cannibals, and in abstaining from human

100

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

flesh offered a striking contrast to the Aztecs of Mexico
City, who, fed on human flesh, cut and salted the bodies
of prisoners captured in battle and sold the meat at the
public markets. They were a fierce and savage nation,.
without law, tribal rules or government of any kind, un-
ruly and brutal in their passions, mercilessly cruel to
their enemies, were more gregarious than social and of a
cold blooded disposition often manifested in treachery,
in relentless persecutions and in assassinations. Oton-
do's colonists charged them in addition with asinine stu-
pidity, ingratitude, inconstancy and irredeenlable lazi-
ness. The Jesuit fathers wrote more kindly of them,
they condoned their bestiality and shameless licentious-
enss by reason of their squalid surroundings and sordid
conditions, but then we must relnember that fronl the
day the Jesuits opened their first mission êU110ng them,
the "Digger Indians" became thei l' spiritual children
and wards of the church. This was the land and these
the people to WhOlll, in their unexampled abandonment
and unspeakable degeneràcy, the lnissionary priests of
the Society of ,-T esus brought the message of salvation,
the hope of happiness in this life and the assurance of a
resurrection to a higher and better life beyond the grave.
Now it may be asked why I have dwelt at such length
on this unpleasant subject, why I have pictured so grue-
somel)"', even if truthfully, tlw disgusting habits of a
foul and filthy people? I have done so that those who
now read tlïis work ma
T lparn and understand what man-
ner of men they were who, for Christ's sake and for
the sake of perishing souls, said" good-bye" forever to
their friends at home, to all that lnen in this world value
and prize, to the teeming vineyards of sunny Spain. to
ease, comfort and the delights of companionship with re-

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

101

fined or scholarly minds, and doomed themselves volun-
tarily to the horrors of hourly association with revolting
vice, with repellent surroundings, to daily fellowship
with filthy and unhospitable hordes. The" Digger In-
dian" was a man, so was the priest. The Digger Indian
had descended to the level, and in some instances below
tIìe level of the brute; the priest rose to the heights of a
hero and to the plane of the saint. 1Vhat conspiracy of
accidents, what congeries of events, what causes com-
bined to make a brute of one and a civilized and an hon-
orable man of the otherî "Tell, unrestrained passions,.
ungoverned will, unregulated desires, contempt for all
law human and divine in the beginning and then entire
ignorance of it, and finally .well-nigh desperate condi-
tions of existence and almost utter destitution and, there-
fore, impossible conditions of civilization, made the Dig-
ger Indian. And the Jesuit priest, the hero and the saint 1
Ethnologically, it is not so long ago since the ancestors
of the priest were barbarians, and on the downward road
to savagery. \Vhen Pope Innocent I., early in the fifth
century, sent his missionaries to civilize and preach the
doctrines of our Divine Lord to the Spaniards and those
of the Iberian peninsula, they were, as we learn from
the letter of the Pope to Decentius, given over to foul-
ness and the worship of demons. The church lifted them
out of their degradation, civilized and Christianized
them and made of them what Voltaire termed "an heroic
nation." The same church with her consecrated mis-
sionaries was leading out from the shadow of death the
Digger Indians and would have made a civilized and
Christian community of them if she had been left for
fifty years in undisturbed possession of the field.

CI-lA.PTER XII.

THE JESUITS AND THE DIGGER INDIANS.

The true idea of an effective religion, the idea which
is formulated in the word Christian, is that it should not
merely be fully capable of adaptation to the habits of-
all climates and natures, but that in each locality it is
able to meet the wants of all condit.ions of human life and
of all types of minds. Our divine Lord and 1\Iaster
taught the highest lessons of virtue and the most heroic
and
as exercised so deep an influence on human souls,
that it may be truly said his active life of three and one-
half years has done more to regenerate and humanize.
our race than all the disquisitions of philosophers and
all the discourses and writings of moralists since the
world began. Among the believers in the Divinity of
Christ, and more especially in the church which he estab-
lished to perpetuate his doctrine and sacraments, we
naturally look to find men, who by their lives and con-
duct furnish us examples of the influence on their souls
of the grace and teaching of the divine 1\Iaster. But par-
ticularly do we expect from those whom Cicero called
divine men and whom we honor with the exalted title of
priests lessons of sublime abnegation, of purity of life,
and, when the occasion demands it, of heroic sacrifice.
To the credit of the Christian religion and for the honor
of our race the centuries proclaim since the resurrection
of our Lord the sanctity and heroism of vast numbers of
these consecrated men who enobled their generations and
died confessors and martyrs. Of these were the mem-
bers of the missionary orders of the church and among
them were many of the order established by Ignatius

104

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

Loyola for the conversion of the heathen and the sav-
3ge.
The Jesuit fathers on the American missions showed
to the world an example of missionary zeal, a sublime
enthusiasm, a steadiness of perseverance, of suff
ring
and of persecution heroically borne with a hope aNd
resignation which, while memory lives, will encircle their
name with a halo of glory. "N 0 deeds," says Cicero,
"are more laudable than those which are done without
ostentation and far from the sight of men." Buried in
the solitude of great wastes or an1Ïd the desolation of
towering sierras, away from the temptations of vain
glory, they become dead to the world and posse-ssed
their souls in unalterable peace. "l\Ialigners may taunt
the Jesuits if they will," writes Parkman, "with credu-
Jity, superstition and blind enthusiasm, but slander it-
self cannot accus
thehl of hypocrisy or ambition."
'Ve have already learned something of the awful de-
gradation of the tribes. Allow me to anticipate the seri...
ous nature of the struggle the missionaries were now en-
gaged in by an extract from a sketch of the Sonora mis-
sion, written by one then laboring among the tribes.
.. The disposition of the Indians," writes the priest,
"rests on four foundations, each one worse than the
other, and they are ignorance, ingratitude, inconstancy
and laziness. Their ignorance is appalling and causes
them to act as children. Their ingratitude is such that
whoever wishes to do them good, must arm himself with
the firm resolution of looking to' God for his reward, for
should he expect gratitude from them he is sure to meet
with disappointment. Their laziness and horror of all
kind of work, is so great that neither exhortation, nor
prayers, nor the threat of punishment are sufficient to

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

105

prevail upon them to procure the necessaries of life by
tilling their own lands; their inconstancy and want of
!'csolution is heart-breaking."
And now it may interest my readers to be informed
of the methods and the discipline of reclamation fol-
lowed by the missionary fathers when dealing with sav-
ages either in northern Canada or on the shores of the
Pacific. Religious and moral teaching naturally under-
laid their system. They attached supreme importance
to oral teac1?-ing and explanations of the doctrines of the
church, iterating, reiterating and repeating till they
were satisfied their instructions had penetrated into the
obtuse brains of their swarthy hearers, lodged there
and were partially, at least, understood. In the begin-
ning
nd to attract them to the divine offices and instruc-
tions they fed them after the services were over. They
were dealing with "bearded children," as one of the
fathers wrote and as there was only a child's brain
in a man's body they were compelled to appeal to their
imagination, their emotions and affections rather than
to their intellects. Having in a measure won their good
will they began to teach the children, singing, reading
and writing. They composed catechisms in the native
dialects, insisted on the children memorizing the chap-
ters which the fathers with heroic patience explained
and unfolded.
They now established a children's choir, introduced
into the services lights, incense, processions, genuflex-
ions, beautiful vestments, the use of banners and flowers
for the purpose of decoration. They brought from 1Iex:,
ico, sacred paintings and the stations of the cross which
they used not alone as incentives to devotion but as ob-
ject lessons in religion. The rude and simple chapels

106

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

which they built with the help of their newly made con-
verts were not only temples where the holy sacrifice was
offered and pra)
ers said, but they became consecrated
kindergartens where the altar, the crucifix, the way of
the cross and the painting of the Last Judgment taught
their own lessons. By pictures, by music, by art and
song, and symbolic representations, by patience and af-
fection they developed the stupid minds and won over
the callous hearts of these benighted children of the
desert. The fathers in time choose from their converts
assistants known as Ternastranes, who taught catechism
to the children, acted as sacristans and explained from
time to time the rudinlents of religion to the pagan In-
dians. They appointed for every congregation a choir
master, known as the maestro, who could read and write,
was comissioned to lead the singers, male and female,
and teach others to play on musical instruments. In t
me
they became enamored with their work and the progl"ess
they were making, so much so indeed that one of the
fathers writes: "It is wonderful how these Indians,
who can neither read nor write, learn and retain two,
three or four different masses, psalms, chants of the of-
fice of the dead, chants for Holy vVeek, vespers for festi-
vals, etc." Then when the fathers succeeded in gather-
ing them into communities and the children, under their
fostering care, had grown into young men and women,
they taught them different mechanical trades and many
of the Indians became tailors, carpenters, tillers of the
soil, blackslniths, butchers, stone cutters and masons. "I
know," writes the author of the "Rudo Ensayo," "sev-
eral Opates and Eudebes who can work at all these
trades and who now play on musical instruments with
no little skill." It has always taken centuries to graft

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

107

upon savagery anything approaching a high civilization,
yet in thirty years these devout priests had changed
these children of the desert and the mountain from eat-:-
ers of raw nleat, stone tool users and grinders of aC9rn
meal in rock bowls to tillers of the soil, weavers of cloth,
workers in nletal, players on musical instrunlents
nd
singers of sacred hynlns.
The consecrated man who entered upon the territory
of a savage trib
to nlake to the owners of the soil a
proclamation of the will of Jesus Christ, knew from the
history of the past that he might be Inurdered while de-
livering his lnessage. I-lis lnission demanded from him
unflinching courage, gooq. health, a living consciousness
that the eye of God was upon him; demanded, in fact,
that he clothe himself in the gannents of the hero and
the nlart

r. ,Ye must remember that by nature the
missionaries were men like others of our race; swayed
by the sanle impulses; aninlated by human hopes; agi-
tated by the saIne fears; subject to the same passions.
But the practice of daily self-denial and self-sa_crifice;
the crucifixion of the flesh with all its earthly appetites
and desires; indifference to worldly honors and worldly
rm\ards, contempt for the vanities of society, a life of
hourly intercourse with heaven, and a supreme purity of
intention raised them in time unto the plane of the super-
natural. Outside of the immediate companions of their
order they were unknown, they coveted obscurity and
were satisfied to be forgotten of men. "It is possible,"
writes :\Iarcus Aurelius, "at once to be a divine man, yet
a lnan unknown to all the world."
It is impossible to study their lives and not feel that
they were nlen emin
ntly holy and of tender conscience,
111en acting under the abiding sense of the presence and
omniscience of God, living in his holy fear and walking

108

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

in his ways. "If ye labor only to please men, ye are
fallen from your high estate," wrote Francis Xavier to
the members of the order in Portugal.
Preaching the precepts of self-denial to men and
women given over to sensual indulgence, to carnal
pleasures, and with whom freedom to think and act as
they pleased was an immemorial right, these men of God
came as enemies making war on the dearest traditions
of the family and the established customs and habits of
the
ibe.
From the cradle to the grave, this religion of the
strangers forced on their savage natures a new law of
conduct, new habits, new conceptions of action and of
life. It entered above all into that sphere within which
the individual will of the savage man had been till now
supreme, the sphere of his own hearth; it curtailed his
power over his wife and child; it forbade infanticide, the
possession of more than one woman and commanded the
abiding with that woman .and with her alone. It chal-
lenged almost every social act; it denied to the bravç
cruelty to an enemy and the right to torture his foe; it
made war on his very thoughts if they were foul. It held
up gluttony and drunkenness, to which they were wedded
and which alone made life worth living, as abominable
vices; it interfered with the unlawful gratification of
sexual desire and condemned killing for revenge or gain
under threat of eternal fire. It claimed to control every
circumstance of life and imposed abstinences and fasts
on men, at all times, ravenous for food and drink.
When reading of the martyrdom of many of these
heroic priests our wonder is, not that forty-seven of
them were done to death when delivering the message
of the Crucified Christ, but that anyone of them escaped
the horrors of the torch or the scalping knife.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE VACA DE LUMBRE.

The morning I left Santa Cruz for the historic town
of Loretto I went to assist at mass in the only church in
the village. It was as early as 6 o'clock and I was sur-
prised and edified to see the number of Mexicans and
J\Iexican half-bl
:)Ods who were waiting for the service to
begin. After mass, as I was passing and repassing, ex-
amining the windows and certain peculiarities of the
architecture, I was struck with the singular appearance
of a half-breed woman who was kneeling by one of the
pillars, with a number of children also kneeling beside
her; a group like which we see carved in marble on some
of the ancient tombs of Europe. While I was studying
from a respectful distance their features and facial ex-
pressions, the J\Iexican priest who had offered up the
Holy Sacrifice came out from the sanctuary and in a sub-
dued voice bade me good morning. After an interchange
of courtesies I asked him,
"Why is this poor woman crouching there with her
children?' ,
He answered, just as if it were an every day occur-
rence:
"Some poor woman, I suppose, who has something to
ask of God."
Then observing and turning to me he said:
"She is the wife of a l\Iason who was hurt by a fall
two or three days ago, the family is quite destitute
and no doubt they have come to ask help of God." 'Vith-
out interrupting her devotions, I laid down by the base

110

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

of the pillar what was a trifle to me, but a god-send to
her and her family; upon which, without thanking me
except by a courteous inclination of the head, she went
up to the high altar, followed by her children to return
thanks to God. N ow all this might be very ignorant re-
ligion to an American Protestant, but to Ine it was true
religion, and, what was more,an example of sincere faith.
She trusted that God would supply what she wanted, she
knew that he had said about his house being the house of
prayer and she came to that house in faith to ask him
for help in her troubles; and when she got what she
wanted she evidently believed that her prayer had been
heard, and therefore did not thank me, whom she con-
sidered merely the instrument, but God who had sent
me.
1\iy companion and guide from the town of Jesus
1\iaria was a quiet, honest representative of the 1\1.:exican
half-breeds to be met with in almost every village of this
peninsula.
"Tell me, Ignacio," I s3:id to him in a solemn tone, late
in the evening when we were coming out of an ugly ra-
viñe, "tell me of this La Llorona who haunts the moun-
tain paths and the lonely roads leading to the towns.-i
is she worse than the Vaca de Lu.rnbre, the glealning cow,
th
t at midnight suddenly appears on the Plaza del Ig-
lesia and after a moment's pause bounds forward, and
with streams of fire and flame flowing fronl her eyes and
nostrils, rushes like a blazing whirlwind through the
village. ' ,
"Ah, senor, she is worse, indeed she is worse than
the fiery cow, for it is known to everybody that while the
vaca is terrible to look at, and on a dark night it is aw-
ful, she never does harm to anyone. The little children,

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111

too, are all in bed and asleep, when the Vaca de Lunlbre
appears, and it is only us grown people that see her and
that not often. But the weeping woman indeed is harm-
ful; it is well, senor, .that we all know her when she ap-
pears, and we are so afraid of her that no one will say
yes or no to her when she speaks, and it is well. 1\lany
queer things and many evil spirits, it is kno"Tll to us all,
are around at night and they are angry, when on dark
nights there is thunder and rain and lightning, but the
\\ ailing "\Voman is the worst of all of them. Sometimes,
sir, she is out of her head and is running, her hair
streaming after her and she is tossing her hands above
her head and sþrieking the names of her lost children
Rita and Anita. But when you meet her sonle other time
she looks like an honest woman, only different, for her
dress is white and the reboso with which she covers her
head is white, too. Indeed, anybody n1Ìght speak back
to her then and offer to help her to find her children, but
whoever does speak to her drops dead. Yes, indeed, sir,
only one man, Diego Boula, who years afterward died in
his bed, was the only one who ever answered her and
lived. Diego, you must know, was a loco, a fool, and he
met her one night when he was crossing the Plazuela-
San Pablo. She asked him what he did with Rita and
Anita. And he looked stupid at her and said he wanted
something to eat, for he was always hungry, this Diego.
Then she took a good look at him and then threw back
her white reboso and Diego saw a wormy, grinning skull,
and blue little balls of fire for eyes. Then she brought
her skull :qear to his face and opened her fieshless jaws
and blew into Diego's face a breath so icy cold that he
dropped down like a dead man. But, senor, a fool's luck
saved him and when he was found in the nlorning, he

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BY PATH AND TRAIL.

was recovering. It is said that this ice cold breath of
hers, freezes into death who ever feels it. Then after
the person falls dead, she rushes onward again, shriek-
ing for her lost ones, but the one who speaks to her is
found the next morning dead, and on his face and in his
wide open eyes there is a look of awful horror.
Did I ever meet her
God forbid, but I heard her
shrieks and wailings and the patter of her feet, as she
ran, on the cobblestones of the Calle de San Esteban."
As we drew near to the inland village where I in-
tended to put up for the night the country bore all the
appearance of having lately been swept by a tornado of
wind and rain. A swirling mass of water must have
rioted over the lowlands, for rocks, trees and bowlders
lay everywhere in confusion and encumbered the roads.
Many of the fruit trees were uprooted, houses unroofed
and outbuildings dismantled. Sure enough when we en-
tered the town it bore all the marks of cyclonic wrath.
With difficulty we obtained accommodations for the
night. 'Vhen I strolled out early next morning to take a
look at the town and the damage done by the storm, the
entire population apparently, men, women and children
were gathered around their church which had been blown
down by the cyclone. Some were chipping stones, some
carrying lime, some mixing mortar, some pulling down
the shaken walls, some splitting shingles for the roof,
some strengthening the sprung beams. Everybody was
busy about the church and, seemingly, not one was en-
gaged about any of the houses. A sudden shower drove
me into a protected part of the building for shelter, and
I got into conversation with a man who turned out to be
the priest, but not being quite as good a bricklayer as
he was a theologian, he was then serving as hodman to

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

113

his own clerk, or sexton, the mason of the village. K ot
knowing at the time that I was addressing the cura or
parish priest, I asked him how all these people were
paid.
"Paid
" said the reverend hodman, "why, they ar
belong to this parish."
"Yes, " I replied, "but how are they paid
- I mean,"
continued I, hesitating and turning over in my mind
what was Spanish for church rates or dues, "how do you
raise the money to pay all these people their day's
wagesî"
The hodcarrier laughed. ""\Vhy," he spoke back, and
I now from his face and accent began to suspect he was
somebody, "why, you do not pay people for doing their
own work. It is the house of God, their own church
which they are repairing. It is mine, it's theirs, it is their
children's. Until the church is ready we have no place to
assemble to pray to God and publicly to offer up to him
the holy sacrifice. There will þe no work done by us till
we have repaired God's temple, our own church." Who
was it who wrote: "0, for the touch of a vanished hand,
and the sound of the voice that is stilL" And 0 for the
simple piety and child-like faith of the days of old. In
the presence of this example of rugged faith and zeal
for the house of God on the part of this priest and his
flock I called back to my mind the ages of faith and the
sublime heroism and devotion of the early Christians.
Beyond a doubt the church was theirs. Not a day did
these simple people go to their work till they had assisted
at the mass offered up by the priest who was now, as a
hodman, helping in the rebuilding of their temple. Not a
time did any of them start out on a long journey without
first receiving holy communion from the hands of this

] 14

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

man of God. Yes, and many a time, too, when sickness
entered the home or when trouble came to some one of
the family, might you see an anxious wife or trembling
mother kneeling before the tabernacle, who had stolen
away from the noise and distractions of home, and
ad
come unto the altar of God to pray for herself and her
loved ones. To these honest souls their church was as
necessary as their sleeping rooms or their kitchens and
was used as much. 1Vhen it was blown down they felt
the want of it as much as they did that of their own
houses. The church was always open and they came and
went when and as often as they liked. Surely it was
their church and they made good use of it.
I remember well the day I came down from the Sier-
etta mountains and was passing on foot through the little
city of Aguas Coloradas, the church of which was well
worth seeing. I had my can1era and field glasses hang-
ing from my shoulders, some few samples in a canvas
bag, was wearing a suit of rough khaki and was not alto-
gether the figure for the inside of a church.
""'That shall I do with these things î" I said to my
guide.
"Put them down here on the church steps," said he.
N ow these church steps projected into the market
place, which at that time was full of all sorts of rough-
looKing people. I laughed and said, ''1 had much rather
not put such a temptation in the way of lVfexican hon-
esty. "
""Vell, " answered my guide, "there is no doubt that
the people of Aguas Coloradas are the greatest rogues
unhung" (he belonged himself to a neighboring parish,
and like all members of little communities was narrow
enough to be jealous of his neighbor's prosperity),

BY PATH A:ND TRAIL.

115

"your excellency is perfectly right, they are the great-
est rogues un hung. But they are not so bad as to steal
fronl God." I put my things on the steps and after the
lapse of an hour I found them, and along with them some
eight or ten baskets of fruit and vegetables, which the
market people had left there while they went in to say
their prayers, all of which though looking very tempting,
though entirely unguarded, except by the unseen pres-
ence of God, were as safe as if they had been under lock
and key. Is there a church in any city of America whose
sanctity would protect day and night articles leff ex-
posed before its door? If not, why not?

WONDERFUL CRUCIFIX.

Very much to my surprise I discovered in the sacristy
of the quaint little church of this primitive village a du-
plicate of Julian Garces' famous copy on glass of "The
Dead Christ." Garces painting from the original hangs
in the baptistry of an ancient church on the Calle San
Pablo,
fexico City, and is never exhibited to visitors
save on request. It is a wonderful painting on gl:lss,
thrilling in its awful realism and impossible, once seen,
ever to be forgotten.
It was copied many years ago by the Dominican
painter, Julian Garces, from the original painting on
wood, carried to Spain, when the religious orders were
suppressed by the :ßfexican government in 1829. This
wonderful painting on wood is now preserved in the con-
vent of the discalced Order of St. Francis, Bilboa, Spain.
It is known as the crucifix of the devil, and intimately
associated with it is a curious and touching legend.
Early in the seventeenth century
iexico City was the
Paris of the Latin-American world. It possessed great

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wealth, for the mines of l\tlexico were literally pouring
out silver. Its reputation for gaiety, for the beauty and
vivacity of its senoritas, for its variety of amusements
and for the splendor of its climate, attracted to its hos-
pitable clubs many of the rollicking and adventurous
youth of Spain. Among them was a young man of noble
birth, who at once flung himself into the whirlpool of
dissipation that eddied in the flowing river of fashion-
able amusements. In a few years he wasted his patri-
mony in a fast life and in wild debauchery. Utterly
ruined in pocket and in credit, he determined to end it all
in suicide. He was returning from the Spanish casino,
after losing heavily at a game of chance, when the
thought of self-destruction possessed him. He was re-
yolving in his mind the easiest way leading from earth---
to where-"To hell!" he muttered. Then he entered
upon another line of thought. He had read and heard of
men in desperate circumstances asking and receiving
help from the devil.
"I'll be damned anyhow," he argued with himself,
"and I may as well have a few more years on earth be-
fore going down into the pit."
fuch to his surprise,
when he entered his chambers he found them lighted up
and a stranger awaiting him. The man who rose to greet
him was in simple citizen's dress, and uncommonly like
one of those curb brokers who are so numerous in our
own day. "I understand, sir," said the stranger, "that
you wish my services."
, 'Who are you T" asked the Spaniard.
"I am the party who, many hundreds of years ago,
said to the founder of your religion: "All these will I
give thee, if, falling down, thou wilt adore me."
"The Devil'"

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117

"The same, at your service."
A bargain was quickly made. In exchange for his soul,
by a document to be duly signed and delivered, the prodi-
gal was to receive more money than was necessary to re-
establish his fortune; and to enjoy until the dissolution
of his natural body, all that he desired, all that earth
could offer him; sensual delight, influence, a distin-
guished career in society, the intoxication of power, in
short all that gold could purchase and secure. However,
the Spanird was no fool, and before he attached his sig-
nature to the fatal contract, he wished to be satisfied
that he was face to face with the J\faster of Hell, the
Rebel Lucifer. "Before 1 sign this parchment, may 1
ask you a few questions
"
"Certainl)T," replied Satan.
"'V ell, since you are Lucifer, how long have you dealt
with the children of Adamî"
"Since that day I laughed at God, when in the Garden
of Eden, I seduced Eve."
, 'Then you must have met in the waning years of His
mortal life Him whom men style Christ î"
"1 followed Him about for three years, and for the
defeats He inflicted on my friends and for the insults He
offered to me I gave Him blow for blow."
"Were you present when He hung on the Cross of Cal-
vary, between a murderer and a thief, and did you wit-
ness his awful agony and ignominious deathî"
"I was, of all the crowd that mocked Him and laughed
a t Him when He hung on the wood, the most pleased wit-
ness. 'Vhy, I inspired the fools who nailed Him to the
wood. It was I who tempted Judas, the Iscariot, to be-
tray HiIn; I inspired the Hebrew priests to insult fIlm,
another to spit upon Him, and my friend Pilate, who now
occupies a conspicuous place in my kingdom, to scourge

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BY PATH AND TRAIL.

fIirn, and fling Him to the mob. \Yhy, only for nle, the
fools would not have whipped Him, pressed the crown on
His head, put a reed in lIís hand for a scepter and a scar-
let cloak on his bleeding shoulders and, amid laughter
and insult, made a mock king of Him.
"Y ou remember His features, the expression on His
face when He hung on the cross and cried aloud to His
Father: ":Nly God,
1:y God, hast Thou abandoned me î"
questioned the Spaniard. .
"As if His vile death happened yesterday.
"Could you and will you paint for me the face, and
the expression on the face as you saw them immediately
before He said: 'All is consunllnated,' and when dark-
ness was falling on Calvary and J erusalem
',
"I can and will."
"vVell, then, do I beseech you, before I sign our com-
pact. Here is the brush and here the palette."
Lucifer took the brush and paints, and when in a few
moments he handed theVl back the face of Jesus Christ
stood out upon an ebony background. It was a face full
of tenderness, of infinite pathos, of unspeakable pity, of
boundless compassion; but on it, deeply graven in the
flesh, were lines of awful suffering, the seamings of sor-
row and sustained agony. The Spaniard, as he gazed
upon the "Santo Rostro," the Divine Face, trembled as
trembles the man to whom the dead speaks. The eyes of
the Holy Face looked into his own; he was standing be-
fore a Christ that was not yet dead, but whose body lay
limp, and from which the blood was pouring from a gash
in the side and trickling from wounds in the head and
hands. From out the c10Ring lids, the eyes, glazed with
approaching death, looked down upon him in sorrow and
infinite pity. The face and figure were so heart-rending

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119

in their terrible realism, the look of the agonized Cruci-
fied so appealing and so full of love that tears of sym-
pathy welled from the eyes of the libertine. Then before,
and hiding the face of the Christ, he saw the face of his
mother, and the eyes that looked their last upon him when
she lay upon her bed of death in their home in 1Uadrid.
Rushing past his tempter, the young Castilian flung him-
self at the feet of the Christ and cried aloud: ' 'Jesus,
son of David, have mercy on me." vVhen, sobbing and
broken-hearted, he rose erect he was alone with the dead
Christ and the unsigned compact.

JULIAN GARCES' COpy.

In Garces' painting on glass, the dying Christ stands
out in full relief with no perspective. Behind the cross
all is darkness save alone a thread of lightning, snake-
like and forked. Over Calvary the sky is lurid and of a
dull red, whose fiery hue in portentous, lugubrious and
awe-inspiring. The body of the dying Savior, the little
board above the cross, with its prophetic inscription:
, , Jesus of Nazareth, I{ing of the Jews; " and parts of the
cross which the Divine Body did not cover, alone occupy
space. Beyond and around them nothing, only the black-
ness of ebon darkness. Save the ribbon of snake-like
lightning coming out of and piercing the impenetrable
darkness, there is nothing; not a ray of light anywhere,
no mark of a horizon, naught but the body of the Man-
God, the gibbet and-night, moonless and starless. But
the isolation of the Figure on the lone Cross, the pitiable
solitude encompassing the Crucified, the blood oozing
from tlie frayed wound and trickling down the pallid
flesh, and the Divine Face from which expression, anima-
tion and life itself are lingeringly departing, appeal to

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BY PATH AND TRAIL.

the heart and the ilnagination, and we are overwhelmed
with pity and sympathy.
If we are familiar with the Holy Scriptures we hear
the patIietic cry of Isais: "There is no beauty in Him
now, nor comeliness '*' '*' despised, '*' '*' '*' a man
of sorrows. '*' '*' '*' His look was as it were hidden
from us.
"He was led as a sheep to the slaughter and He did
not open His mouth."
"I have given my body to the scourgers, and my cheeks
to the strikers; I have not turned away my face from
them that rebuked me, and spat upon me." \Ve call up
the prophetic words of the inspired writer of the Psalms.
"I am poured out like water: they have dug my hands
and feet. "
"They gave me gall for my food, and in my thirst they
ga ve me vinegar to drink: l\1:y God,
1:y God, hast thou
forsaken me
" V\T e listen to Jeremias speaking with the
voice of the 'Victim of Divine Love sacrificed before our
very eyes: "l\fy tabernacle is laid waste, all my cords
are broken; my children have abandoned me, and they
are not: there is none to stretch forth my tent any more:
I am left alone."
While we stand with eyes fastened on the solitary and
bleeding Figure, we see Him die. He is dead! From His
hands, from His head fallen away froln the dead muscles
and resting on the naked breast, from the gaping wound
made by the soldier's lance, the blood no longer flows.
The body is bloodless, but between the muscles, through
the delicate and transparent skin, one may count the
bones of the Crucified, one might number the pulsations
of the heart before it ceased to beat.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE PRADERA AND GUANO BEDS.
From my first chapter on Lower California I may
have left the impression on the minds of my readers
that the entire peninsula is a waste of desolation or tlmt
:in anathema of sterility had withered the whole country.
This would not be the truth. As we near the southwest-
ern coast the land struggles to shed more vegetation and
we begin to experience a mild, soft and almost langurous
air. The palo verde, the mesquite, the giant sahuaros
and many varieties of the cacti gradually appear. Along
the eastern coast the land is yet more covered with
mesquite trees, and malma and bunch grass above which
looms the columnar pithahaya. The mesas or table lands
of sand have here and there groo and gramma grasses.
Then, as we climb the mountains we meet scrub oak and
hill juniper, till at an elevation of 6,000 feet we en..ter
the pine lands. Owing to the peculiarity of the river
beds which run through loose quarternary deposits the
water which flows down the mountains during the rainy
seasons disappears in the porous earth, seeks under-
ground channels, and after following its subterranean
course for many miles, is lost entirely or comes again
to the surface where the older formation rises or is
crossed by a dyke forming a natural dam.
By reason of the clearness of the atmosphere and the
al!sence of all foreign substances in the air distances are
deceptive and appearances delusive. Small objects, such
as tne outlines of an isolated mound, the face of a pro-
jecting rock or a browsing steer loom large and stand

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out sharp and wen defined. At a distance of fifteen
miles foothills seem but one or two miles off. Fronl the
top of Para hill, fifty miles inland, I have seen the pano-
rama of the shores and bay, the town of La Paz, the
ills
and yalleys, all clearly outlined. The escarpment of the
San Juan mountains, 100 mies to the north of the hill
on which I was standing, seemed but twenty miles away,
and from the highest peak of the Cerita range, on a fine,
clear day, they tell me, a circular panorama 350 miles
in diameter, inclosing the most varied scenes of tower-
ing mountains, sunken deserts of yellow, shifting sands,
patches of cultivated land and rolling ocean, is plainly
visible. This diaphanous condition of the atmospher

is so deceptive that a stranger will sometimes begin a
walk for a neighboring hill, thinking it only a few miles
off, when in reality it is twenty miles away.
In certain stretches of this wonderful land currents of
air of widely different temperature, and hydrometric
layers of atmosphere lying one over the other produce
an electric condition like what we are told occurs on the
high Peruvian Andes. Owing to extreme dryness the
ground is a very poor conductor, so _that the superabund-
ance of electricity in the air corrodes metallic imple-
ments or objects exposed and left upon the ground for
any length of time. At times when desert storms sweep
across the face of the land the air is so abundantly
charged with electricity that the hair of the head will
stand out like that of a boy on an insulating stool. Th
.
hair on horses' tails and manes become like the bristles
on a brush, but seemingly no annoying effects follow.
There are regions of this extraordinary land where rheu-
matism is unknown. Leather articles, books and goods
which mildew in other coast lands, may here remain ex-

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123

posed night and day without injury, showing the harm-
less character of the climate, in striking contrast with
that of the :nIadeira and Canary Island where leather
molds, salts deliquice, unprotected metal rusts, botani-
cal specimens spoil and musical instruments cannot be
kep:' in tune. :ßIulberry trees in Italy and Southern
France require constant care and vigilance, but here,
once planted, they demand no further attention. There
are here stretches of land where in the dry, hot and rari-
fied air meats, eggs, fish and fowl remain lmtainted for
da.ys.
Back of the ancient and historic town of Loretto-
with which I will deal in another place-there is a valley
of centradiction, full of fascination to the eye to-day, and
to-morrow a land of desolation and of horror. It is
called "La Pradera Honda," the deep meadow, from its
marvelous wealth and coloring of vegetation at certain
seasons and times.
The Pradera reposes between two menacing ranges of
barren mountains which yet retain the ancient marks
left by the waters when the desert was an inland lake.
When I saw "La Pradera" a few days ago it was under
a shroud of sand, and of ashes that the angry volcanoes
of the mountains had, long ago, vomited upon it.
Turning to my J\fexican companion and extending my
hand toward the Prada, I asKêd: "Is there any life
there T" "Si, senor," he answered, "there is life there,
but it is life that is death to you and me. You see these
intermittent and miniature forests of bisnoga and cienga
cacti? They shade and protect from the fierce rays of
a burning sun the deadly rattlesnake, the horned snake
that strikes to kill, the kangaroo rat, the tarantula, the

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cnawalla, the white scorpion, the arena centipede, lizard8
and poisonous spiders."
The sun beat down upon the deadly silence, upon tb.e
dull gray floor of the desert where the bunched blades of
tñe yucca bristled stiff in the hot, sandy waste. But
before coming here I had heard of another and Illore
wonderful life than the reptile existence dwelt upon by
my friend. There are times when torrential storms of
rain rage fiercely among the nlountains bordering this
arid land or a drifting cloud loaded with water strikes a
towering peak. ,Yhen these things happen, rivers of
water flow madly down the furrows worn in the face of
the great hills, and, hitting the desert, separate into
sheets of liquid refreshment which give Life and bea1J.ty
to desolation and aridity. They come, says the inspired
writer, by the command of God, "to satisfy the deso
ate
and waste ground and to cause the seed in the parched
earth to spring forth." Then the ashen white waste is
all aglow with myriad blossoms, and the desert sands
are covered with a most beautiful carpet of wonderful
flowers for many of which the science of botany has llO
name.
Of all these plants that bloom in this vale of Hinom,
perhaps, the most pleasing to the eye are the flowers of
the cacti, and the rapidity with which their dry and ap-
parently dead stalks throw out beautiful blossoms after
their roots are watered, is one of the marvels of the des-
ey.t. The cacti of La Pradera are an annual manifesta-
tion of the realism of death and resurrection and, as the
plants come into fullest bloom in early spring, this desert
at the time of Easter is one vast circular meadow where
the rarest and most beautiful flowers have risen from
their graves as if to glorify the resurrection of their

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

125

Lord and l\faster. The largest and most wonderful
flower of them all grows, I am told, on an ugly, short,
misshapen cactus which, for eleven months of the year
is to aH outward seeming, dead, but when its roots are
watered, blooms with supremely delicate and waxy pet-
als. There is another cactus, a low creeping plant of
round trunk and pointed stem, repellent as a snake, and
ugly to look upon which, at about the time of the vernal
equinox, is covered wth large pink flowers, beautiful as
orchids and fragrant as the fairest rose in my lady's
garden. Then by the sides, and between the l\iexican
agaves and the white plunled yuccaswith trembling serri-
-ated leaves, are scattered in luxuriant' prodigality co-
lumbines, phloxes, verbenas and as many as twenty or
thirty varieties of flowering plants for which my limited
knowledge of botany supplies no nalnes. Unfortuna1tely,
for the present, the names of many of these rare species
are not known even to our professional botanists, and
the common varieties of those which are classified, and
found in other parts of California bear no such fascinat-
ing and gorgeous array of flowers as those indigenous tð
the "Pradera" desert.
The Islands of St. George off the east coast of tile
Peninsula of California are a singular group of squeezed
or lifted rocks on which the dew never settles and where
Tain never falls for years. These are the famous "rook-
ery island::;" where, for uncounted years, enormous num-
bers of birds of the sea and of the land have built theif
nests, deposited their eggs and hatched their young. By
some mysterious law of instinct and selection the birds,
from the beginning, alloted small islands and sections. on
the larger islands to the different species of the feather-
ed race, so that the sea birds, like the frigate pelicans,

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the gulls, petrels and the like have their own allotments
and the land birds theirs, and between them there is no
friction or intrusion on each others' premises. 1Vith
the first sign of dawn they begin the flight for their feed-
ing grounds, and for hours the heavens are intermittent-
ly obscured by the countless members of this aerial host.
They fly in battalions, or in orderly detachments, reach
the feeding grounds on land or water fifty or a hundred
miles away and at once scatter and separate in search of
food. An hour before twilight, and timing their distance,
they rise again, converge to an aerial center and wing
for home. As the birds approach the rookeries they
announce their coming by cries, calls or shrieks and are
answered by those on the nests or by the young but lately
hatched. The cry of the birds is heard far out at sea,
and to the ship that sees no land, the effect is weird and
ghastly, if not ghostly. The decomposing bodies of dead
birds, of feathers, bones, flesh and entrails, the disinte-
gration of shells and t
e droppings from millions of
birds for thousands of years have superimposed upon
the primitive surface of the islands a deposit of great
commercial value, and in places eighty feet deep. Thi

deposit, saturated with ammonia and phosphorus, is
(,tined guano and, wherever found, is dug out,
hiefly by
Chinese coolies, loaded on ships and freighted to the sea
ports of Europe, where it is bagged or barreled and sold
to gardeners and farmers for fertilizing their lands. On
islands like Rotunda off Antigua, where the rock is por-
ous and friable, and on which rain occasionally falls, the
guano liquefies, percolates through the porous stone and
decomposes the rocks into what is known as mineral
phosphates.

CHAPTER XV.

ORIGIN OF THE PIOUS FUND.
Felicien Pascal, the French publicist, devotes an ar-
ticle in Le :ßtlonde 11odern, to an explanation of the mis-
sionary success of the Society of Jesus, the members of
which are known to us as Jesuits. It is rather ex
ep-
tional for a French freethinker to write calmly and dis-
passionately of a religious association whose creed and
manner of life are in direct antithesis to his own.
Iuch
has been written at various periods in their history of
the "secrets" of the Jesuits; but,
sserts )),11'. Pascal,
"the great secret of their strength is their sublime disci-
pline. To this discipline the Jesuits have always owed
their marvelous power and their acceptabilty as a chosen
body of highly trained specialists among the ruling
classes of Europe and in the savage wilds of Africa
nd
America. ' ,
1\11'. Pascal is experimenting with a social and histori-
cal fact and is disposed to deal honestly and dispassion-
ately with its origin. Having no faith in the super-
natural, it was not to be expected that the French sociol-
ogist would look beyond the human and the natural for
the solution of a great problem. Unquestionably he is
right as far as he goes or his negations will permit him
to go. St. Paul, the prototype of all missionaries, writ-
ing to the Corinthians, recounts for their edification his
own sufferings and sorrows, his "perils in the wilder-
ness, in labor and painfulness, in watchings often, in
hunger and thirst, in many fastings, in cold and naked-
ness. " Further on, this extraordinary man, "called to

128

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

be an apostle out of due time," tells us why, according
to men of the world, he was a fool. "I take pleasure in
my infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecu-
tion, in distresses-for Christ's sake." On another oc-
casion when writing to the Christians at Rome, he says
that to men of the type of l\fr. Pascal, the heroism of
martyrs, confessors and missionaries, is foolishness;
that ít is inlPossible for the natural or worldly man to
understand the things that are of the kingdom of God.
And now, let me. record for the edification of my read-
ers, the deeds of fraternal love and self-denial wrought
among the savage tribes of this unhospitable land centu-
ries ago by men whose heroism and success, 1fr. Pascal
and men like him try to explain by hUlnan discipline and
human organizatioIj. In an earlier chapter I dwelt pass-
ingly on the attempt of the Spaniard Otondo to establish
a settlement on the shores of the Bay of La Paz. For
eighteen months the Spanish colonists tilled and coaxed
a sandy soil and they reaped cactus, sage brush and dis-
appointment. During these eighteen nlonths not one
drop of rain fell upon the soil, now dry and parched as
the tongue of Dives. Otondo, in disgust, broke up the
settlement, called off his lnen and sailed away for l\fan-
zanillo.
IWith Otondo's colonists, when they left Chalca,
Sinoloa, went three Jesuit priests, one as cartographist
to the expedition, and the two others as missionaries to
the natives. They now pleaded to be permitted to re-
main with the tribes, for already they were mastering
the language and dialects and had under instruction
nearly four hundred adults and children. Father Copart
had already begun the composition of a "doctrina" or
short catechism in the native dialects. He experienced

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

129

much trouble, he tells us in a letter written to a clerical
fnend, in finding words and idioms to explain the doc-
trines of Christianity, but with the help of the children
he got on fairly well. The fathers asked to be left with
the tribes, but Otondo declared that he could not take
upon himself the responsibility of leaving a solitary
European on the accursed shore and insisted on the
priests returning to
Iexico with him.
Thus ended the first attempt to found a settlement
in Lower California. \Vhat a singular fatality fol-
lowed in the wakes of nearly all the first settlements
on the coasts of North America. Raleigh's planta-
tion in Virginia was abandoned after four years of dis-
appointment and heart-breakings, though Grenville,
the partner of Raleigh, said the land was "the goodliest
soil under the cope of heaven." The first settlement in
New England was even shorter lived and Goswald and
Popham brought back their colonists from
faine, as did
Otondo from California. The story of the hardships and
sufferings from cold and scurvy of the first French set-
tlers on the St. Charles is paralleled by the history of
Vizcaino's voyage and landing in the Bay of :NIonterey.
Twenty years afterOtondo's failure England called off
its first contingent of settlers from Tangiers. La Salle,
the explorer, and one of the grandest men that ever trod
the American continent, was shot by his own men and
his dream of colonization ended. The pioneer Scotch
colony at Darien failed absolutely, as did Selkirk's settle-
ment in the Canadian Northwest one hundred years ago.
The colonization of Lower California, such as it was
and is, was finally effected mainly through the persistent
efforts and untiring zeal of two Jesuit priests, Eusebio
Kino and Gian-
Iaria Salvatierra. Some day the lives

130

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

of these heroic and saintly men will be written and will
give added dignity and importance to the history of
Christian missions on the continent of America.
Once having begun the conversion of a savage or bar-
barous people, the Jesuit missionaries never voluntarily
retire from the field. It was at no time, and is not now, a
part of the policy of the constitution of the order to des-
pair of converting a people who spurned their friendly
advances or with bloody hands welcomed them to hospit-
able graves. The Society of Jesus is not, by any means,
the greatest missionary body to which the Catholic
church has given birth. Anyone familiar with
Iontal-
ambert's great history, "The Monks of the West," ]nust
concede that the church has been the fruitful mother of
heroic and zealous missionary orders. Considering the
duration of its existence, it must. however, be admitted
that the Society of Jesus is on a plane of successful
equality with any organization established since apos-
tolic times for the conversion and civilization of pagan
nations and savage tribes. It is a hopeful augury for
the establishment and permanency of a more friendly
feeling among us all that, since Parkman gave us his
"J esuits in North America," the hostility to the great
order among English speaking races is, like an unpleas-
ant odor, gradually evaporating.
After reading Otondo's "Report" of the failure of
the California colony, the horrible degradation of the
tribes and the pitiful sterility of the land, the Spanish
viceroy to
iexico advised the home government to have
nothing more to do with the accursed country. The
King of Spain followed the recommendation of his rep-
resentative, and Lower California was abandoned to its
sagebrush, scorpions, tarantulas and naked savages.

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

131

Despairing of obtaining any help or even encourage-
ment from the Spanish or :ßlexican officials,FatherSalva-
tierra now appealed to the zeal and Christian charity of
the Spainards in :ßlexico to assist him in his effort to re-
open the mission to the Digger Indians. Father Eusibio
Kino, who was with the Otondo expedition, and Father
Juan Ugarte flung themselves into the good work and
with speech and pen pleaded for the California tribes.
It was impossible to resist the call of these men; the
piety of their daily lives, the sincerity of their motives,
their scholarship, eloquence and heroism awoke enthu-
siasm and touched generous, though until now, indiffer-
ent hearts. Subscriptions began to move. From far
away Queretaro, Padre Cabellero, a priest who inherited
parental wealth, sent $10,000. The" Congregation of
Our Lady of Sorrows," a confraternity of holy women,
promised a yearly sum of $500; Count de
iiravalles
subscribed $1,000; Pedro Sierrepe of Acapulco gave the
fathers a lancha or long boat and offered the loan of his
ship for a transport, and fronl
Iexico City and towns in
the vice royal provinces came liberal contributions.
These generous donations Father Salvatierra formed
into a fund, or, as we would say to-day, capitalized for
the evangelization of the California Indians and the sup-
port of the California missions. Thus began the famous
"Fondo Piadoso de California," of which we have heard
so much and which involved in its distribution and par-
tial settlement two religious orders and three civilized
nations, and for which, to quiet a claim against it, the
government of the United States lately paid the arch-
bishop of San Francisco three hundred and eighty-five
thousand dollars.
On the 13th of July, 1697, the ship of Pedro Sierrepe

132

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

loaded with supplies for the infant mission sailed out of
the harbor of Acapulco, on the Pacific coast, and pass-
ing through the straits of l\Iagellan, finally, after two
1J10nths of ocean travel, rounded Cape San Lucas and
anchored in the Yaqui bay, Gulf of Cortes, now the Gulf
of California. Father Salvatierra, who had come over-
land to Sonora, was, with the illustrious lCino, giving a
mission to the Yaquis when he was informed of the ar-
rival of the ship. ICino made preparations to accom-
pany him to Lower California when the Governor of
Sonora intervened.
The provinces of Sinoloa and Sonora were at this
particular time threatened with an Indian uprising, the
governor refused to let ICino leave him, contending
that the influence of the priest in controlling the rest-
less Yaquis and J\layos was greater than the pres-
ence of a thousand soldiers. So Salvatierra sailed
alone out of the Yaqui bay and in October landed in
Lower California, twenty miles north of the site chosen
by Otondo for his unfortunate colony. Like that heroic
Canadian missionary, Breboeuf, Salvatierra, when he
landed, knelt upon the beach and placing the country
under the protecijon of the Blessed Virgin, invoked the
help of God in the work he was abo
1t to undertake. Then
rising he exclaimed aloud, "hie req'llieseam, quonia'ln
elegi eam"-I wHI remain here, for I myself have cho-
sen it. After the landing of the baggage, the provisions
and a few domestic animals the party rested for the
night.
Here is the roster of the first settlement and prac-
tically the :first Christian mission which led to the civin-
zation of the tribes and the exploration of all California.
A Portuguese pick and shovel man called Lorenzo, three
Christianized :1Iexican Indians, a Peruvian mulatto, a

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

]33

Iexican half-caste from Guadalajara, one Sicilian and
one ::\Ialtese, sailors who had served in a Philippine
galleon and one Jesuit priest, Father Salvatierra. In the
history of early colonization, in any part of the world,
there is no page recording anything like this or any
enterprise composed of such seemingly hopeless ma-
terial. And yet under the masterful mind of the mis-
sionary, with faith, piety and tact these human frag-
ments were welded into a compact body that conquered
a stubborn soil and conciliated tribal opposition.
The :ßlaltees sailor was also an ex-gunner and to him
fell the honor of mounting the miserable little cannon
brought from Acapulco to protect the mission if attack-
ed by the natives. The
lexican Indians, under the eye
of Lorenzo, were to till a few acres of ground, look after
the few cattle, sheep and goats brought in the ship, and
in a pinch, do some fighting. After throwing up a tem-
porary chapel and staking off the ground, they began
the building of a rough stone wall around the camp and
mission to guard men and animals against the hostility
or covetousness of the savages. The Indians gathered
from near and far, and looked on stolidly, making no
demonstrations of friendship or dislike.
I already mentioned that Father Copart of Otondo's
expedition had partially compiled a catechism of the
Cochimis or "Digger Indian" language. Salvatierra
from this unfinished abridgement gained f-ome knowledge
of the savage tongue. He began, as did the .J esuits with
the 'Yyandottes, by appealing to their affections through
their wretched and always half-starved stomachs. After
filling them wth cornmeal porridge, he addre
sed them
in Copart's gutterals, tried to teach them a few Spanish
words, and after three months baptized his first convert

134

BY PATH AKD TRAIL.

-a cancer victim-to whom Father Copart had given
some instruction eleven years before. To the infant vil-
lage and mission he gave the name of Loretto the same
nanle which Father Channlonont had bestowed on the
little bourg outside of Quebec, \vhere he sheltered, and
where yet dwell the last of the Hurons.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE REPOSE OF THE GRAVE.

I well remember the afternoon I arrived-after a ride
across the mountains of thirty-two miles-at a turn of
the narrow road and, for the first time, looked down
upon the quaint and historically fascinating village of
Loretto, Lower California.
This is the place. Stand still, my steed,
Let me review the scene,
And summon from the shadowy past
The forms that once had been.
Eight generations of human life had come into the
world, lived their uneventful but singular existence, and
when the time came were laid away with those who had
preceded them, since first the Spanish missionary bore a
message from the crucified Christ to the most loathsome
of men and women that ever walked the earth. Yet they
could claim, if they but knew it, kinship with God, the
immutable and eternal, through Him whose message of
friendship and .love the Spanish Ambassador was sent
to deliver.
Unless God the ....t\.lmighty took away their human and
gave them a brute nature, it was impossible for the
"Digger Indians" or for any human beings to approach
nearer to the brute's state.
There existenec was a hell of foul licentiousness, of
nameless lusts, of hunger, thirst, of disease and physical
suffering, and there was no hope for betterment save in
annihilation or reconstruction, or rather resurrection.
The civilized and educated man who entered this barcen

136

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

desolation of savagery, and devoted his life and his tal-
ents to the talning and uplifting of these brutalized men
and women was a fool or a saint. This Father Salva-
tierra, who first came to live and companion with them,
was a Jesuit priest, and though terrible things have been
said and written about the Jesuits, their bitterest ene-
mies never pilloried them as fools.
"\Vhen we have delivered our attacks and exhausted
our ammunition on the Jesuits," writes de l\1arcillac,
"we must, as honorable foes, acknowledge they are, as a
body, the greatest Rcholars and most fearless missiona-
ries known to the world. "
When I entered this curious little Indian and 1fexi-
can village, Loretto, I carried with me a sense of rever-
ence for the place and of respect for the 111emory of the
consecrated 11len whose sublime heroism stilt J [ves in the
tradition of the simple people. The followiag morning,
after assisting at the sacrifice of the mass offered up by
a very dark, half-Indian priest, I entered the unpreten-
tious but well and cleanly kept graveyard to the rear of
the church. All over the great Republic of ]\'1exico, in
Chiapas, Yucatan, Tabasco, in the states of Central
America, wherever I went, I saw many things which I
thought could be improved, but I must confess that their
churches were always clean and their graveyards and
cemeteries well looked after. The Spaniards, like the
Jesuits, have been given hard knocks, but they were
never charged with being an unclean people. The Latin
Americans have inherited cleanliness froln the Span-
iards.
To me, who was fairly familiar with the humble but
heroic history of Loretto, with the u-
lspeakable degrada-
tion of the early tribes and the miracles of rehabilitation

BY PATH AKD TRAIL.

137

wrought among them by the Jesuit and Franciscan fa-
thers, this consecrated plot of ground was full of con-
soling memories. Here and there a monument of Todos
Santos marble lifted itself above a forest of unpreten-
tious crosses marking the graves of half-castes and In-
dians. These humble black crosses, with a ribbon of
white paint bordering the black, bore unpronounceable
names, the age and the day of the death of the deceased
in Spanish. Some very few monuments had more elab-
orate inscriptions, but all, marble and wood, carried the
Catholic and early Christian "Requiescat in pace"-
1\Iay he or she rest in peace.
Dominating all in magnitude and impressiveness was
the great central cross of cedar, the crux sanctorum, in-
dicating that the enclosed ground was consecrated and
exclusively reserved for the bodies of those who died in
union with the Catholic church and sleep the sleep of
peace. The t.ransverse bar bore this inscription from the
Hook of Ecclesiastes:
"Corpora sanctorum in pace sepulta sunt: et nomina
Eorum vivent in generationem et generationem."
(The bodies of the just are buried in peace and their
names live from generation to generation.) Further
down on the cross was a verse from the Psalms:
"Qui seminant in lacrimis in gaudio metent."
(Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.)
A few months before my visit to Loretto, the young
daughter of the harbor-master-a very charming and
beautiful girl of seventeen-was drowned in the bay. lIer
body was recovered almost immediately, but for a time
it was feared her mother would lose her mind. The af-
fection and sorrow of her family are materialized in one
of the most chaste and purest shafts of marble I have

138

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

anywhere looked upon. It is the only monument I have
ever seen in a Catholic, or indeed in any graveyard,
carrying a Christian and fagan inscription. The brother
of the young girl is a free-thinker, who worshiped his
sister with the respect and affection of a brother and
the passion of a lover. He entreated his father to have
chiseled on his sister's monument, under the "Requies-
cat in pace," Ximinsez' epitaph on the tomb of Inez.
Translated it would read:
Warm southern sun,
Shine kindly here;
Warm southern wind,
Blow gently here;

Green sod above,
Lie light, lie light,
Good-night, dear heart,
Good-night, good-night."
I referred in another place to l\L Pascal Felicien's ex-
planation of the missionary success of the Jesuits. 'If,
like M. Felicien, they had no hope of immortality or ex-
pectation of a judgment to come, men of the heroic self-
denial of Salvatiera and the other evangelizers of the
"Digger Indians" would be to us sublime examples of
folly, if not of insanity, developed by religious fanati-
cism. But, perverted ingenuity itself has never brought
a charge of religious imbecility against the members of
the great Order, and Eugene Sue but popularized the
expression of Carrier de N antes when he wrote: ' 'The
sons of Loyla are too wise for superstition and too delib-
erate for fanaticism."
When, last September, I was on my way to Guamas
to sail for La Paz, I laid over at Los Angeles expressly

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

139

to call on Charles F. Lumlnis, the editor of "Out \Vest,"
and the author of the'. Spanish Pioneers." 'Yith the
possible exception of Rudolfe Bandelier, :111'. Lummis is
the best infornled and nlost reliable living authority on
the tribes of the southwest and the early missions of
California. In answer to my request for his opinion on
the manhood and sincerity of the priests who fought the
wilderness and evangelized the tribes of the Pacific coast,
1\11'. Lummis took from a shelf his "Spanish Pioneers,"
and, placing his finger on a passage, asked me to read it,
and this is what I read: "Their zeal and their heroism
were infinite. No desert was too frightful for them, no
danger too appalling. Alone, unarmed, they traversed
the most forbidding lands, braved the most deadly sav-
ages, and left on the minds of the Indians such a proud
monument as mailed explorers and conquering armies
never made."
Before the "break up" of the Lower California mis-
sions, caused by political jealousies, disease among the
tribes and civil wars, the Catholic church had established
sixteen missions or parishes for the Indians, extending
from Tia Juana at the north, to Cape Palmas of the
south. Notice that I mention disease as contributory to
the reduction of the missions. The passage of a primi-
tive people from savagery to civilization, is like in its
effects on human systems, to the influence of an entirely
new and unaccustomed climate and is generally followed
by a decrease in numbers during a transition period of
more or less duration.
'Vhat this transition costs we may estimate by analogy
from lower organic kingdoms. For instance, spring
wheat has been changed into winter wheat, but the ex-
periment entailed a loss of nearly three harvests.

140

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

Wheat has been forced to accommodate itself to the
soil and climate of Sierra Leone, but only after an
enormous loss a.nd years of effort. Cochin China hens
were introduced into the state of Colombia, South Amer-
ica, and it was twenty years before they were acclima-
tized. So that practically twenty generations perished
before the few which survived chickenhood could adapt
themselves to conditions and increase in numbers. Some-
thing analogous happens when members of the human
family try to conform to a]tered conditions or enter upon
a period of transition. It may end in complete disap-
pearance as in the case of the Tasmanians and l\Iaoris,
or be followed by a revival in vitality under new condi-
tions as among the :ßlexicans and Filipinos. vVhen the
missionary priests entered California they met a de-
composing race, whose excesses and prolonged physical
suffering from exposure and frequent starvation had re-
duced them to degeneracy. Their extinction in their wild
and brutalized state was
ure to occur in, ethnologically,
a very short time. No doubt the restraints of civiliza-
tion and the new conditions to which they were asked to
conform hastened the inevitable.
There is left to-day out of a population computed in
1698 to be six thousand, a scattered remnant of, perhaps,
fifteen hundred. Before the expulsionof the fathers and
the consequent abandonment of the lnissions, ahuost the
entire peninsula was redeemed and its population Chris-
tianized a:çld civilized.
ro-day the unorganized rmnnant
roam tile hills of I(hada-l\::halna retaining a few Chris-
tian practices wrapt up in the rags of pagan supersti-
tion. "\VIien they disappear forever, there will be no
Cooper to perpetuate their nlenlory, or write a romance
on "The Last of the Digger Inc1i<llls."

CHAPTER .XVII.

SOLDIERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

It may have occurred to a few of my readers who have
ttccompanied me in my wanderings in Northern :Jlexico
and Lower California that I have exhibited a rather
strong partiality in favor of the Jesuit missionaries and
by my silence have been unfair to those self-sacrificing
and zealous members of the Order of St. Francis whose
undaunted courage on the mission fields of the south-
west have wrung applause even from the n1aterialist and
the infidel. I am filled with adlniration for the zeal, the
self-denial, the heroism of the martyrs and missionary
fathers of the Franciscan order. From their monasteries
came men whose names are beads of gold worthy to be
:filed on the Rosary of Fame; men of saintly lives an<:1 of
a transcendent greatness that raises them high above
the level even of good men and whose sacrifices for
Christ and humanity challenge the admiration of the
brave and stagger faith itself.
If I have omitted to do honor to the members of the
great order it was because I have already been antici-
pated by many pens abler than mine. Bancroft, C. F.
Lummis, Stoddard, Helen Hunt Jackson, Bryan Clinch
and even poor Bret Harte, in fact, an army of
writers in books, magazines and newspapers have
sounded the praises of the Franciscan padres,
forgetting those saintly men, the Jesuits, who pre-
ceded the Franciscans on the thorny road and broke the
trail that afterward carried them to the martyr's grave

14

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

in the lonely desert. The world, and America in particu-
lar, will never rep
y or be able to repay its debt to the
sons of St. Francis. Indeed, I doubt if Columbus could
have sailed out of the harbor of Palos on his providen-
tial mission of discovery had he not enlisted the co-oper-
ation and influence of Francis of Calabria, confessor to
Isabella, the queen of Spain, and a menlber of the Fran-
ciscan order.
It was this Spanish Franciscan who appealed to the
queen to outfit the great Genoese for his daring ex-
periment. Then the first and most influential pro-
tector in Spain of the great Admiral was that noble
and generous Franciscan, Perez de l\farcbena. Return-
ing from his first wondrous voyage of discovery, Colum-
bus obtained from Pope Alexander VI. the privilege of
selecting missionaries to accompany him on bis second
voyage to America. He chose several Franciscans, in-
cluding Father Perez, the astronomer, and, arriving at
I-Iispaniola, now the Iiland of Haiti, laid, in conjunc-
tion with tbe Franciscans, tbe first stone of the city of
San Domingo. Here, too, came, in 1505, the Franciscan
Fatber Remi, the l{ing of Scotland's brother, accompa-
nied by members of his order, who established for the
conversion of the Indians of Hispaniola and those of the
Antilles the monastery and headquarters of the IIoly
Cross. It was a Franciscan priest, Jean Bernard Cas-
tori de Todi, the astronomer, wlio offered up the first
mass on tbe virgin soil of America. It was also a Fran-
ciscan priest, Jean Berganon, who first addressed the
Indians in their own language, and the first missionary
to die and be buried in America was a member of tbe
order, Father Allesandro.
Diega de Landa, miE sionary to the Quiches òf T a-

BY PATH AKD TRAIL.

143

basco, and then Bishop of Yucatan in 1573, wrote the
History of Yucatan, mastered the mysterious Quiche lan-
guage and deciphered the hieratic
Iaya alphabet, was
a Franciscan. He left us the key to some of the strange
inscriptions on the monuments of Central America. He
deciphered the weird characters on the monuments of
:ßIayapan and Chichin-Itza; but for him, his intelligence
and tireless industry, these gravings would perhaps re-
main a mystery for all time, like the Egyptian hiero-
glyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone and
the magnificent research and ingenuity of Champollion.
Father Pierre Cousin, a French Franciscan, was the
first priest martyred for Christ in America, and the first
bishop consecrated for America, 1511, was Garcias de
Predilla, a Franciscan, who built his cathedral in San
Domingo. But I am straying far afield and I call back
my wandering pen to California and the southwest of
our own country.
By some mysteri<?us centripetal force almost all the
writings on the Franciscans of California converged to-
ward one personality-Father Junipero Serra, a saintly
priest. Hanging in the reception room of the ancient
college of San Fernando, !\Iexico City, is an oil painting
of the gentle priest executed one hundred and sixty
years ago. It is a face full of human pathos, of h
nder-
ness, of spirituality: this painting and an enlarged da-
guerreotype in the old Franciscan College of Santa Bar-
bara, Cal., are all that remain to bring back the form and
features of one who will for all time fill a conspicuous
place in California history. N ow, good and saintly as
was Father Junipero, and great and many as are the
praises sung of him, he was not superior, indeed, judged
by the standard of the world, he was not the equal of

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other Franciscan missionaries of the southwest, whose
names one seldom ever hears. If the crucifixion of the
flesh, with its appetites, desires and demand
; if great
suffering voluntarily assumed and patiently borne; if
fatigue, hunger, thirst and exposure _endured uncom-
plainingly for God and a great cause, and if surrender-
ing freely life itself, for the uplifting of the outcast and
the accursed, be the marks of heroic sanctity and hero

men,_ then there were greater saints and greater me
on
the desert missions than Junipero Serra. Alone, away
from the eye and the applause of civilized man, these
lonely priests in desert and on mountain trod the wine
press of the fury of insult, mockery and derision. For
weary years of laborious and unceasing sacrifice, amid
perils as fearful as ever tried the heart of man, they
walked the furrow to the martyr's stake, nor cast one
halting, lingering look behind. Their zeal, their courage,
their fidelity to duty in the presence of eminent warn-
ings; their fortitude unåer hunger, weariness and exces-
sive fatigue; their ange]ic piety and purity of life, and
their prodigious courage when confronted with torture
and death, have built on the lonely desert a monument
to St. Francis and to heroic Catholic charity, a monu-
ment which will endure till time shall be no more.
Of these men were Fathers Garces, cluhbed to death by
the Yumas; 1Ia.rtin de Arbide, burned alive by the Zunis;
Juan Diaz, tortured by the I\iojaves, and thirty others,
martyred for the faith. The history of the conversion
and civilization of the Indians of the California coast,
Arizona and New }'Iexico by the Franciscan fathers,
foruls one of the most brilliant chapters in the martyr-
ology and confessorium of the imperishable Church of
God. By their patience, tact and kindness, by the un-

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145

blemished cleanliness of their lives, these men of God
won the confidence and affection of their savage flocks,
lifted them unto firm earth, Christianized and civilized
them. From Cape San Lucas to San Diego, and on to
San Francisco and Los Angeles, all over Arizona, Texas
and New
Iexico, they established missions, built churches
and taught the tribes to cultivate the land. They gath-
ered the wandering families into village settlements,
taught them horticulture and irrigation, and furnished
them seed and implements of agriculture. They intro-
duced sheep and cattle, planted vineyards, olive and
orange groves, and made of these human wrecks a peace-
ful, industrious and contented people. They did more.
They taught these men and women of unknown race and
origin how to break and shoe horses, to carve in wood,
to mould clay, make and lay tiles, to tan hides and make
shoes, to sing and play on musical instruments, to make
wine, candles, clothes, ploughs and hats; they taught
them the trades of the cooper, the weaver, the saddler,
the blacksmith, the painter, the carpenter, the baker, the
miller, the rope maker, the stone cutter, the mason and
many other civilized occupations. Some of the finer arts
taught the Indians by the fathers are practiced to-day by
the members of the tribes, such, for example, as embroi-
dery in gold and silver thread, fancy basket making,
moulding and annealing pottery, leather carving, lace
and drawn work, from the sale of which to curio dealers
and visitors the Indians draw considerable revenue.
When, in 1834, a band of Catholic renegades, calling
themselves the Republic of
Iexico, broke up the mis-
sions, seized upon the possessions and revenues of the
monasteries and Christian pueblos, the Indians were re-

146

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

duced to beggary and became human derelicts, outcasts
and thieves.
Fray J unipero Serra, founder of the early missions of
Southern California, was a Franciscan priest, whose un-
blemished life, angelic piety and habitual tenderness form
a splendid pedestal for the statue of admiration erected
to his memory by an aP:Rreciative public. It was on the
morning of July 16, 1769, that Admiral Galvez, an up-
right man and a brave fighter, together with Father
J-unipero Serra and another Franciscan priest, s8:iled
into the bay, landed, and founded what is now known as
"the old town," a few miles away from the present
beautiful city of San Diego. They brought with them
soldiers and laborers, 200 head of cattle, a full supply
of seeds; seeds of grain, fruit, vegetables and flowers,
young vines and bulbs, with an abundance of tools and
implements.
Thus by the priests of the Catholic church were intro-
duced into California the horticultural, pastoral and
agricultural industries, the civilization of the coast tribes
begun, and the first mission opened. The founding of a
mission and town in those days of faith was an affair
of very great importance. When the men, stock and sup-
plies were landed, and the commander of the expedition
unfurled the standard of Spain, all heads were bared and
a salute fired. Then the captain strode to the side of
the floating flag, raised on high three times, in honor of
the Holy Trinity, a large cross carrying the Image of
the Redeemer. At once the commander, soldiers and
men went, with uncovered heads, to their knees, bowed
in worship, and, rising, chanted the" Te Deum," a hymn
of praise to God and in His Name, and in the name of

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

147

the king of Spain, took peaceable possession of the coun-
try.
Having chosen a site best adapted for their infant
city, the priests superintended the erection of an altar
under the shade of a friendly tree. Father Jlmipero,
robed in the vestments he had brought with him from
his monastery of San Fernando,
Iexico Citr, celebrated
the first mass offered up in California, July 17, 1769, and
before intoning the "Credo," feelingly addressed his
companions. Far away on the hilltops the naked sav-
ages, amazed at the sight of the ship and astounded by
the report of the guns, gazed with awe and wonder on
the white-robed priest, the plumed commander, the uni-
formed soldiers, t
e horses and strangely horned cows
and sheep. After mass the Spaniards fonned in proces-
sion and moved towards the bay, whose waters the priest
solenlnly blessed, and in honor of St. James of Alcala,
confirmed the name "Puerto (Bay) de San Diego de Al-
cala " bestowed upon the harbor by Vizcaino, November
12, 1603.
The following day ther began the erection of a {ort
and church, selecting an old Indian rancheria, called
Cosoy, as best suited for the site of a Christian pueblQ.
The ruins of the church and fort are here to-day; two
stately palms, planted by the fathers, still wave and nod
with every cooling breeze, and the dear old bell, tha t
every morning called the Indians to prayers, hangs in
its rude belfry, outside the church, reminding the lnoney-
making and aggressive _A_merican that in those days
men worshiped God and believed in a hereafter. In Au-
gust, 1774, they changed their quarters and removed the
mission and settlement six miles up the valley to a place
called by the Indians Nipaguay. Here they built a

148

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

wooden church thatched with tule rushes, a blackslnith
shop, storehouses and outbuildings for the men.
On the night of November 5, 1775, the mission was
attacked by the savages. No intimation, no warning or
provocation was given. They swooped down upon the
unsuspecting Spaniards, slaughtered Father
Jaume and
four others and burned the buildings, including "the
church. Father Fustre, who fortunately escaped the
massacre, wrote an interesting account of the nlurder of
the priest and the destruction of the mission. 1'he fol-
lowing year the mission was restored, and, in 1834, when
the fathers were driven out by l\Iexican bandits, caning
themselves the Republic of l\Iexico, the Indians were all
Christians and civilized.
His old lnission of "Our Lady of Sorrows," at San
Diego, was destroyed during the l\lexican war, but SOlne
crumbling walls yet remain, eloquent memorials of the
romantic past. The few acres of land and the buildings
on them, which were confiscated and sold to a l\Iexican
politician, were recovered for the church in 1856. Beside
the dear old church there is now an industrial school,
where the Indian children, from the reservations of
Southern California, are trained and taught by the Sis-
ters of St. Joseph. To this little farm belongs the dis-
tinction of protecting the first olive trees planted on the
continent of North America. Three miles above the
school, the old dam built by the fathers and their Indian
converts 125 years ago, is still in existence. From this .
dam, through a deep and ugly ravine, they carried an
aqueduct of tiles imbedded in mortar and rubble to irri-
gate their gardens. The gnarled old orchard, still bear-
ing its fruit, is as luscious as in the days when the" old
mission" brands of pickled olives and olive oil were fa-

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149

mous the world over. Indeed, they are famous yet. No-
body wno is anybody visits this queenly city of the royal
harbor without calling at the old mission so redolent of
pathetic incident and romantic enterprise. The friend-
ly citizens of San Dieg<? are proud of the historic mis-
sion of "Our Lady of Sorrows," and of their beautiful
harbor. One of these days, in the extensive park whicn
they are now improving and beautifying, they will place
on native granite pedestals, two statues-one of Viz-
caino, -who entered and nanled their splendid harbor, and
another to Padre J unipero Serra, who first planted the
cross of Christianity in Southern California.
The history of the colonization and civilization of the
California coast by these brave, faithful and zealous.
priests, is in striking contrast with -what happened in
New Eng1and and Virginia, where the Indians were civ-
ilized off the face of the earth.
Mter establishing the San Diego mission, Father
Serra pushed northward and planted a chain of Chris-
tian pueblos one day's march apart. He and his priest-
ly companions taught their converts to cultivate and
irrigate the land, raise grain, fruits and vegetables, and
make their labor profitable. "I do not know," writes

Ir. W. E. Curtis in the Chicago Record-Herald, "any
missionary on any part of the earth-Catholic or Pro-
testant-who accomplished more good for his feHow
creatures. The heroism of Padre Junipero Serra, his
usefulness, his self-sacrifice, his piety and his public
services for the church and humanity entitle him to
canoniza tion. "
The Franciscans, in time, established fifteen missions,
baptized 60,640 Indians before the expulsion of the-
order, introduced horses, cattle and sheep; planted

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orange and olive groves, and lllade of their swarthy con-
verts a peaceful and industrious people. Left alone
and in undisturbed .!)ursl1it of their apostolic work, the
fathers -would in tinle have converted and civilized all
the tribes of the Pacific coast and the South-west. From
the day they opened the first 11lission to the Indians, until
the confiscation of their property, ill 1834, the fathers
l11et with opposition and discouragelnent. They succeed-
ed in conquering the hostility of the savages, eradicating
their foul superstitions and winning them to a Christian
and a clean life, but their virtues, self-denial and heroic
. charity failed to subdue the cupidity and avarice of the
founders of an illegitimate republic.
Fronl his death bed in his little nlonastery in
Ion-
terey, the saintly priest .J unipero Serra asked his breth-
ren to beg from God for l110re help in the desolate "\vil-
derness. On the night of ..A..ugust
8, 1784, he was dying,
and his last words wpre: ' 'Pra
T ye, therefore, the Lord
of the harvest that He send laborers into His vineyard."

BOOK HI.

IN THE LAND OF THE PAPAGOES

CHAPTEH XVIII.

A LAND OF SCENIC WONDERS.
After thirty days' traveling by train and burro,
through Sonora and this extraordinary land, I arrived
here last night, filled with amazement and admiration
for the wonderful work of God made manifest in the
strange configuration of this land and in the marvels
wrought by the hand of time. Dante Aligherie, when he
breathed his last in the picturesque capital of the Exar-
chate, died 560 years too soon. If he were living to-da)T
and travelled across this land of wonders, he would have
seen upon the earth a region where Purgatory, Hell and
Rea yen had conspired to produce a bewildering viascope
of all that is weird, terrible and awe-inspiring, side by
side with the beautiful, the marvelous and romantic. With
the possible exception of Sonora, in the Republic of
Iex-
ico, to which geographically and ethnographically Ari-
zona belonged, there is not on the continent of America,
perhaps not in the world, a land as full to repletion with
all that is so fascinating in nature and startling to man.
Only a few months ago, a sailing ship from Honolulu
reported that the lava from 1Iount :ßlatatutu. then in
active eruption on the Island of Savaii, had covered
thirty square miles, while in places the flowing stream
was 200 feet high, and that in a part of the island a river
of lava twelve miles wide was ru
hing to the ocean. The
tale was laughed down and ridiculed in San Francisco,
wnere the captain of the ship made his report. Yet here,
almost on the boundary line of California, there are in-
disputable, positive and visible proofs of a volcanic

154

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vomit compared to which the
Iatatutu discharge is but
an intestinal disturbance.
The San Francisco mountain, 13,l)OO feet high, on the
northwestern edge of Arizona, is one of the most beauti-
ful mOlmtains in America. At some period, geologically
recent, it was the focus of an igneus commotion of un-
equaled duration and violence. It poured out rivers and
lakes of lava, which covered the land for two hundred
square miles and raised it in places 500 feet. This state-
ment may stagger belief, but anyone who leaves the
Santa Fe at Ash Fork and follows the trail to the Hupais
village of Ave Supais, and begins the descent of Cataract
Canyon, may verify for himself the enormous depth of
this
precedented flow.
Returning to Ash Fork, when the sun is declining and
the sky flecked with clouds, the same man will see a
sunset impossible of description, paralyzing the genius
of a PauJ. Loraine and the brush of a Turner. Then the
heavens are bathed in a lurid blood color, in purple and
saffron, or gleam with vivid sheen of molten, burnished
gold, when a falling cataract of fiery vermilion rests
upon the purple peaks and ridges of the western moun-
tains. I know not any land where the full majesty of
the text of the inspired writer is more luminously pres-
ent than here in this region of wonders. "The heavens
declareth the glory of God and the firmament showeth
His handiwork."
East of the Missouri river this is an unknown land,
even to the well-informed American. Wealthy and pre-
sumedly educated citizens of the East spend millions
annually sightseeing in Europe and Egypt, when here,
within their borders, is a land where mysterious
nd
pre-historic races dwell, where nature and nature's God

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155

have "\\ronght incredible marvels unlike anything seen
elsewhere upon the earth, and of which the people seem
to have no appreciation. The hills and lakes of Switz-
erland, the Alps and Appenines, to which thousands,
year after year, go from America ostensibly to admire
the configurations and to\\ering heights of these histor-
ically famous mountains, can offer nothing to the eye or
to the imagination to be compared to the natural won-
ders of their own land and of which they appear to be
unconSClOUS.
Nowhere may there be found such extensive areas of
arid deserts, crossed and' recrossed in every direction by
lofty mountains of strange formation, as in this com-
paratively unlmown region. Here are fathomless can-
yons, dizzy crags and cloud-piercing peaks and a vast
array of all the contradictions possible in topography.
There are broad stretches of desert, where the winds
raise storms of dust and whirl cyclones of sand, carrying
death to man and beast. Here are to be found dismal ra-
vines, horrent abysses and startling canyons, in whose
gloomy depths flow streams of water pure and clear as
ever rippled through the pages of Cervantes. Here are
the cells of the cliff-dwellers, the burrows of the trog-
lodytes, or pre-historic cave-men, the ruins of the ancient
pueblo towns, and traces of pre-Columbian tribes who
have gone down amid the fierce conflicts of tribal wars
and have disappeared from off the earth.
Darwin, Huxley and Maupas are welcome to their
theories accounting for the origin of
ran and his expan-
sion from the brute'to a civilized being, but my life
among and my experience with savages have convinced
me that the territory separating the ciyilized from the
savage man could never he crossed by the savage un-

156

BY PATH AXD TRAIL.

.assisted by a civilized guide, while all history proves that
races at one time in possession of civilization have
passed over that territory and descended into the gloomy
depths of savagery, where many of them yet remain. In
Arizona, at least, it was impossible for the Indian to lift
himself out of his degradation, for when he began his
rude cultivation of the land, the ferocious mountain
tribes swooped down upon him and drove him into the
desert or to the inaccessible cliffs.
Following the instinct of self-preservation, he built
his stone hut on lofty ledges or scooped from the friable
mountain side, fifty, one hundred, two hundred feet in
air, a cave which served for an observatory and a refuge
for his wife anø. children. ,Vith a rope ladder, twisted
from the viscera of the grey wolf, or the hide of the
mountain lion, he climbed down from his lofty perch, re-
turning with food and water for his miserable falnily.
Thus began the now famous "cliff-dwellings," which
seventy years ago many of our learned antiquarians
thought were the dens of an extinct species, half animal
and half man. Seeing and knowing nothing of the rope
which was always lifted by the woman when the man was
at home or on the hunt, the deduction was quite natural
that no human being could scale the face of the almost
perpendicular cliff.
The 1\10qui Indians still inhabit these strange rock
lairs on the northern side of the Colorado Chiquito.
There is no tribe of aborigines left upon the earth, there's
no region of the world, more deserving of examination
than the Moquis and the mysterious land they occupy.
Here at the village of Huaipi, on a mesa or table land
surrounded by sand dunes and aU10rphous boulders of
old red sandstone, is held ever:r second year the mystic

\-

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-Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
MOQUI LOVERS; CLIFF PEOPLE.

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157

rite of the "Feast of the Snake," when the tribal medi-
cine men, or shamans, holding in their mouths and fond-
ling venomous rattlesnakes, dance around and through
the sacred fire, and rushing wildly through the assembled
crowd of women and children, disappear behind the estu-
fas and liberate the reptiles. These 1Ioqui dwellings and
the Zuni pueblos of New
fexico are the oldest continu-
ously inhabited structures in .L\.merica and probably re-
main more nearly in their original state than those of
.any other aboriginal people in North or South America.
For ethnological study it is hardly possible to overe
-
timate the value of these strange people-the J\Ioquis
.and the Zunis. In the accounts of their early explora-
tions the Spanish missionary fathers found from eighty
to a hundred cells of these pueblo and cliff dwellers in-
habited in Sonora, Chihuahua and Arizona. Clearly the
whole of New .filexico, Arizona and northern J\tlexico was
occupied by these semi-civilized people, who lived in
-caves, stone and adobe houses, cultivated the land with
stone hoes, and irrigated it with water brought in chan-
nels from the nearest river. Centuries before the advent
of the Spaniards, the decline of the race began, and event-
ually would have ended in total savagery if the European
had not entered upon the scene. Internecine wars,
drought, pestilence, and, above all, the coming into the
land of the fierce Apaches, or Dinnes, and their many
predatory and annihilating raids, wore down the ancient
race and threatened their extinction. All the adobe and
stone ruins, all the remains of ditches and canals from
all over the river lands of N ew
Iexico and Arizona, are
the relics of these strange people.
This is not the place to enter into a disquisition on
the origin or migration of the race. I may, however,

158

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

add that in the common use of adobe, for building mate-
rial, in the plain walls, rising to a height of many stories,
in the architecture of their terraced structures, absence
of doors in the lower stories, the ascent by external lad-
del's to the higher, their buildings were altogether unlike
any found in
Iexico, Yucatan or Central ...L\..merica. In
the absence of arched ceilings, of overlapping blocks, of
all architectural decorations, of idols, temples and build-
ings for religious rites, of burial mounds and mummies
or human remains, rock inscriptions and miscellaneous
relics, the monuments of the 'Zunis and )Ioquis present
no analogies with the M::ayas, Quiches or any known race
of. people now existing.
Returning from this digression, let me continue my
explorations. Here in tIlls land of wonders is the Pet-
rified Forest, where are to be seen trunks of giant trees
over ten feet in diameter and a hundred feet long,
changed from wood into carnelian, precious jasper and
banded agate. Here are hundreds of tons-a riotous
outpouring-of Chalcedony, topaz, agate and onyx, pro-
tected from vandals by decree of congress. Here also
is the Cohino Forest, through which one may ride for
five days and find no water unless it be the rainy season.
There are places here where the ground is coyered with
pure baking soda, which at times rises in a cloud of irri-
tating dust, and when driven by the wind excoriates the
nostrils, throat, eyes and ears. There are depressions
near the mouth of the Virgin River, where slabs of salt,
two or three feet thick and clear as lake ice, may be cut;
and mirages of deceiving bodies of water so realistic that
even the old desert traveler, parched with thirst, is some-
times lured to his death.
In this territory is
logo11on :\Iountain, whose sides

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

159

and summit are covered with a forest of giant pine
trees. At some time in the remote past, nature, when in
an experimental mood, fashioned it, casting the huge
freak to one side, and, laughing aloud, left it unfinished
in the lonely desert. It is an unexampled unheaval, a
marvelous oddity, from whose western rim one looks
down 3,000 feet into the Tonto abyss, a weird depth,
where ravines, arroyos, angular hills and volcanic set-
tlings conspire to produce one of the roughest and
strangest spots on the earth's surface.

CHAPTER XIX.

VEGETATION OF THE DESERT.

I cannot resist the temptation of enlarging and dwell-
ing upon, what I may term, the natural miracles o
this
extraordinary region. North of Yuma, on the Colorado,
there are hundreds of acres of mosaic pavement fash-
ioned from minute cubes of jasper, carnelian and agate,
a flooring of tiny pebbles so hard and polished thqt, when
swept by the wind, is as visibly compact and regular as
if each cube was set in place by an artisan and forced
down by a roller.
\.t times this floor of precious stones
is entirely hidden by the sand, then a fierce desert wind
enters and sweeps it clean. Nowhere, unless it be the
Giant's Causway, Ireland, haye I seen stones laid with
such mathematical accuracy.
In this land of contradictions is the Painted Desert,
with its fantastic surface of ocherous earth and varieties
of marls rivalling the tints and colors of a large palette.
Here, in this weird and singular territory, was opened
by the Spaniards the now exhausted and abandoned
mines of the Silver King and the Plancha de la Plata,
where lumps of virgin silver weighing 2,000 pounds were
discovered, and the Salero, where in Spanish times the
padre, who had charge of the little mission, wishing to
entertain with proper respect his bishop, who was paying
his first visit to the camp, discovered when the table wat9
set that there were no salt cellars. Calling two of hi8
Indian neophytes, he ordered t.hf'm to dig ore from the
mine and hammer it into a solid silver basin, which he
placed on the table, garnished with roses and ferns, and

162

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presented to the bishop when he was leaving for Du-
rango, his episcopal see.
In 1870 the last herd of wild horses was rounded up
in Arizona, and here, too, corraled like the horses, and
at about the same time, are the remnants of the Apaches,
who, with no weapons, save bows and arrows, lance,
knife and war club, defied for 250 years the fighting men
of'Spain and the United States.
The Standard Iron Company is now tunneling earth
near the Diabolo Canyon in search of the greatest me-
teor ever heard of by meteorologists. "\Vhen this com-
posite visitor struck the earth it cut a channel 600 feet
deep and nearly a m
le in length. The land for miles
around was, and is yet, covered with fragments of this
star rock. Some of these pieces weighed many tons, and
when broken up and reduced, ran high in valuable min-
erals. The size of this meteor is said to be enormous,
and judging from the value of the ore scattered around
the great depression, the minerals embosomed in the
meteor will amount to many millions of dollars. Distin-
guished mineralogists of Europe and America have ex-
pressed a wish to be present when the meteoric wonder
is uncovered. Here, also, solidly perched on the breast
of a small volcanic pill, is the only desert labora to.ry in
the world. This hill projects from the base of a rugged
mountain range, known as the Tucson, and was selected
by the Spaniards as a site on which to build a blockhouse
and observatory in the days when the Apaches terrified
southern Arizona. From the crest of this volcanic
mount one may sweep a circular horizon within which
repose in awful majesty fifteen ranges of mountains,
stretching southward into 1\lexico, northward into Cen-
tral Arizona, and extending toward the west far into

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

163

California. 'Vithin this circle the Spaniards were mak-
ing history when the states of the East were a
wilderness, and New York had as yet no place on the
map of America. The mountains and the deserts remain
as they were when the Spanish priest 1\Iarco, of Nizza,
in 1539, crossed them on his way to the
Ioqui towns of
Quivera. The vegetation even has undergone no change,
for here, all around, and before you, are the giant Sua-
haros, or Candelabrum cacti, the ocotilla, the Spanish
dagger plant, with bayonets all a-bristle, the palo verde,
the mesquite, priddy pear, sagebrush, and all the won-
derful varieties of desert flora for which the Arizona
deserts are notorious.
The professor of botany in the University of Arizona
tells me there are in Arizona 3,000 varieties of flower-
carrying plants, and 300 different kinds of grasses. 'Vith
the exception of the verbena and a few others, all the
indigenous flowers are odorless, owing, it is said, to the
absence of moisture in the air. All desert plants are
protected against the greed or hunger, or, let us say,
wanton destruction of man and animal, by spines or
thorns.
Iore than 680 varieties of the cactus alone have
been discovered, catalogued and classified. All deserts
have a botany of their own and a flora of infinite possi-
bilities óf value, and in the deserts of Arizona have been
found plants of great medicinal value, many of them
with unique and interesting characteristics. It is a very
curious fact that the only varieties of- the cactus without
thorns known to exist in this region, are found growing in
rock projections and ledges beyond the reach of animals.
This was explained to me on the theory that, at some time
in the past, this kind of cactus was common enough in
the mountains, but that gophers, rabbits and other des-

164

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

ert animals had long ago consumed all that could be
reached. In" \ý-rild "'Vest" books, and even in profes-
sedly historical novels, one reads occasionally of this and
that family or clan of Indians perishing of hunger or
thirst. It is impossible for a normally healthy savage
to die of hunger or perish from thirst on the Arizona des-
erts. The white man
Yes, and often, the Indian
e\"er.
It is a case of God tempering the wind to the shorn lamb,
or :fitting the back to the burden. Under the thorn
of
every variety _ of cactus there is refreshing, nourishing
and indeed, palatable food. The desert and mountain
tribes knew this from immemorial times, and until they
were confined to the reservations, cactus food formed a
large part of their ordinary diet. They had a way of
their own of stripping the needles from the plant, reach-
ing the pulp and eating it cooked or uncooked.
There are many fruit and berry bearing cacti, and
these fruits and berries were gathered in season, eaten
raw or boiled, and from which a delicious S}Trup or juice
was extracted, and an intoxicating drink, called "chaca,"
distilled. The pitayha and suaharo cacti grow to the
height of twenty and thirty feet, and yield, when prop-
erly tapped, from ten to twenty-gallons of pure drinking
water. All desert plants contain a large amount of mois-
ture, and the professors of the Carnegie desert labora-
tory are now trying to :find out how the
e de
ert plants,
especially the cacti, extract water from a parched and
sandy soil, and moisture from hot air. There is a cac-
tus, christened by the early Spaniards, the "barrel,"
wñich is 75 per cent water, and, strange to say, thrives
best in hopelessly barren lands in which no water is
found within hundreds of miles, and on which no rain
ever falls.

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

165

'rhe desert laboratory for the study of the flora of
barren lands, is the property of the Carnegie Institute
at "\Vashington, and was founded by
Ir. F. V. Coville,
of the United States Department of A.griculture, alld
Dr. D. Trembly l\IacDougal, who was for years assist-
ant director of the New York Botanical Garden. Dr.
)facDougal is now here in charge of the department of
botanical research. In its specialty of purpose there is.
only one other institution in existence, even collaterally
related to this desert laboratory, and that is the college
of science established lately in Greenland by the govern-
ment of Denmark, for researches in arctic regions and
the study of the flora and fauna of the far north. This.
desert laboratory, under expert botanists, will include in
its scope, the physiographic conditions of notable inter-
est in the two great desert areas of western America,
deliminated by the g
ologist, the botanist, and the geog-
rapher, and designated as the Sonora-Nevada desert
and the Sinaloa-Chihuahua region of sand. These two
regions embrace large sections of Idaho, Utah, Oregon,
Colorado, "\V a
hington, Nevada, Ca]ifornia, Arizona,
Raja California, Sonora and Sinaloa. In this classifica-
tion the beds of many ancient lakes are included, and
with them the yet existing Great Salt Lake. Dr.
Iac-
Dougal informs me that notable features in this vast
body are the Snake river desert of Idaho, the Ralston
sand lands of Nevada, the sage fields of 'Vashington, the
lava beds of Oregon, Death Valley, the l\Iojave Desert,
the Colorado Desert, the Painted Desert in Arizona and
New
Iexico, the Salton bed and the great Sonora desert
of
fexico. In the Californias-Southern and Lower-
the desert vegetation and that of the coast lands meet,
but, except in rare instances, never assimilate. I was

166

BY PATH AKD TRAIL.

surprised to hear from the distinguished professor, as
without doubt you will be to read, that if the deserts of
the earth could be brought into one area they would
form a continent larger than all of North .America. The
wonderful and peculiar vegetation of the deserts has
time and again invited and received the attention of
learned botanists, but not until the founding of this Car-
negie laboratory was any systematic and contin
ous
study made of desert plant life. 'rhe assistant in charge
of the botanical department corresponds with the famous
botanists of the world, and is daily mailing to and re-
ceiving specimens of desert flowers and plants from all
parts of Asia, Mrica and Australia.
It may interest my readers to learn that, in the val-
ley of the Salt River, in Arizona, the United States gov-
ernment reclamation service has well under way one
of the most remarkable engineering enterprises for the
irrigation of desert lands ever undertaken. Before a
hole was drilled for the actual work in this almost inac-
cessible quarter of the Salt River Canyon, a wagon road
twenty-1ive miles long had to be blasted from the side
of the fearful gorge. Fifteen miles of this road pre-
sented almost insurmountable difficulties, for it had to
be run through the wildest and most precipitous portions
of the awesome canyons. Then began the herculean task
of prepar
.tion for controlling the turbulent waters of
the river, which in the late spring become a rushing tor-
rent. In a narrow part of this canyon the men, under
expert hydrographic and civil engineers, are now build-
ing a wall of solid masonry, which, when completed, will
rise to a height of 270 feet. It will inclose a lake of stor-
aged water twenty-five miles long and 200 feet deep.
Sluices and canals will carry water from this artificial

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

167

lake to the parched lands. This goyernment contract
will cost $6,000,000, and will reclain1 200,000 acres of arid
land. At the southern level of the lake stands the town
of Roosevelt, not very old, as you may judge by the
name, but substantially built. Well, when the reseJ'voir
is finished and the waters are about to be let in, "Roose-
velt must go."

CHAPTER XX.

TEMPLES OF THE DESERT.
Among all the mission churches built by the Spanish
missionary fathers, within the present limits of the
United States, extending from the meridian of San A.n-
tonio, Tex., to the Presidio of San Francisco, and em-
bracing such examples as San Gabriel, outside of Los
Angeles, and the mission church of San tJ ose, near San
Diego, built by Padre J unipero Serra-of whom Bret
Harte and Helen .J ackson wrote so s)
mpathetically-
there is not one superior architecturally, and there are
few equal to San Xavier del Bac. the church of the gen-
tle Papagoes. The drive from Tucson to the mission is
nine miles. To your left, within sound of its gurgling
waters, flows the Santa Cruz, that for 400 years has
filled a prominent place in the real and legendary history
of Arizona. Springing from the floor of the valley, the
Tuscon range of mountains and hills rise majestically
to the right., and stretch southward to an interminable
distance. Far away to the southwest-miles and miles
away-the "Twin Buttes," inflated with copper, tower
in imperial isolation. Five miles from Tucson the road
suddenly rises, and at once the bell-shaped dome and
the
foorish towers of the church of the Papagoes break
the sky line to the south. Another mile, and we enter
the reservation and are received with an infernal disson-
ance of barks, snarls and growls from a yelping pack of
unpedigreed curs of low estate. The road winds through
and around wikiups and cabins, past the humble grave-
yard where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,

170

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

and where a forest of plain wooden crosses records the
sublime hope and faith of the vanishing Papago. Before
entering the church, I called to pay my respects and
tender the tribute of my admiration to the three sister!:;
of the community of St. Joseph, who for years have de-
voted their lives to the mental and spiritual uplifting of
the Indian children of the reservation. I found the class
rooms clean, a plentiful supply of blackboards an,d mural
tablets, and the walls ornamented with sacred and other
pictures. The children were almost as dark as negroes,
their coal-black hair falling over their shoulders and
their shake-like eyes piercing and searching me as if I
were an enemy. What clothes they wore were clean, and
I found them as intelligent and as far advanced in their
elementary studies as the children of white parents.
"Sister," I said, "how often do you have mass hereT"
"Twice a month, sir."
"And in the meantimeî"
"In the meantime we are alone with the Blessed Sac-
rament. "
"Oh, the bishop then permits the 'Reservation' in
your oratory."
, , Yes, wíthout the Blessed Sacrament we could not
live here. IWe three are alone. We have no amus
ments,
no society, and, outside of ourselves, no companionship.
"\Ve do our own cooking, our own washing, our own
scrubbing, and teach these eighty-five children six hoursa
day and give them an hour's religious instruction on
Sunday. We also teach some of them music, and all of
them singing."
I shook hands with these heroic and estimable ladies,
thanked them for their courtesies, and as I passed across
the "patio
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PAPAGO "WIKIUP."

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

171

exquisite poem, "The Sister of Charity," by Gerald
Griffin, unbidden, visited by memory:
"Behold her, ye worldly, behold her, ye vain,
'Yho shrink from the pathway of virtue and pain;
,V-ho give up to pleasure your nights and your days,
Forgetful of service, forgetful of praise."

Before we enter the sacred and historic fane, let us
go back some centuries, and from the shadowy past
evoke the dead that we may learn from them something
of tEe early days of this holy place. The first white man,
of whom we have any record, to visit and preach to the
Pìmas and Papagoes of Southern Arizona, was that
great Jesuit missionary and explorer, Father Eusibio
Francisco I{ino. In 1691 he left the Yaquis of Sonora
on his wonderful missionary tour, and on foot crossed
the deserts, preaching to the Apaches, Yumas and J\I.ari-
copas on the way. Late in October, of the same year,
he entered the tribal lands of the Pimas and Papagoes,
anâ from the Pima town on the Santa Cruz, now St.
Xavier del Bac, a deputation was sent tò escort him to
their village. 'Vhen the priest entered the village, Coro,
chief of the Pimas and his warriors were parading and
dancing around the scalps of ..'-\..paches, whom they had
defeated in battle, and before whose dark and reeking
hair they were now shouting their paens of victory.
)Iange, the historian of the Pinlas-of ,,-horn the Papa-
goes are a branch-says that the morning after I{ino's
arrival, Coro paraded before hÜn 1,2()O warriors in all
the glory of war bonnets, bright blankets, head dresses
of eagle feathers, scalp shirts. shields of deer hide, and
gleaming lances. Father I{ino remained here two or
tnree weeks, teaching and instructing the tribe in the

172

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

Christian religion, and when about to leave, lnarked on
his chart the Pima valley and g
ve to it the nalne of
San Francisco Xavier del Bac, perverted by local usage
into "San Xavier del Bac." This intrepid missionary
traveled through Lower California, Sonora and Arizona,
instructing the desert Indians and baptizing, according
to Clavigero, 30,000 infants and adults. From 1691 to
1702 he visited all the tribes of these regions, soh::ing
many interesting problems of ethnology, erecting mis-
sions and collecting vast treasures of information about
the land and its wonderful people, the Yumas, Apaches,
Opates, Pimas and Zunis. He reached the Gila in 1694,
and said mass in the ancient ruin, the "Casa Grande,"
which is yet standing, in splendid isolation, amid a waste
of burning sand. In 1700 he built the first church, and.
according to his biographer, Ortega, "lIe used a light,
porous stone, very suitable for building."
The church records are extant from 1720-67, and show
that during these years. twenty-two Jesuit fathers suc-
cessively administered Bac and neighboring missions.
In 1768 the Franciscan fathers succeeded the Jesuits.
In that year Father Garces assumed charge of this
Pima mission. This extraordinary and saintly priest
was one of the great men of these early days. In his
quest for perishing souls he visited all the tribes of Ari-
zona, crossing deserts, scaling mountains and enduring
famine, thirst and insult. He lnapped, charted and
named mountains, rivers and Indian settlen1ents. He
took latitudes and longitudes, and was the first white
man to have reached the Grand Canyon fronl the west
and give it a specific name. IIis diary or the itinerary of
his travels was translated into English last year by that
eccentric, but honest, bigot, Elliott Coues. ,Vith
Ir.

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

173

Coues' historic, topographic and invaluable notes, the
diary of the priest, in two volumes, is a splendid addi-
tion to the ethnographic literature of the Southwest.
On the 19th of July, 1781, the great priest was mur-
dered at the mission of the Immaculate Conception-
now Yuma-in an Indian uprising against the Spaniards.
The cornerstone of the present beautiful church of the
Bac mission was laid by the Franciscan fathers in ] 783,
and the date, "1797," still legible over the door, records,
no doubt, its completion. The historian, Hubert H. Ban-
croft, calls the church a "magnificent structure," and
devotes three pages of his History of Arizona to this mis-
sion. In 1828, soon after ßlexico broke away from her
allegiance to the mother country and declared herself an
independent republic, chaos reigned, and the fathers
were compelled by the force of circumstances to aban-
don their missions in Arizona. The Pima and Pa pago
-converts assembled in the church every Sunday and feast
day, and for years, in fact until the return of a priest ap-
pointed by the Bishop of Durango, said the beads, sang
their accustomed hymns and made the stations of the
cross. The historic building shows sadly the wear and
tear of time and threatens to become a Inelancholy ruin
in a few more years.
Some time, let us hope, a gifted and conscientious his-
torian will appear and do for the early missionaries of
the Southwest, for the ICinos, the Garces, the Escalantes
and the other saintly and heroic priests and martyrs,
what Parknlan has done for the early Jesuits of Canada
and New York, and Bryan Clinch for the Spanish mis-
sionaries of Southern and Lower California. It is pop-
ularly believed that Coronado, on his way to the Zuni
pueblos of New :ßlexico, was the first white n1an to gaze

174

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

upon the now historic ruins known as the Casa Grande.
I have once or twice mentioned the nmne of Father
Eusebio l{ino, a distinguished missionary and a heroic
character, who merits more than an incidental reference
in a book of travel, or in a history of Northern J\lexico, or
of the Southwest of the United States.
Adolph Bandelier, Charles F. Lummis, and that inde-
fatigable historical burrower and delver into musty man-
uscripts, the late Dr. Elliott Coues, have settled for all
time, that neither Coronado nor anyone of his men ever
saw or heard of the "Casas Grandes "-the great build-
ings of Southern Arizona. The Jesuit priest, who was
the first white man to see and explore the mysterious
building-was Father Eusebio ICino, one of the most il-
lustrious and heroic men that ever trod the Southwest,
if not the American continent. The record of the trav-
els and missionary labors of this magnificent priest are
to be found in Bancroft's History of Arizona and Sonora,
in Elliott Coues' "On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer,"
in the "Diario" of Juan Mateo J\Iange, a military officer
who was with Padre Kino in some of his "entradas,"
or expeditions, and in the first volume of the second
series of the work entitled "Documentos para 10 His-
torio de Mexico," printed in J\lexico City in 1854. Lieu-
tenant ßlange, in his journal, writes of Father ICino,
whom he knew intimately: "He was a man of wonder-
ful talents, an astronomer, a mathematician, and cosmo-
grapher. "
Before I relate the incidents associated with the dis-
covery of the now famous ruins, the Casas Grandes, by
Father Kino, let me. hurriedly record something of the
life and history of this remarkable priest and model mis-
sIonary.

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

175

Eusebio Francisco Kuhne-or, as the Spaniards pro-
nounced it, Kino, was born at Trent, Austrian Tyrol, in
tne year 1640. He was a blood relation of the famous
Asiatic missionary, Father }';Iartin-Martin. After grad-
uating with honors, particularly in mathematics, I(ino
declined the chair of mathematics)n the University of
Bavaria, tendered to him by the Duke of Bavaria. Turn-
ing aside from the promise of a distinguished future in
Austria, he entered the Society of Jesus, and asked for
a place on the foreign missions. Arriving in l\fexico in
1680, the year of Newton's comet, he was drawn into a
friendly discussion on the origin of comets and the solar
system, with the Spanish astronomer, then in l\Iexico
City, Siguenza _y Gongora. His remarkable familiarity
with authorities and his great knowledge of the solar sys-
tems, determined his assignation to duty in Lower Cali-
fornia as cosmographer major on Admiral Isidore
Otondo's expedition of 1683.
Returning from Lower California, he was assigned
by his ecclesiastical superior to the mission of Sonora,
which then embraced all southern Arizona. On Decem-
ber 16, 1687, he left the J e
uit college at Guadalajara,
and traveling by burro and on foot, arrived in Sonora,
where he founded the mission of "Our Lady of Sor-
rows," which remained his headquarters until his death.
N ow begins his wonderful career.
Leaving his Indian mission in charge of an assistant
priest, he struck out for the ftlayo hunting grounds, and
entering the valley of the "Rio l\fagdalena, preached to the
l\fayos, and gathering them in, founded the pueblo or vil-
lage settlement of S1. Ignatius. He now swung toward
the north and established among the Run10ri the pueblo
of 81. Joseph of Rumoris, now known as Iinur-Ïs.

176

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

Returning to his mission of Our Lady of Sorrows, he
waited for the coming of Father Juan Maria de Salva-
tierra, the superior and visitador, or visitor of the Indian
missions of ß1:exico. This was the Father Salvatierra
who established the "Pious Fund" for the California
Indians, and who afterward opened the mission to the
Digger Indians and became known as the Apostle of
Lower California.
A few days after the arrival of Salvatierra, the two
priests set out on a missionary itinerary, visiting and
preaching to the tribes of northern Sonora, till they
came to Cocaspera, near N ogales, -where they separated;
Salvatierra returning by Our Lady of Sorrows to Guad-
alaj ara.
Father ICino tarried for some time at Cocaspera, in-
structing the Indians, and early in J\lay, 1691, started on
his historic desert journey to the Santa Cruz valley,
where he preached to the Pimas and founded the pueblo
and nlission of San Xavier del Bac.
To describe the fatigues and hardships of a journey
in those days from N ogales to Tucson, to record the
varied and very interesting interviews and experiences
with the tribes, 111any of whom had never before seen
a w
ite man, to relate the hardships and trials of the
great missionary, would put too severe a tax on my read-
ers, so I hurry on to the Casas Grandes.
In 1694 Lieutenant Juan J\fateo Mange, nephew of
Petriz de Crusate, ex-governor of New ßfexico, was com-
missioned to accompany Father Kino on his visits to
the Indian tribes, and on his exploring expeditions, .and
to report in writing what he saw and learned. J',lange
joined the great prie
t at his mission of Our Lady of
Sorrows on February 7, 1694; they crossed the Sierra

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

177

del Comedio, and on the 15th reached the coast, first of
white men from Pimeria Alta-from the west-to look
out upon the waters of the great gulf. At Turbutana,
1\lange left the priest for a time, and went up the Col-
orado river to a rancheria named Cups, so called from
a smoking, rocky cave in the neighborhood. Returning
he joined I(ino at Caborca, bringing news of famous
ruins said to exist on the banks of a river entering into
the Colorado, or River of the Immaculate Conception, as
Kino christened it. This was the first intimation the
Spaniards had of these remarkable buildings. The party
now returned to the mission of Our Lady of Sorrows,
Sonora. ,Vhile here, some Indians, Pimas from San
Xavier, on. the Santa Cruz, Arizona, came on a visit to
the priest, who questioned them on the existence of the
pre-historic ruins near the Gila river. They informed
hinl that these wonderful ruins were standing on the
desert, but of their origin they knew nothing.
In October, 1694, Kino, accompanied and settled Fran-
cis Xavier Saeta as missionary at Caborca, where he was
murdered by th
Yumas, _A_pril 2, 1695. Leaving Saeta
at this mission,
-'ather I(ino now set out alone on an
expedition to the Casas Grandes. He reached the Gila,
camped for the night, and on the morning of November
30, entered the region of the ruins, and in the largest
of the three buildings offered up the Holy Sacrifice of
the l\Iass. l\lange, on page 25 of his published report,
in Spanish, gives the whole history, and bestows great
praise on Kino.
The pliest was the first white man who saw and ac-
curately described these now famous pre-Columbian
ruins. This wonderful priest tramped the valley of the
Santa Cruz to the Gila. Passing down the Gila to its

178

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

mouth, after exploring the country, he retraced his
steps, penetrating the land north of the Gila river for
some distance, and ascending the Salt river and other
northern branches of the Gila. His explorations did not
end here. Proceeding east, he explored the valley of the
San Pedro and its branches, then the Gila to the Mim-
bres, and on to the Rio Grande and the l\iessila valley.
He went from Yuma, crossed the Colorado desert, and
traced the Colorado river to its mouth. He visited sixty-
three tribes, sub-tribes and families, studying the wars,
customs, traditions, folk-lore and habits of the Indians.
He founded missions, built churches, made maps and
tracings, took observations and left us a mass of valua-
ble information on the botany, geology and temperature
of the country. His map was in his time, and long after
his death, the best delineation of Sonora, southern ....t\ri-
zona and the gulf coast of Southern California. His
life was an unparalleled record of devotion, heroism and
dauntless courage. Of him we may repeat what Bacon
wrote of Pius V., to whom Christendom is indebted for
the victory of L
panto: "I am astonished that the Ro-
man church has not yet canonized this great !llan."
On February 5, 1702, Father Kino, accompanied by
Father Gouzalez (the same missionary who was with
Kino on his excursion to the mouth of the Colorado),
started on a missionary expedition to the Gila Indians,
and went from tribe to tribe, till he arrived at the mis-
sion of S1. Ignatius on the Colorado river. Here Father
Gouzalez, worn out with hardship and illness, lay down
and died. Mter giving Christian burial to his priestly
companion, the great priest returned to his mission in
Sonora. His report of his entrada, or expedition, bears
the date April 2, 1702. He never again saw the Colorado

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

179

or Gila. He was growing old, and his strong constitu-
tion was beginning to give way under the weight of
years, and the wear and tear of missionary travel and
missionary labor. His last, and, in a sense, his most
extended journey, was made toward the north, during
the autumn of 1706. He left his mission late in October,
and swinging around by way of Remedios, made his
wonderful tour to the Santa Clara mountains, preach-
ing to and evangelizing the tribes on his way. From
the summit of Santa Clara he looked out for the last
time on the waters of the Gulf of California, noting the
continuity of Lower Canlornia from Pimeria, the main
land, and fixing for all time its peninsular character.
This was the last, long, eartnly pilgrimage of the great
Jesuit and typical missionary, whose explorations and
fearless endurance on behalf of perishing souls, lift him
unto a plane of canonization and a pedestal of fame. He
returned to his mission in Sonora, where he passed his
few remaining years, training his swarthy converts _ in
decency and clean living, making short visits to neigh-
boring pueblos, and adding by his heroism and saintly
life another name to the catalogue of brilliant and won-
derful men for whom the world and the church are in-
debted to the Society of Jesus. He died in 1711, aged
70, having surrendered thirty of these seventy years to
the saving and civilizing of the Sonora and Arizona
members of that stran
e and mysterious race, the ..Amer-
ican Indian.
Let us hope that some day a Catholic Parkman will
appear, gifted with his nlarvelous fascination of sty'le,
his tireless industry, his command of language, with an
appreciation of the supernatural, and an admiration of
saintly asceticism, which the Harvard master had not,

180

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

and do for the dauntless Spanish missionaries of Lower
California, the coast and the Southwest, what Parkman
díd for the French missionary priests of Canada and
western N ew York, when he bequeathed to us his immor-
tal' , Jesuits of North America."

CHAPTER XXI.

A MIRACLE OF NATURE.

On the earth's surface there is no plat of ground
bristling with sharper problems for the microscopist, or
that offers to the analyst more interesting specimens for
examination, than the eight or ten square miles of land
in northeastern Arizona, known as the Petrified Forest.
I-Iere nature exults in accomplished miracles, in mar-
velous and seemingly impossible transmutations, in
achievements transcending imagination and the possi-
bilities of science. fIere, where the giant trees fell in
the daY8 before man was upon the earih to count time,
they lie to-day, with shape and outline unchanged, with
bark and cell and nodule unaltered to the eye, with
everything the same save that alone which constitutes a
tree and gives to it its own specific name. Here, for
miles around, the land is chased with unpolished jewels,
which ask but the touch of the lapidary's art to reproduce

Iilton's "firmament of living sapphires." They re-
main with us to bear imperishable testimony to the dec-
laration of the evangelist, that, "with God, all things are
possible. ' ,
"\Vhen the adventurous Spaniards returned home from
the Orinoco and the shores of the Spanish 1fain, after
their fruitless expedition in quest of the "El Dorado"-
the gilded man-and told of the wondrous things and
monstrous creations they had seen-the Lake of Pitch,
the disappearing rivers, the land and sea monsters, the
men with tails, the Amazons, the female warriors who
gave their name to the greatest river in America-the

182

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

world nlarveled, but believed. Yet when Andres Do-
rantes and Alonzo Maldonado returning after years of
wandering in the desert and mountain lands of south-
western America, recorded the existence of a great forest
they had visited, where precious stones of jasper and
onyx strewed the ground, and where trees of agate and
carnelian, blown down by a mighty wind, encumbered
the earth, there was an uppricking of ears among the
learned men of Madrid, then a wagging of heads and
finally loud and incredulous laughter. As well ask them
to believe in the existence of a herd of cattle suspended
in mid-air, frozen into rigidity and retaining their shapes
and outlines. Yet the forest was here and is here now,
unchanged and unchangeable.
In the nlemorial to congress, adopted in 1895, by the
legislative assembly of Arizona, requesting that Chal-
cedony Forest be made a national park, the area of the
forest is defined to be '
ten miles square, covered with
trunks of agatized tre
s, SOllie of which measure over
200 feet in length, and from seven to ten feet in diam-
eter." In this official statement we have the limits of
the wonderful region accurately defined, and the mate-
rial of the trees recorded.
I have seen the petrified trees of Yellowstone Park,
some of them yet standing, the stone trees of Wyoming,
and those of the Calistoga Grove of California, but the
petrified region of Arizona is the only place in the world
where the trees are in such number as to merit the name
of a forest. In delicacy of veining, in brilliancy and va-
riety of coloring, they outclass all other petrifications.
But Professor Tolman, the geologist of the University
of Arizona, tells me there is another notable distinction
which places this forest of chalcedony in a class by itself.

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

183

The trees are much, very much more ancient than those
of Yellowstone park. Of course, I cannot mark time with
Professor Tolman when figuring upon the very remote
beginning of creation. I am yet a Christian, and will, I
am satisfied, die in my belief in revelation. My studies
in archaeology and paleontology but confirm me in my
attachment to the orthodox school of theology. Dr. Tol-
man and the school to which he belongs count by milIions
of years
I count by thousands. "The petrified trees of
all other known localities," said the learned professor
of geology, "are of tertiary age, while the Arizona for-
est goes far back into 11esozoic time, probably to the
Triassic formation. The difference in their antiquity is
therefore many millions of years."
And, now, before I attempt to describe this great won-
der, as it appeared to me, let me for a moment linger
by the wayside. About sixteen years ago there was a
man named Adam Hanna, who lived between the Santa
Fe railroad and the nearest point to the petrified forest.
When the officials of the road decided to build a station
due north of the forest and about eight miles from the
Natural Bridge, they gave it the name of Adamana, in
compliment to Mr. Adam Hanna, upon whom fell the
honor of conducting scientists and visitors to the forest.
At Adamana, I stepped from the train, and, with a com-
panion, took the stage for the petrified lands. 11idway,
between the station and the Natural Bridge, we left the
wagon and struck across the country to visit the ruins
of an Indian pueblo and fortification, whose people had
disappeared many years before the Spaniards crossed
the mountains of Arizona. Approaching the ruin we en-
tered the tribal graveyard, where some years ago a vast
accumulation of silver and copper ornaments, of agate

184

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

spearheads, arrow tips of jasper and obsidian and beau-
tiful pottery was unearthed. These were buried with
the dead, whose bones had wasted to dust many years be-
fore the white vandals had rifled the graves. The pre-
historic buildings are now a confused mass of sun-dried
brick and sandstone, but when ]\1:ulhausen was here sixty
years ago, the divisionary lines of 300 houses or rooms
were traceable, and a few feet of a wall standing. "'\Vhen
ihe exploring party for the Pacific railroad passed here
in 1853, it was said that traces of unique pictographs or
symbolic writings yet remained on the face of a neigh-
boring cliff. A little to the west of Chalcedony Park are
the remains of another abandoned vil1age. A few scat-
tered huts are still nearly intact, unique, ghost-like,
alone, unlike anything found elsewhere upon the earth.
The material entering .into their construction is like
unto that of which the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse
is built, for "the building of the walls thereof are of
jasper, and the foundations adorned with al
manner of
precious stones."
The ancient builders selected silicified logs of uniform
size for their dwellings, and, with adobe and precious
chips of Chalcedony, chinked the valuable timbers. Never
did prince or millionaire choose more beautiful or more-
imperishable material for even a single room of his
palace than the trunks of these trees which stood erect
ages before the first man saw the setting sun.
When I entered the wonderful forest and ascended
an elevation from which I could command my surround-
ings, I experienced a feeling of disappointment. From
magazine articles and letters of travelers, I was led to
believe that this mystic region was a dream of scenic
joy. I confess I was keyed up too high by these descrip-

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

185

tions, and for a time was not in accord with my environ-
ment. The land here is a desert, lifted 5,000 to 6,000
feet above sea level, and cut up into small mesas or table
levels, into many ridges, buttes, gulches and miniature
ravines carrying little vegetation. Flowing southward,
into a winding channel, is the Lithodendron (stone
river), or, more correctly, creek. The valley of this river
at a certain bend widens out to the east and west, form-
ing an alluvial depression whose banks and slopes are
rugged, spurred and ravined. Here one enters the heart
of the petrified forest, and the section known as Chal-
cedony Park. And now everything and the position of
everything are startling. On the knolls, spurs and iso-
lated elevations, in the hollows, ravines and gulches, on
the surface of the lowlands, piled up as if skidded by tim-
bermen or flung recklessly across each other in heaps,
lie the silicified logs in greatest confusion. Everywhere,
with unstinted prodigality, the ground is sown with
gems, with chips, splinters and nodules of agate, jasper
and carnelian of all shapes and sizes, and displaying all
the colors of the lunar rainbow.
Buried in the sand hills rising above the valley to the
west, are petrified logs squaring three and four feet
at the butts which protrude from the beetling bluffs.
Curiously enough, specimens frolll these trunks are not
of agate color, but of a soft blending of brown and gray
and absolutely opaque, while chips from the trees in the
valley are translucent, and many of them transparent
as glass. The state of mineralization in which many of
these valley trees are found alnlost lifts them into ma-
terial for gems and precious stones, opals, jasper, ame-
thysts and emeralds. One of the most extraordinary fea-
tures of this marvelous region is the Natural Bridge, an

186

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

agatized tree, spanning a miniature canyon twenty-five
feet deep and thirty feet wide, on which a man may
safely cross. The tree is in an excellent state of preser-
vation and shows no marks of sand abrasion; it lies
diagonally across the ra vine and measures a span of
forty-four feet. From end to butt the tree is 110 feet
l(lng and, as with all the stone logs of this quarter
of the forest, there are no branches adhering to top or
body. So much of the material of the forest retains its
natural color, bark and shape, and so true is the piling
thàt looking on them one would be inclined to believe
that some settler, who was clearing the land, had left for
dinner and might at any moment return and fire the pile.
Another very singular and as yet unexplained phenome-
non are the rings or divisionary markings encircling
many of the logs from end to end. These ring marks
girdle the trunks every eighteen inches and do not vary
the eighth of an inch. Either by the disintegration of
the mesa or by torrential floods the trees have been car-
ried down from higher levels and in the moving suffered
many fractures, some of them being broken into frag-
ments. N ow all these logs, measuring from twenty to
ninety feet, broke transversely and every time the break
was on the ring. How these rings were formed remains
to this day an unsolved problem. The material of these
trees is so hard that some years ago an abrasive com-
pany of Chicago made preparations to grind the logs
into emery. Their plant was brought from Chicago to
Adamana, where it is now falling to pieces from rust and
neglec't. In answer to my enquiry why it was not set up,
I was told that a Canadian company, at about the same
time, began at Thfontreal the manufacture of abrasive
sand and lowered the price of the material below the

BY PATH A
D TRAIL.

187

point wher(t it would pay to grind up the trees. Out of
this agatized wood have been manufactured most beauti-
ful table tops, mantels, clock cases, pedestals and orna-
mental articles. But the cost, of sawing, chiseling and
polishing make the goods very expensive. To give you
an example. 'Yhen Tiffany's workmen started to saw off
a section from one of these logs to form
pedestal for
the silver vase of the Bartholdi presentation, they began
with a six-inch saw of Sheffield steel aided with diamond
dust. Sawing eight hours a day, they .were five days
cutting through a four-foot log which wore their six-inch
saw to a ribbon one-half inch wide. Although there are
millions of tons of the petrified material scattered around
this region, the lust of gain and accumulation, which be-
comes a passion with some of us, would soon strip the
forest to the naked desert if congress had not intervened
to save it. For forty years' despoilers haye been rifling
the land, gathering and shipping the silicified wood to
the east.
fuch has been sold to museUlllS and private
collectors, but much more has been shipped to dealers
and manufacturers. Visitors to the park may carry
away with theln a few specimens, but no dealing or
trafficking in the precious material is now permitted.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE PRE-HISTORIC RUIN.
I am writing near the foothills of the Catalina moun-
tains and from the bed of an evaporated inland sea. It
is now a desert whose vegetation is unlike anything seen
east of the 1Iissouri river. Around me tower the statu-
esque "pithaya" or candelabrum cactus, bearing in sea-
son luscious fruit; the massive bisnaga, of wondrous for-
mation and erratic habits, whose fruit is boiled by the
Maricopa squaws and made into palatable candy. From
the slopes of the mountains spring giant specimens of
the thorny "sahuaro," resembling from afar monuments
erected by man to commemorate some great historical
events in the life of the early people. Further down,
near the bed of an exha usted stream, are pa tches of
withered "palmilla" or bear's grass, from which the
Pima women make waterproof baskets. Around the
desert, miles and miles away, rise porphyritic mountains,
the Rincons, the Santa Rita, the Tortillitas, grim,
savage and withal picturesque and weirdly fasci-
nating. Their rugged sides are torn, gashed and cut to
pieces, their cones now cold and dead, stand sharp and
clear against a sky of opalescent clearness. In times
past, in years geologically not very remote, the flanks of
these towering hills were red with fire and their peaks
ablaze with volcanic flame.
Gazing on them from afar you experience a sensation
of awe, a consciousness of the earth's great ag
domi-
nates you, and down the ayenues of time, down through
the ages there comes to you the portentous question of

190

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

the inspired author of Ecclesiasticus: "Is there any-
thing whereof it may be said: see, this is new; it hath
been already of old time, which was before us." Almost
within gunshot of where I sit repose in sol
tary isola-
tion a group of buildings, the despair of antiquarians and
historically very old. The central building is a large
edifice, whose adobe walls have resisted for many centu-
ries the erosion of time, the abrasion of drifting sand
and the wear and tear of torrential storms. This is the
now historic "Casa Grande" or Great House, so named
by the early Spanish explorers. Its walls are ahnost
oriented to the four cardinal points, built of adobe blocks
of unequal length and laid with symmetry in a celnent
of the same composition as the walls. This famous group
of ruins rests on a raised plateau, about two miles to
the south of the Gila river, in the midst of a thick growth
of mesquite. l\Iany of the buildings, from two to four
stories high, are now roofed and kept in repair by the
United States government, and are included in the pro-
tected govern
ental reserves. Around the princi pal
buildings are heaps of ruins and many acres of shapeless
debris, all that remain of an ancient Indian town or
pueblo that was abandoned long before the daring Span-
iard, Francisco de Coronado, in 1540, entered Arizona.
It was through this wild and mystic region that Padre

1arcos made his weird expedition in 1539 in quest of the
elusive seven cities of Cibola. In his report of his ex-
plorations he mentions the great buildings, then known
to the Pima tribe by its Indian name of "Chichilitical."
Here, too, after wandering over thousands of miles of
mountains and barren deserts, passed the daring adven-
turers and explorers, Pedro de Tehan, Lopez de Car-
dines and Cabezza de Vaca, the solitary survivors of Nar-

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191

vaes' unfortunate expedition which went to pieces at the
mouth of the Suwanee river, one hundred years before
De Soto crossed the
Iississippi. After them came the
fearless and saintly missionary, Padre Eusebio I{ino, so
highly praised by Venaga, the early historian of Cali-
fornia. Of the time when the Cas a Grande was left deso-
late before the coming of the Spaniards as early as
1539, or when the ground was broken for the foundations
of the town, whose walls even then were an indistinguish-
able heap of ruins, the neighboring tribes had no tradi-
tion. It is really wonderful how these structures of Slill-
dried brick have resist
d the ravages of decay and the
elements for 500 years of known time.
These mysterious people carried from the Gila River
an irrigation canal three miles long, 27 feet wide and
10 feet deep, and converted the barren sands around
them into fertile gardens. The word "pueblo" in Span-
ish means simply a village, but in American ethnography
it has obtained a special significance from the peculiar
style of the structures or groups of buildings scattered
along the Gila and Salt River valleys, whose architecture
was unlike that of any buildings found outside the north-
ern frontiers of l\Iexico, Arizona and N ew
fexico. The
most fertile valleys of these regions were occupied by a
semi-civilized and agricultural race. The face of these
lands was dotted with buildings :five and six stories high,
held in common by many families, and in many instances
the houses and villages were superior to those of the
new existing pueblo towns. They were built for defense,
the walls of great thickness and the approaches in many
cases difficult. At least a century, perhaps nlany centu-
ries, before the coming of the Spaniards, the decline be-
gan and continued with the certainty of a decree of fate,

192

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

until but a me:r;e remnant of the town builders and their
singular structures now remains in the valley of the Rio
Grande and the land of the
ioqui. Bartlett and Hubert
Bancroft, the historians, are of the opinion that, at one
time, in the Salt River country there was a population
of 200,000 lndians- Pimas, l\Iaricopas and Pa pagoes-of
whom buE a pitiful remnant now remains. Of a certain-
ty, tribal wars and, it may be, famine and pestilence wore
down the race and in a few years the white man's vices
and the white man's diseases will finish them. 'Vhether
they woul
ever have advanced beyond their rude archi-
tecture and simple hoe culture is very doubtful. I am of
the opinion, from a study of and experience with the
Brazilian tribes, that when the Europeans came to the
southwest the indigenous people were descending from
barbarism to savagery, and, like the Aztec tribes of

Iexico, would, with the march of time, become cannibals.
Savage man cannot of himself move upward. The negro
of equatorial Africa was a savage long before the time
of Herodotus; for four thousand years he took not one
single step toward civilization, and Livingstone and
Stanley found him the same brutalized man that he was
in the days of the first Rameses. St. Paul, two thou-
sand years ago, in language that admits of no equivoca-
tion, said that it was impossible for Ulan to attain to a
knowledge of the higher truths without a teacher. The
low state of some of the American tribes, the South Sea
islander, and the African savage, when first encountered
by civilized man, would seem to proye that, unassisted by
a higher type of the hunlan race, the savage cannot ris8
out of his degradation. ..A.lid if even nlan, when having
gone down to savagery, could never ascend the steep de-
cline he lÏad once trodden, how was it possible for the

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

193

half-ape-half-man of the Agnostic to lift himself to a
higher plane
I cannot resist the malicious suspicion
that all these puerile and violent attempts to account for
the origin of man were intended to destroy the credibility
of revelation and belief in the divinity and perpetuity of
Cnristiani ty.
Here, near the Casa Grande, I saw for the :first time
the alligator lizard or "Gila monster," imprisoned in a
wire enclosure on the ranch of a
lexican vaquero. Full
grown, this repulsive reptile is three feet long, of a
black-brownish color, with the snout of a crocodile and
tIìe eye of a snake. The hideous and venomous thing
bore an evil reputation three thousand years ago. He
is the only surviving reptile that answers to the Biblical
description of the cockatrice or basilisk. In those early
days it inspired loathing and was shunned for its subtlety
and dreaded bite. It was selected, with the asp and other
poisonous creatures, by Isaiah to illustrate the benign
influence of our Divine Lord in subduing the fierce pas-
sions of men which he compared to ravenous beasts and
poisonous reptiles. In prophetic allegory the inspired
Judean foretells the time when "the suckling child shall
play on the hole of the asp and the weaned child shall put
his hand in the den of the basilisk." Is the bite of this
repulsive creature fatal
'Yhen the Gila monster at-
tains its growth and is not in a torpid or semi-torpid
condition its bite is as serious as that of the rattlesnake.
"\Vhen young or in a torpid state, often for four months
of the year, the "hila" does not secrete poison. Ignor-
ance of the habits of the reptile have led to interminable
disputes and discussions making an agreement of opinion
impossible. 'Vhen I was in Yuma I met a surgeon who,
last year, treated two men who had been bitten. I need

194

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

not enter into the details of how they happened to be
bitten. One man came to the surgeon last November,
three hours after the "hila" sank his teeth in his hand.
The doctor cauterized the wound and the man experi-
enced no more inconvenience than he would from the
bite of a gopher. The other man, Ernest Phair by name,
was bitten at four in the afternoon, had the wound cauter-
ized and treated with antiseptics two hours after the
bite. At 10 0 'clock that night he was" out of his mind,"
his limbs became shockingly tumefied and at 2 o'clock in
the mqrning Phair died. This loathsome creature of
giant wrack is disappearing and in twenty or thirty years
it will be extinct. Reference here to Yuma reminds me
that nowhere in the southwest have I seen tramps, hoboes
and yegg men behave themselves as well as they do in
this town. When I mentioned this good behavior of the
"floating brigade" to Sheriff Livingston he said that
conditions made for it. ' 'You see," continued the sheriff,
"there is practically no escape from Yuma for a crimi-
nal. The only avenues open are the railroad and the
river. To strike across the country would mean death
from tliirst on the desert. This accounts for the fact
that the tramps and hoboes are very peaceful in Yuma.
The river and railroads offer no hope to an escaped
prisoner, for they are too well policed."

L\..ccompanied by a guide, I left Casa Grande early in
the forenoon on burros or donkeys, and struck southeast
across the Aravapi desert, hoping to reach the historic
town of Tucson some time in the afternoon of the next
day. Passing over ten miles of desert we entered the
canyon of Santa Catalina in the mountains of the same
name. For four miles we traveled through a dark and
dismal gorge enclosed by walls 1,000 feet above the trail

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

195

and no place wider than an ordinary street. "\Vherever
a cat could stand a cactus grew, whose thorny plates
matted the face of the escarpment. Sheltered from the
sun by walls of solid granite, porphyry or basalt, the
great pass was cool and the silence intense. Here and
there were piles of loose stones and .boulders deposited
when the rains of the summer solstice swept madly down
the flanks of the Catalinas and swelled this gorge to a
rushing torrent. i\Vhen we emerged from the gloomy
canyon we saw before us another desert, stretching away
many miles to the Santa Rita range, supposed by the
early Spanish explorers to contain fabulous hordes of
gold and silver. To our right rose the Baboquivari, the
sacred mount of the Papagoes. A.cross this desert four
hundred years ago marched the Spanish missionary and
explorer, Father J\Iarcos of Nizza, on his way to the
Zuni towns in northern Arizona to bear a message of
saqvation to these strange people, "who sat in darkness
and in the shadow of death."

CHAPTER XXIII.

A CITY IN THE DESERT.

Nowhere is the dividing line between the old and the
new so sharply drawn as in Tucson. I do not mean the
growth from a frontier or bush village into a city or that
of a mining camp into a town as in the mineral states.
To this transition we are accustomed. Here the modern
city has grown away from the old l\lexican pueblo which
is yet a numerically strong part of it, growing out into
the desert, leaving the quaint old Mexican village in
possesSion of the fertile valley of Santa Cruz. It is not a
divorce-a mense et thoro-from bed and board, nor yet
a separation, but rather a spreading out, an elongation
of the young giant towards and into the desert. The his-
toric pueblo, so full of romance and story, is left in pos-
session of its own ground, its own religion, language, tra-
dition and customs. Its people have a voice in the selec-
tion of the mayor and are eligible for any office in the
gift of the citizens, are protected by the same laws and
the same police as are those of whiter color.
Tucson had a name and was a rancheria of Pimas,
Papagoes and Sobaipuri before the great missionary,
Padre I{ino, visited it in 1691. He was the first white
Ir'an that ever crossed the Santa Cruz from the west and
entered Tucson. In 1773 it was still a rancheria, but
many of its swarthy denizens had already been received
into the church; it was visited regularly by the priests
of San Xavier del Bac and was now San Jose de Tucson.
In 1771 the Spanish garrison or presidio at Tubac was
shifted to Tucson, a resident priest appointed and the

198

BY PATH A1.D TRAIL.

adobe church of St. Augustin built, the walls of which
are yet standing on the east bank of the Santa Cruz, one
of the disappearing rivers of the southwest. \Vith the
coming of the railroad in 1880 the really modern Tucson
begins. In 1803 two meteoric bodies were found here
weighing respectively 1,600 and 63:3 pounds. The rub-
bish that has been written about Tucson in the news-
papers, books and magazines of the east, is only matched
by the myths and fables published about Santa Fe. From
before Father l(ino's visit in 1691 Tucson was never
heard of. Since then, down to the building of the South-
ern Pacific, its history is a record of blood and murders,
of Apache raids, of l\Iexican feuds and American out-
laws, gamblers and hold-up men who exterminated each
other or were lynched by the law-abiding citizens. To-
day Tucson is a city of law and order and will soon be
the metropolis of Arizona. So much by way of a preface
and now let us continue our impressions of the city.
The early Spaniards civilized and Christianized the
Aztecs of Mexico and intermarried with them. From
these unions were begotten the race known to-day as
l\iexican, though the average American very often con-
fuses-and very annoyingly to the 1fexican-the Indian
tribes of the l'tfexican republic with the descendants _ of
the Spanish colonists and military settlers and the daugh-
ters of the warriors of
Iontezunla. The Spaniards did
sometliing more. They imparted to their descendants
courtesy, civility and high ideals. They taught them all
those nameless refinen1ents of speech and manner which
impart a gracious flavor to association and a charm to
companionship.
I cannot help thinking that the Americans of Tucson
have profited very much from their intercourse with the

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

199

Mexicans, for nowhere in the southwest have I met a
more civil and companionable people.
The modern American is so full of the spirit of com-
merciafism and the demon of material progress; so mas-
terful. in all that makes for political expansion and the
achievement of great enterprises, that he is in danger of
forgetting his duties to God and the courtesies of social
]ife.
To-day I took my second stron through the l\Iexican
section of Tucson and noted the slow but steady en-
croachment of Anglo-Celtic influence. I saw with regret
that many of the old Spanish names of the streets had
disappeared and that other and less euphonious ones had
replaced them. The Calle Santa Rita has gone down in
the struggle to hold its own with the "gringo" and
Cherry street has usurped its traditional privileges, and
our good-natured friend l\IcK:enna has his Celtic name
blazoned where Santa Maria del Guadeloupe, by imme-
morial right, ought to be.
But, with the exception of these street names, the adop-
tion of a more modern dress, and the absence of old time
customs, fiestas and ceremonies, or their modification,
the people are the same with whom I mingled two years
ago in Zacatecas, C-qernavaca, and other towns in J\fexico.
Here are the narrow streets, with rows of one storied
flat-roofed houses of sun baked brick, or adobes, with
here and there a house whose floor is "rammed" earth.
Remember that lumber here a few years ago cost $80 the
thousand. In early times there were houses with not a
solitary nail anywhere in or about them, for the window
frames and doors were held in place by strips of rawhide.
The women no longer wear the many-striped "Rebozo"
or the "Tapole" which concealed all the face but the left

200

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

eye. Thè Moors, who held possession of nearly one-half
of Spain for 3:lmost 800 years, grafted on the Iberian
race many of their own customs, manners and Oriental
dress. The Spanish women inherited from them the
"Rebozo," the "Tapole" and concealment of the face,
and the !iexican senoritas adopted the dress of their
Spanish sisters. I found the men leaning, as of old,
against the door jambs and walls of the mescal shops,
smoking their soothing cigarettes, made by rolling a
pinch of tobacco in a piece of corn-husk, and apparently
supremely happy. But I missed the picturesque
"zarape" and the many colored blanket of cotton or
wool, and the sweeping sombrero, wide as a phaeton
wheel, and banded with snakes of silver bullion. Through
the ancient street of the old pueblo-the main street of
the town-there passed and repassed a motley aggrega-
tion of quaint people, Papago Indians, "greasers," half-
castes, l\Iexicans and American ranchers, herders and
cow-punchers. You IUust be careful here, for it is yet
early in the forenoon, and the street is filled with horses,.
mules and burros loaded with wood or garden truck for
the market and dealers, and with tawny-complexioned
men and women carrying huge loads on their heads and
followed by bare-footed children and half-starved and
wild looking mongrels, :first cousins to the sneaking coy-
otes of the Sierras.
The sure sign of racial absorption comes when a peo-
ple begin to adopt the diet and cooking of the foreign ele-
ment with whom they must live and with "horn they must
associate, at least commercially. To test how far this
process of assimilation and incorporation had aIr.eady
advanced among the l\iexicans, I dined to-day at one of
their restaurants. Fortunately or ala:;! it ,vas the saIne

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

201

familiar and palatable meal I had so often sampled in
the inland towns of the neighboring republic. Beginning
with" soppaseca" or vegetable soup, I had my choice
of one or all of the dishes of "enchiladas," "tamales,"
"tortillas;" plates of "frijoles" and" chile con carne"
seasoned with "chile Colorado" or any other kind of
pepper. The dessert introduced "dulces, " coffee or
chocolate, cheese, cigarettes and Chihuahua biscuits. Evi-
dently after 1ifty ") ears of occupation the absorption of
the
Iexican by the Anglo-Celt is yet in its intial stage
in Tucson.
The" enchilada" and the" tamale" are of Aztec origin.
The enchilada is a cake of corn batter dipped in a stew
of tomatoes, cheese and onions seasoned with pepper
and served steaming hot. The tamale is made from
chopped meat, beef, pork or chicken, or a mixture of all
three, combined with cornmeal, boiled or baked in husks'
of corn. These dishes, when properly prepared, are de-
licious and are gradually finding their way to American
tables and restaurants. Cooked as the :ßlexicans cook
them, they would be a valuable addition to the admirable
menus of our eastern hotels.
Mter dinner I visited the half acre of ground which
was at one time the" God's acre," the last resting place
of the early "comers," many of whom died with their
boots on. In those days-1855 to 1876-the Apaches
swooped down from their mountain lairs, and attac
ing
tñe suburbs of the town and the neighboring ranchos,
killed the men and boys, drove off the cattle and carried
back with them the women and children. As I Inay have
to deal some other time wth this extraordinary and
crafty tribe and fierce race of men, I will say here, only
in anticipation, that the Apaches of Arizona were the

202

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

shrewdest and most revengeful fighters ever encoull-:-
tered by white Inen within the present limits of the
United States. Fiercer than the mountain lion, wilder
than the coyote he called his brother, inured to great
fatigue, to extreme suffering of soul and body, to the
extremes of heat and cold and to bearing for days and
nights the pangs of hunger and thirst, the Apache Indian
was the most terrible foe the wilderness produced. In
those early days this neglected piece of ground, "where
heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap," recorded
the history of the pioneer days of the American Tucson.
The headboards marking the graves informed the visiting
stranger that this man was "killed by the Apaches, " this
one "died of wounds in a fight with the Apaches," this
other "scalped, tortured and killed by the Apach
s,"
and-this family. in the little corner of the graveyard-
"this whole family, wife, husband and six children was
wiped out by the Apaches." But these days are gone
forever; the Apache is 'imprisoned on the reservation and
we may safely say of him what Bourienne said over the
grave of Bonaparte, "No sound can awake him to glory
again.' ,
To-day, with a population of 17,000, and a property
valuation of many millions, this city is the social and
commercial oasis of Arizona. The city is wel1 supplied
wi th churches, schoolhouses and public institutions. The
Carnegie free library, erected at a cost of $25,000, is
surrounded by well kept grounds; it faces \Yashington
park, the military plaza of the old l\Iexican presidio, and
t.he largest public park in the city. The Sisters of S1.

T oseph look after the parochial schools, have a very fine
academy for young ladies and conduct one of the best
hospitals of Arizona. There are twelve hotels in the

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"WHITE EAGLE" AND "THE PUMA" APACHES O
PARADE.

BY PATE AND TRAIL.

203

city and, one of theIn, the Santa Rita, is architecturally
one of tne most novel buildings of the southwest. It is
named from the Santa Rita range of mountains and
forms, with San Augustin's Cathedral, the most impos-
ing structure in Tucson. The city council is experiment-
ing in street oiling, not sprinkling the streets with oil, as
in San Diego, southern California, but soaking them, so
that the fine triturated sand forms with the oil a fairly
durable and smooth surface.
On these same streets one is always running up
against some interesting and peculiar varieties of the
N oachic stock. Here are Chinese in quest of the elusive
dollar, stage ghosts in Oriental dress, quiet, unobtrusive,
always looking down on the dust as if examining the
minute particles entering into the composition of th
ir
material selves, and apparently doing a "heap" of think-
ing; here, also, is his cousin germain-the gentle and
innocent-looking Papago or Pima of the mysterious abo-
riginal race, sun-scorched and wind-tanned with long
coal-black hair and keen snake-like eye. He is in from
the reservation of San Xavier del Bac, nine Iniles south
of here, asking a dollar for a manufactured stone relic
worth 10 cents. The sons of Cush, the Ethiopian, lno-
nopolize tlie lucrative trade of shoe blacking, guffaws
and loud laughter. Varieties of the Caucasian race-
rare varieties many of them-half-breeds, mulattos and

fexican half-castes, a11 have right of way and use it on
the beautiful streets of Tucson.

CHAPTER L""\:IV.

CAMP OF THE CONSUMPTIVES.
From the balcony of my hotel I looked away, the morn-
ing after I came to Tucson, to the northeast, where just
outside the city limits, row upon row of white tents break
the monotony of gray sand, mesquite and" grease"
bush. Here on the desert, protected from the winds on
every side by barriers of porphyritic mountains, is
pitched the tented city of the consumptives or "lungers"
as the rougher element around here call them.
Here in this canvas-tented camp the victims of the
"white plague" and those threatened by the monster
gather from all the states of the East and form a com-
munity by themselves. The white canvas of the tents
gruesomely harmonizes with the pale faces of the un-
happy victims of the scourge. Farther away to the east
I see white specks here and there on the foothill!;; of the
Catalinas. I ask a gentleman by my side what these dots
are and he courteously answers: ' 'These are the tents
of the isolaters who wish to live alone and live their own
lives in their own way. "
To-day I visited the camp or reservation of the con-
sumptives. I seldom carry a letter of introduction, for
I am one of those who depend much upon an accidental
acquaintance. As I go wandering through the world I
see many a face whose mild eyes and sweet, placid feat-
ures bespeak a gentle mind and a candid soul. Such a
face as this is worth more than a dozen of letters of in-
troduction, for written on it is the assurance of civility
and kindness. In any case I knew no one here to whom

206

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

I could appeal for an iñtroduction to anyone in the camp.
The tents are of cotton or ship èanvas, with broad floors
of "rammed" earth, or simply rugs laid upon the dry
sand. They are of var)Ting sizes, furnished and orna-
mented according to the means or tastes of the occu-
pants.
fost of them are divided into kitchen, living and
sleeping apartments. In some, the glooln of the "liv-
ing" room was relieved by the bright colors of a few
Navajo blankets or
Iohave rugs. In others were photo-
grapns of the dear ones at home, little framed titbits of
western scenery, illustrated souvenir cards from Eu.ro-
pean and eastern friends and caged California road-
runners or Arizona mocking birds. Here also were
earthenware jars called "ollas" holding water which
cools by evaporation, banjos, zithers and guitars, lying
on the table or suspended from the sides of the tents. Now
and then you entered an apartment where an accumula-
tion of Papago bows and arrows, obsidian tipped lances,
Apache quivers and l\!oqui stone hatchets advertise the
archaeological taste of the proprietor. Occasionally I
entered a tent where the limited means of the owner or
renter allowed him or her few luxuries. To be poor is
not a disgrace nor ought it to be a humiliation, but there
are times and places when to be poor-I do not say pov-
erty-is very trying to the human soul and galling to the
independent mind. 1Vithout money and a liberal supply
of it no consumptive should come here. In the tent of
the young man or woman of limited resources was a
single cot, or perhaps two, an ordinary chair and a
"rocker," a trunk, a small pine wash stand, an oil stove,
a looking-glass and maybe a few books and magazines.
N ow and then the purest and gentlest of breezes merrily
tossed the flaps and flies of the tent, and a harmless and

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

207

wondrously colored little lizard, called by the :M
exicans
"chiquita," coquetted with the magazines on the table.
The patients who are here taking the "air" treatment
rarely enter the city. Every morning, from 6 to 12,
butchers, milkmen, grocery boys and Chinese vegetable
hawkers make the rounds of the camp and isolated tents.
They are all here, the rich, the middling rich and the
comparatively poor putting up a brave fight against an
insidious, treacherous foe-" not so well to-day, but to-
morrow, to-morrow, we'll be better"----'-always nursing
the consumptive's longing and cherishing the "hope that
spring's eternal in the human breast." "\Yhat's the per-
centage of the cured
" I do not know, I may only say
that if pure, dry air can accomplish anything for dis-
eased lungs, you have it here day and night abundantly.
Neither Spain, Italy or Southern France may compare
with Southern Arizona in dryness and balminess of cli-
mate, and I write with the knowledge of one who is fa-
miliar with the climates of these countries. I know not
any place on earth better for pulmonary and nervous
diseases than the desert lands around Tucson from N 0-
vember to April. Bear in mind I am not recommending
any man or woman to come here in the final stages of
disease nor anyone whose purse is not large, deep and
well filled, for druggists' and doctors' bills, groceries
Iilld incidentals are "away up" and almost out of sight.
The winter nights here are cool and bracing, and the
early mornings sharp when a gasoline or oil stove is a
nll)st convenient piece of furniture. But from 8 in the
morning to 4 in the afternoon every day in winter is a
delight and the air an atmospheric dream. The sum-
mers are hot, "confoundedly 'ot," to use a \Vellerism,
when the heat will at times run the mercury up to 120

208

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

Fahrenheit. There have been weeks here in the summer
when the thermometer would register 98 degrees day and
night. But remember there would be only 20 per cent
moisture in the air. In the eastern states such heat
would wear down men and animals. A canvas tent of
fair size costs anywhere from $60 to $100 or a tent may
be rented including site for from $15 to $30 a month,
counting in a little cheap furniture. People soon learn
to do their own cooking, and after a time begin to live
with reasonable economy. There is an electric road run-
ning from the camp to the city, the fare for the return
trip being 10 cents. In this tented village are men and
women of all ages, but chiefly the young and the middle
aged who, in the words of the Psalmist, are "suffering
hard things and drinking the wine of sorrow." It is
very lonely here for many and wearisome, and this feel-
ing of loneliness engenders a sadness which is often
more fatal than disease, for the splendid air cannot reach
it. Away from home and friends, the human heart
craves companionship and those who at home are natu-
rally reserved, and socially exclusive, here become com-
panionable and invite conversation. For some, life here
is very trying indeed; it is so lonesome, so monotonous
to live, day by day, this life of sameness and unchanging
routine unredeemed by variety and unblessed by pleas-
ant association. This isolation bears in upon the soul;
it tires of its own thoughts which, even if pleasant, carry
a note oÎ sadness. There are here and there in the camp
human souls, imprisoned in their decomposing bodies,
tbat are by nature melancholy and given to brooding.
They become morose in their thoughts and drift into
thf
pit.Ltul condition described by the Royal Prophet
when the sorrowful soul communes with itself and in

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

209

df'spair exclaims, "I looked for one that would grieve
wi th me and there was none; and for one that would
('( mfort me and I found no one."
The days are so long, so full of melancholy forebod-
ings, of pleasant and unpleasant memories, of fears of
dissolution and the hope of life; and after the day tEe
wearisome night and intermittent slumbers, and even
these broken with hacking coughs, with the dreap.ed
chills and burning fever, and, perhaps, unwelcome
dreams.
Here each human will is. putting up a brave fight
against treacherous and insidious foes, fiendishly cun-
ning in their methods of attack. It is the combat of the
body against millions of bacterial activities, of micro-
scopic parasites, which, living, feed upon the lungs, and,
when dead poison the blood. In this unequal fight for
life the soul is ever active, helping the body-its yet liv-
ing tabernacle and beloved companion-with hope, with
splendid determination, and whispering to it with un-
quenchable love, "",Vhat magnificent help this friendly
air of Arizona is giving us." Then the body has an-
other friend, severe, if you will, but a friend-the ter-
rible cough, that racks the body with heroic determina-
tion to tear out the dead and decaying bacteria poisoning
the human temple. And now,
"Swing outward, ye gates of the future;
Swing inward, ye ga.tes of the past,
For the dark shades of night are retiring,
And the white lights are breaking at last."

The therapeutic air and loving soul are winning out.
The cough is bidding good-bye to the body, its help is
no longer required, the dreaded night sweats have van-

210

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

ished and the soul, rejoicing, says to its companion,
"The battle is won; the field is ours."
In one tent, into which I was invited by the mother,
reclined on the lounge her daughter, a fair young girl
of 18 or 20. She sat up as we entered, and when I was
introduced she courteously extended to me her hand,
which left upon my own a sensation of wetness. Her
conversation, address and bearing indicated a convent
training and a cu1tivated mind. Her blue eyes, the fever
flush on her cheeks, and her wealth of rich, auburn hair,
sadly reminded me of the "Norman Peasant's Daugh-
ter," immortalized by the Irish poet, Thomas Davis:
"To :M: l1nster 's vale they brought her
To the cool and balmy air,
A Norman peasant's daughter
With blue eyes and golden hair.
They brought her to the valley,
And she faded, slowly, there,
Consumption hag no pity
For blue eyes and golden hair."
The tent erected to shield "from sunbeam and from
rain the one beloved head," bore in its furnishment and
decorations testimony that the hand which hung the etch-
ings and photographs and the taste which arranged the
rugs and furniture, were directed by a refined and culti-
vated mind. The young lady has been here but five
weeks, and already is beginning to experience a cha
ge
for the better.
lay she and her companion in suffering
return home restored to health and to the possession of
many years of happiness.
It is well to remember that Arizona is a very large ter-
ritory-114,OOO square miles-and that all of it is not to

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

211

be recommended for diseased lungs or shattered nerves.
There are broad stretches of desert where the winds
raise clouds of finest dust; there are towering mountains
and startling canyons and gloomy ravines. There are
sections of the land which exude baleful malaria, and
places black, for miles and miles, with solid waves of
lava, recording the elemental confusion of fire and stean1
and exploding gases in days gone by. But, I am told by
those who have explored the territory-by pioneers of
the early times-that the sand and gravel beds of the
Tucson valley are ideal grounds for consumptives and
neurasthenics, or people of shattered nerves. From
what I know of other lands and other climates, I believe
the pioneers are right.

CH.APTER xxv.

THE OSTRICH FARM AND THE SALTON SEA.
The American people live in the most wonderful of all
lands, and do not seem to realize the glory of their pos-
session. They cross oceans and girdle foreign countries
in quest of strange scenes; they fill the art galleries of
Europe to view the productions of the sculptor and the
painter, when here, within their own domain, unseen and
unappreciated, are marvels of nature baffiing all descrip-
tive art, wonderful creations of God challenging the pen
of the poet, and the possibilities of thf\ brush of genius.
vVhile traveling through this wonderf1l1 territory I
was asked if I had seen the ostrich farms on the Salt
River vaHey. I had to answer that I had not, and in
every instance I was urgently pressed to visit the rned-
ing grounds of this strange bird before leaving Arizona.
I came to Phoenix last week to enjoy a few days of indo-
lent ease before starting for the wilds of Sonora,
fexico,
and the hunting grounds of the terrible Yaquis, of whom
you have heard. Not far from Phoenix there is an os-
trich farm, where 1,000 birds are annually surrendering
to the "pluckers" $30,000 worth of feathers and eggs. I
am not going to inflict upon my readers any detailed
description of the wired farm enclosing these 1,000 Af-
rican birds, nor of the pens of the birds, nor the topo-
graphical features of the land, but will simply record
wliat I have seen and learned of the ostrich at the colony
I visited.
But first let me correct some mistakes and errors our
story books and school books havé handed down to us

,

214

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

about the ostrich and his habits. This singular bird"
when pursued by man or animal, does not bury his head
in the sand and suppose that, because the ostrich cannot
see its enemy, the enemy cannot see it. The os
rich,
when in condition, can out-run and out-dodge almost any-
thing traveling on two or four feet. This was- well
known to the ancients, for the Patriach Job instances the
fleetness of the ostrich in proof of God's kindness:
"For, if God hath deprived the ostrich of wisdom, nor
gave her understanding, when the time calls for it, she
setteth up her wings on high. She scorneth the horse
and his rider." When driven to close quarters and
forced to defend himself, this extraordinary bird is a
fierce fighter, and very few wild animals care to attack
him.
She does not lay two eggs on the hot desert, hide them
with a thin covering of sand and trust to luck or the
sun to hatch them. She does not and cannot live for
eight or ten months under pressure of great heat and
feel no thirst. When compelled by circumstances, the os-
trich can live a long time without water, perhaps a month
or six weeks, but it cannot live, as one of our encyclope-
dias tells us, a year without water. 'Ve always believed
our story books and books of travel when they told us
that the male ostrich, like our barn-yard rooster, always
strutted around, escorted by eight or ten wives. The
ostrich has but one mate, and, if the female dies after
they have lived together for some time, the male bird is
inconsolable and will sometimes pine away and die.
The average life of the ostrich is 75 years, but after
twenty-five years they bear no feathers of commercial
value. .
The writer of the article in the encyclopedia, which I

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

215

mentioned above, says the ostrich lays only two eggs a
year, and that the female plucks out the feathers of the
male twice a year. The African ostrich may do all these
things, but his descendants now in California and Ari-
zona have abandoned the habits of their primitive ances-
tors and have conformed to modern conditions. The os-
trich lays from twelve to sixteen eggs in a shallow hole,
which the male bird has scooped out in a place conve-
nient for hatching. They are large eggs, and, for forty-
two days, the birds cover them alternately, the male by
night and the female by day. By a mysterious law of
adaptation, the color of the female, when brooding, is
that of the desert sand, while that of her mate, which
sets upon the eggs at night, is pitch black. This marvel-
ous provision of nature helps to conceal the birds dur-
ing the period of incubation from the eyes of prowling
enemies. The chicks, when hatched, after a few days,
are taken from the parents and confined in pens, where
they are fed, and, until they can forage for themselv
s,
raised by hand. If this were not done, many of the
young birds would perish, for the parent ostriches seem
to be indifferent to the fate of the little ones after they
are hatched. It is to this apparent callousness of the
ostrich the Patriarch Job alludes when he says, "She is
hardened against her young ones as though they were
not hers;" and the Prophet Jeremias, when he compares
the ingratitude of .Jerusalem to the indifference of the
ostrich to her Y01.1Jlg: "The daughter of my people is
cruel, like the ostrich in the desert."
The young birds are delicate when they come from the
shell and demand careful treatment until they are six or
seven weeks old, when they become independent, take a
firm hold on life and hustle for themselves. A two-

216

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

months-old chick is always hungry, he is pecking and
eating every moment he is awake, and will devour more
food than a grown bird. They grow fast, gaining a foot
a month in height for sjx or seven months. Some of the
birds on the Salt river farms are eight and nine feet.
from the head to the ground, and weigh from 400 to
500 pounds. Some one has said that facts are some-
times stranger than fiction, and in the wonderful provis-
ion made by nature for the perpetuation of the ostrich,
the saying becomes an aphorism. The first three eggs
laid by this singular bird are sterile and will not h
tch.
By a wonderful law of instinct, or call it what we
iU,
the mother lays these eggs outside the nest. There is a
deep and mysterious law of nature compelling the bird
to follow this command of instinct. On the Mrican des-
erts, when the nesting time draws near, the birds retire
into the most lonely and unfrequented parts of the soli-
tary and desolate region, far away fron1 the haunts of
beast and man, and from water. Now when the little
creature, the chicken, is liberated from its prison by the
bursting of its walls, it is very thirsty and craves for
wa tel' or anything to slake its thirst. But there is no
water. The mother looks upon its gasping offspring
with its tiny tongue protruding, carries it over to where
a sterile egg is lying in the sand, breaks the shell, and at
once the little perishing creature buries its head in the
opened egg, sucks in the liquid refreslullent and lives.
The next day the little thing staggers by itself to the
wonderful fountain of the desert, and the day after it is
able to walk straight upright to the well.
On the ostrich farms or alfalfa ranges of Arizona,
the young birds are taken away and raised by hand, the
barren eggs gathered by the keeper and sold for $1.00

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

217

each. There is another very singular thing about the
wonderful knowledge, or instinct, of the ostrich. If an
egg is removed from her nest while she is hatching, and
a sterile egg, heated to the same temperature as eggs on
which slÏe is setting and of the same color and size sub-
stituted, she will at once detect the change and roll the
egg out. If all the eggs in the nest be taken away and
sterile eggs put in their places, the mother will abandon
the nest and lay no more for nlonths. If you ask me for
an explanation of the origin of this marvelous and mys-
terious 'sense, I can only answer in the words of the in-
spired writer: "This is the Lord's doing, and it is won-
derful in our eyes."
About fifteen eggs is the average "setting," and the
period of incubation forty-two days. The male bird takes
upon himself the heavier labor of the contract. He takes
charge of the nest and assumes control of the work at
5 0 'clock in the afternoon, and stays with his job 'til
9 0 'clock in the morning, when the female relieves hinl.
At noon he returns and keeps house for an hour while
his partner goes for her lunch. The male bird turns the
eggs once every twenty-four hours. Incubators have
been lately introduced and are giving satisfaction. The
chicks, when two weeks old, sell for $25 each, and
when four years of age a pair, male and female. sell for
from $400 to $600.
The birds do not differ in appearance until they are
eighteen months old, at that age they take on an alto-
gether different plumage; the male arraying himself in
black and the female in drab. Wb.en six months old, the
birds experience the sensation of their 1Írst plucking,
and after that they give up their plumes every eight
months. Not until the third plucking do the feathers

218

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

bring much in the market; the first and second pluckings
selling for a few shillings. A healthy ostrich will yield
$30 worth of feathers every year for twenty-five years,
though the average life of the bird is seventy-five years.

lany hundreds of young birds roam over alfalfa fields
enclosed with wire netting. Breeding pairs are confined
in a two-acre enclosure. The range birds feed, like cat-
tle, on alfalfa grass, picking up quartz pebbles which are
scattered over the fields for their use, and which, for
them, serves the same end as gravel for hens and chick-
ens. When the hens are laying they are given, from
time to time, a diet of bone dust to help in strengthening
the egg shells. One of the most singular and inter-
esting habits of the ostrich is his daily exercise.
Every morning at sunrise the herd, two by two, begin
training for the day by indulging in a combination cake-
walk and Virginia reel. Thenin single file they race around
the pasture till they are thoroughly limbered up. "\Vhen
halting, they form in squares and begin to dance, intro-
ducing imitations of the waltz, negro break-downs, cake-
walks and hornpipes. It is a laughable and grotesque
performance, and, when the birds are in fuU phllnage
and their wings extended, not devoid of grace and beauty
of action. The ostrich is the ornithological goat. He
will eat and digest anything. Offer him a large San
Diego orange, and he'll swallow it whole. Grease an old
shoe with tamarind oil, throw it into the paddock where
the birds feed, and at once there is a struggle for its
possession, ending in the. complete disappearance of the
brogan in its entirety or in fragments. The salvation
of the ostrich are its plumes. His feathers have saved
him from the fate of extinct birds and animals like the
great auk and the Siberian mammoth. He is destined to

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

219

last to the end of time, or to the effacement of vanity
from the heart of woman-a weakness of the sex which
began with time and will oply end when time shall be no
more. He is the only bird or animal that can live and
be healthy on grass, grain, fruits, vegetables, fish, flesh,
or leather.
A few weeks before coming to Phoenix I was told that
the great Colorado river broke away from its own chan-
nel, was filling the Salton Sink, and threatening to
eventually destroy the homes and farms of 12,000 pros-
perous settlers. ,Vhen I reached Yuma, this morning,
I learned for the first time that, if the river was not
turned back, an inland sea would form, and the climate of
southern Arizona and southeastern California change.
North of the
fexican boundary is a splendid tract of
land known as Imperial Valley, homesteaded by 10,000
families. The chief towns-Imperial, Holtville, Heber
and Brawley-are all now thriving and prosperous.
South of the border is an area of land equal to that of
Imperial valley in fertility and productiveness, belonging
to the Colorado River Development Company. The
principal canal of the great irrigating system leaves the
Colorado river a few nliles below Yuma at an elevation
of 100 feet above the sea, and crossing the }'iexican fron-
tier, flows eastward into Inlperial valley. The town
of Imperial, al.most in the center of the valley, is six-
ty-two feet lower than the ocean, and the grade contin-
ues to fall till at Salton Sink it is down to 287 feet be-
low sea level. This decline gives a rapid current to the
flowing waters, and the opening in the river bank hae-
grown so wide that it will take much time and millions
to close it. If the break be not repaired, the Imperial
vaHey and the entire Colorado desert of southern Cali-

220

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

fornia Up to the ancient beaches on the inclosing moun-
tains, will become submerged and a great lake formed at
the end of twenty years. So, at least the engineers of the
Southern Pacific and the hydrographers now here assure
me.
The new sea now forming in the desert lands of Ari-
zona, l\Iexico and California is one of the most extra-
ordinary assisted natural phenomena of modern times.
It has changed the course of one of the greatest rivers
of the \Vest, has forced one of the greatest railroads in
the world to move back, and back and back again, is con-
verting a desert into an inland sea, may possibly change
the climate of a great territory, and even involve two
friendly nations in diplomatic controversy.
Back of all is fhe sinister suspicion that behind the
opening is a deep-laid plot to acquire by purchase from
Mexico an important slice of Lower California. This
suspicion has probably reached the ears of the President,
who is above trickery alld treachery, and may account
for his "rush order" to
Ir. Harriman of the Southern
Pacific to "close the breach; count not the cost, but close
the breach." It will be closed.
This morning I sailed over tbe ruins and roofs of some
of tlie buildings of Salton Sink, where a few years ago
were the greatest salt works and evaporating pans in
America. Where three years ago there was a desolate
and forbidding wilderness, there is now a lake twenty-
three miles wide, fifty miles long, in pl::lCes forty feet
deep and forced by the inrush of the waters of the Gila
and Colorado rivers, is rising nearly one inch every
twenty-four hours. The break is in the banks of an irri-
gating canal a few miles south of Yuma, Ariz. Three
miles above this town, the Colorado opens its side anâ

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

221

takes in the Gila river, and from there the flow sweeps on
100 miles to the Gulf of California.
Possibly the most ambitious attempt at irrigation of
arid lands ever undertaken by private enterprise was
that of the California Development Company, which
promised its shareholders to irrigate, by gravity, from
the Colorado river, 800,000 acres of desert land, one-
fourth of which belongs to Mexico. The company was
capitalized at $1,250,000. This company began opera-
tions in April, 1897, and in six years villages and towns
sprang into life, and where a few years ago there was a
desert, there are now fertile farms, orange and lime
groves and comfortable homes, occupied by thousands
of industrious and contented people. A canal, called the
Alamo, was dredged from the Colorado through the sand
lands, and from this canal, by auxiliary ditches, was fur-
nished water for irrigating the farms.
,Vhen the Colorado river was low, the canal was slug-
gish in its flow, the channel and subsidiary trenches filled
with silt, and the settlers became clamorous. Then the
company opened a second intake, known as the Imperial,
which connected the Colorado with the Alamo canal.
Here, and now, is where the trouble begins. Neither suf-
ficiently strong nor perfected headgates, wing-dams or
bulkheads were. constructed, and, when, in the spring of
1903, the Colorado, swollen from mountain and tributary
streams, Game rushing to the sea, it swept the artificial
works aside and entered upon its present career of de-
vastation.
About this time a series of sharp, quick and rotary
earthquakes rocked the country and opened a gash in
the Colorado above the Imperial weir. From this open-
ing the waters poured into what is now known as the

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new river, and onwards, almost due north, to Salton
basin, seventy-five miles away.
Salton Basin was a vast depression in the earth's sur-
face, sinking from sea level to 287 feet below. It wid-
ened over two counties of southern California and
stretched well into J\Iexico, forming a huge depression be-
tween well defined "beaches" of an ancient sea, and
covered an approximate area of fifteen to forty miles
wide and about 100 miles long. There is no doubt but
that at some time in the past this sunken desert was an
extension of the Gulf of Çalif ornia.
From a point near the boundary line to the gulf, a dis-
tance of about eighty-five miles, lies the delta of the Col-
orado, a rich alluvial plain of great depth, equal in pro-
ductivity to the delta of the Nile; a vast area, apparently
as level as a table, built up by the Colorado river, that has
drawn its material from the plains of Wyoming, through
Green river, and, adding to it all down through Colorado,
Utah and Arizona, deposited it on the new land it was
forming at the end of its flow.
This is the first time in its history that the Colorado
has changed its course, and all efforts of men and money
of the great Southern Pacific and the giant irrigation
companies have failed to coax or force it back to its
natural bed. A river that has flowed on through the
ages, laughing at all obstacles, tearing the hearts out of
opposing mountains and ripping for itself in places a
channel a mile deep, and, in places, leagues wide, is not
going to be turned aside easily. Great is the strength of
the Southern Pacific; enormous is the power of corporate
wealth; cunning is the brain and deft the hand of the
American, but as yet the strength of the Southern Pa-
cific, the power of corporate wealth, combined with the

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223

shrewdness and clearness of the American brain, have
not been able to subdue that turbid, treacherous, sullen
river, the Rio Colorado.
Three times, at a cost of a half million of dollars, the
Southern Pacific has wrenched apart and moved back
its trunk line, twenty, thirty, and now, through a cloud
of profanity, seventy-five miles from its lawful bed. Al-
ready Salton, with all its buildings, its vast eva pora ting
pans and improvements, is submerged, and fertile farms
and ranch lands are destroyed, it may be, for all time.
The towns and improved lands of Imperial valley, the
grazing lands of the Pioto region of Lower California,

Iexico, and millions of dollars invested in railroad and
other valuable securities are threatened, and to save
them may call for the co-operation of two nations and
the expendìture of an enormous sum of money. The
whole territory, from the Chuckawalla mountains and
far south or the
fexican frontier, is menaced with anni-
hilation.
Unless the inrush of the Coloraao is cnecked, it is very
probable that the Salton sea and the Gulf of California
will again form one great body of water.
This means that the inland desert will become a great
gulf where, a few years since, there was a field of sand
120 miles from the sea.
Thus, sometimes, do natural phenomena, in time,
make for the prosperity or decadence of a nation. In
spite of evaporation, the profanity of the Southern Pa-
cific shareholders, and the herculean attacks of 2,000
laborers, led by expert hydraulic engineers, the inland
sea is wídening, for the waters of the great river are
rushing to its assistance at the rate of 8,000 cubic feet
per second. This is the volume at the lowest stage of

224

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th.e water; the spring freshets will swell it to 50,000 feet,
for that is the average high flow of the river.
At present the new inland lake is a beautiful sheet of
water, and is a never failing source of wonder to Eastern
tourists after crossing hundreds of miles of arid wastes,
of sand, greasewood and cactus. To the west, from the
fond-du-Iac or foot of the lake, tower the snow-capped
peaks of l\Iount San Bernardino and
Iolmt San Iacinto,
each about 12,000 feet high. For ages the Bernardino
has held the restless, crawling sands of the thirsty des.
ert which scorched its foothills, and at last the cool
waters have come and rippling waves play with its foun-
dations. Facing Salton-or what was once Salton-the
sea is about twelve miles wide, and the mountains, rising
majestically to the west, mirror themselves on its placid
surface.
Here, in Yuma, they tell me the temperature was no
higlier than usual last summer, yet the heat was the most
oppressive in the history of the place. They attribute
this oppression to the Salton sea, and dread the ap-
proach of June with a much greater area under water.
1Vhatever the outcome of tbis continuous inundation
may be, if not arrested, whether the present waters join
the gulf or an inland sea is formed, a remarkable climatic
change is sure to occur, and, indeed, is now in process
of evolution. For the past year, more rain has fallen in
and around Yuma than in the .last five years, and sections
of land that were formerly a wilderness of shifting sands
are now blossoming like a garden. Here before our very
eyes is the verification of the prophecy of Isaiah: "The
land that was desolate and impassable shall be glad, and
th.-
wilderness shall rejoice and shall flourish like a lily;
it shall bud forth and blossom and shall rejoice with joy;

BY PATH AND TRAIL.

225

the glory of Libanus is given to it; the beauty of Carmel
and Sharon."
The vitality of desert seeds is imperishable, and, like
the peace of the Lord, surpasseth the understanding of
man. There are places near here, now bright and green
with flowers and grasses, that a few years since were
wastes of land, and from immemorial time scorched with
hopeless sterility. Since" the waters have broken out
in the desert and s
reams in the wilderness," the face
of this region is taking on the look of youth, and the
land a competitive value.
.At Salton the water is as translucent as the sea at
Abalone, and is even more salty. It seems almost un-
canny to cruise about in skiffs and launches over places
which, a while ago, were barren lands, and over homes
.
here people lived.
At the present time two great forces are battling for
thp, mastery of a territory as large as the state of Rhode
Island. On the one side is the Colorado river that has
ne"':er been controlled by man; on the other is a power-
fu; irrigation company, supported by the genius and re-
source of a great railroad corporation. There are indi- .
cations that they may retire from the fight and run for
the hills, leaving the governments of the United States
and !\Iexico to engage the monster that threatens the an-
nhi]&tion of Imperial valley and its thousands of culti-
vÐted acres and prosperous homes.

THE END.

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