Mexico, California and Arizona/Chapter 30
XXX.
ACROSS ARIZONA.
I.
IF there be anything politically disrupting in mere topography, the section cut off by the range below the Los Angeles and Riverside country should also be made a separate State. It should clamor at any rate to be joined to Arizona, since it is Arizona that it follows in climate, and not California. South-east of the low San Gorgonio Pass the seasons are the same as those of Mexico; that is to say, the rains fall in summer, while northward they fall in the winter and spring. Thunder-storms on each side of the mountains may be plainly visible from the other, but do not pass the limit.
I myself saw, from the Arizona side, in December, in hot, clear sunshine at the time, murky clouds billowing above the range, and the lightnings playing in them, and, on returning to Los Angeles, found it drenched in its first showers of the season.
There is one excellent reason why the inhabitants of the section do not raise such a clamor, which is, that there are no inhabitants worth mentioning. For a hundred and fifty miles, from the pass, to the Arizona frontier at Yuma, the railroad hardly knows any local traffic. Its route is over the celebrated
"Colorado Desert," in comparison with which previous deserts are of small importance. There are various
stopping-places, with designa-
tions on the map, but these are rarely more than signal-stations where the locomotive, like the passengers, stops
to slake its thirst at one of the series of artesian wells.
The plain is not of great extent laterally. Black and purplish mountains are always in sight, and spurs cross the track. Bowlders and pebbles are scattered thickly on the surface at first, among patches of bunch-grass. Then, near Seven Palms, the jaws of the black and purple mountains open and receive us into the genuine desert. It is strewn with bowlders still, but is itself a waste of drifting-white sand, with large dunes and hills of sand. One might be riding on the shores of Coney Island or Long Branch.
A singular depression below the level of the sea for a hundred miles, and at its lowest point nearly three hundred feet, is traversed. At Dos Palmas, in the very bottom of it, a board shanty, covered with signs in amateurish lettering, indicating that it is a saloon, stands entirely alone. Surely the bar-keeper must consume his own drinks, and lead an existence unprecedented among his kind. No; a horseman in Mexican accoutrements dashes across the plain—though where he should dash from, and how he should ride anything, here in the bottom of the sea, but the skeleton, say, of a dolphin or a sea-horse, is a mystery—pulls up, and enters.
And it appears, on a better acquaintance with Dos Palmas, that a stage starts every other day for points on the Colorado River, and Prescott, the capital of Arizona Territory, and that this is but a faint survival of bustle which once reigned here before the advent of the railroad. The route of the Southern Overland Mail then came this way, and long trains of immigrant and freight wagons, carrying water in casks for two and three days' supply, were passing continually over these wastes.
Nothing, on general principles, would appear more de-
pressing than such a country, but as a matter-of-fact it is a stimulus to the curiosity, and furnishes real entertainment. One would not wish to be abandoned there without resources, it is true, but he does not tire of looking
at it from the car-window. Its blazing dryness is disinfectant and preservative. There can never exist the last extreme of sadness where the element of decay by
damp and mould is not present. Chemical processes are those which are principally going on. Wonders of almost any sort may be expected, and you almost look for phantoms not of earth among the shifting mirages.
A considerable part of Arizona, as well, is of the same character, but it is estimated by competent authority that with irrigation thirty-seven per cent, of that Territory can be redeemed for agriculture, and sixty per cent, as pasturage. It will be called to mind that even the apparently hopeless Colorado Desert, which is below the level of the sea, is also below the level of the Colorado River, from which water might perhaps be spread over it with comparative ease.
The truly patriotic Arizonian in their neighborhood is not ashamed of his encompassing deserts, but rather proud of them, and with a certain reason. The desert is in reality a laboratory of useful products. Paper is made from the yucca, or Spanish-bayonet, which abounds in parts of it. There are tracts of salt, borax, gypsum, sulphur, asbestos, and kaolin, and quarries of pumice-stone, only waiting shipment. It is maintained, also, that it has deposits of the same precious metals which, mined in places where water is more accessible, have given the Territory most of its present fame.
Our train runs out upon a long wooden drawbridge, across the Colorado River, and we arrive at Yuma. The company has placed here the first of its series of hotels
of uniform pattern. It is both station and hotel. Such provision on an equal scale of comfort would hardly have been judicious yet as an investment for private persons. These structures therefore become not only a typical feature of the scenery, but an indication of the extent to which the railroad has had to, and has been able to, by reason of its ample resources, take this bare new country into its own hands. They are of the usual reddish-brown, two stories in height, and surrounded by piazzas of generous width—an indispensable adjunct under the dazzling light and heat of the country.
II.
The heat of Yuma is proverbial. The thermometer ranges up to 127° in the shade. There is an old story of a soldier who died at the fort and went to the place which Bob Ingersoll says does not exist, and, finding it chilly there by comparison, sent back after his blankets.
Great heat, nevertheless, is not equally formidable everywhere. It is well attested that there is no sun-stroke here, and no such suffering as from a much lower temperature in moister climates. Distinct sanitary properties are even claimed for this well-baked air. So near the sea-level, it is said to be less rarefied, and to comprise, therefore, a greater quantity of oxygen to a given bulk, than that of mountain districts, which, in purity and dryness, it resembles. It is thought to be
beneficial in lung troubles. Yuma, among its arid sand-hills, has aspirations to be a sanitarium. Civilized people also may yet resort there to engage in a sensible sun-worship, basking in the genial heat, and then plunging into the river, after the fashion of the resident Indians, who make of it in this way a kind of natural Turkish bath.
COLORADO RIVER AT YUMA.
railroad, and is to have a shipping-port of its own, by the construction of another to Port Ysabel, on the Gulf of California. Still, it laments a greater activity it once enjoyed, as chief distributing point for the mines and upper river towns. It expects the Port Ysabel Railroad to have the effect of doubling its population in two years. It will not be a very stupendous population even then, as it is but fifteen hundred at present.
The town is a collection of inferior adobe houses, a few of the very best being altered from the natural mud-color by a coating of whitewash. The ordinary part of it resembles more the poor tropical hamlets on the trail to Acapulco than even the ordinary villages of Mexico. The houses consist of a framework of cotton wood or ocotilla wattles, plastered with mud inside and out, making a wall two or three inches thick. The roof is thatched, the floor is the bare ground. Around them are generally high palisades of ocotilla sticks, and corrals of the same adjoining.
The waiters in a Yuma hotel are of a highly miscellaneous character. You are served, in the same dining-room, by Mexicans, Chinamen, Irish, Americans, and a tame Apache Indian. One and all had a certain astounded air, ending in something like confirmed depression, on finding that we were to remain, would dine at our leisure, and did not wish to have the dishes shot at us as if out of a catapult, after the practice with the ordinary traveller pausing here his allotted half-hour. One does not expect too much of his waiter in Arizona, however. There are reported instances in which he makes you eat your steak with his hand on his pistol-pocket, and the
threat of wearing it but on you if you object.
The Colorado at Yuma makes about the same impression as to width as the Sacramento at Sacramento, the Ohio at Pittsburg, or the Connecticut at Hartford. It is a turbulent yellow stream. It cuts into high sand bluffs on the Arizona side, and spreads out their contents in wide bars on the California side. It is without wharves. The light-draught, high-decked steamboats, or barges, that ply up and down its interminable reaches tie up
when necessary to the banks.
Mountains of a jagged, eccentric formation follow its general course northward. Peaks impressively counterfeiting human work. Castle Dome, Chimney Peaks, Picacho, and Cargo Muchacho, loom up along the horizon, a fitting prelude to the marvels of Arizona.
It was at the close of an Indian war that this visit was made. It had been said, in rumors much exaggerated, that the whole white civilization of the Territory was in danger by the outbreak, and troops—but now on their return—had been hurried thither from all sides. The first view of Indians, therefore, at Yuma was of a double interest. They were not Apaches, it is true, but a subsequent acquaintance with the general field proved them to be even more picturesque. They are of that highly satisfactory style of savages who wear but little clothing, and none of it European. They are to be seen in numbers about the railway-station by the most casual passenger. The railroad is still new to them, and they have not satiated their curiosity. They bring friends from a distance to see it, and are observed describing to these visitors how the drawbridge swings, and how the cars are switched from one track to another.
They are met with coming across this bridge from the patch of river-bottom near the fort on the California side,
where their principal settlement is. The young men run
or stride at great speed, so as to throw out behind them a long red sash or band, depending from the breech-cloth, which is, in summer, the principal part of their attire. To this is added, in winter, a close-fitting gray or crimson under-shirt. They wear their thick, coal-black hair "banged" low on their foreheads, and bushy about their necks. The effect at a little distance is not unlike that of
PASQUAL, CHIEF OF THE YUMAS.
the Florentine period, when the young gallants wore jerkins and trunk hose fitting them like their skins, and just
such bushy locks, which they crowned, however, instead of going bare-headed, with jaunty velvet caps.
The fort is without guns, other than a howitzer for firing salutes, and has no strength, as it no longer needs to have, except from its position on a commanding bluff. The military policy of the government now is to station its troops along a railroad or other easy line of communi-
YUMA INDIANS AT HOME.
consist of a series of comfortable, large, adobe houses, plastered, and painted green, around an oblong plaza. They have in front a peculiar screen-work of green blinds, which shuts out the glare arising from the yellow ground, and makes both a cool promenade and comfortable sleeping apartments for the summer.
The chief of the Yumas, on whose settlement the fort looks down, chooses his sub-chiefs, but is himself appointed by the military commandant. The last investiture was made as long ago as 1852, by General, then Major, Heintzelman. He conferred it upon the now wrinkled and decrepit Pasqual, described at the time as "a tall, fine-looking man, of an agreeable disposition."
Pasqual's people cultivate little patches of vegetables and hay in the river-bottom, fertilized by the annual verflow. Their principal sustenance, however, is the sweet bean of the mesquit-tree. This they pound, in mortars, into a kind of flour. Sometimes, when on the move, the Indians float their hay across the river on rafts, which they push before them, swimming. They propel the small children in the same way, placing them in their large, Egyptian-looking ollas, or water-jars.
The crop of mesquit beans was so large one year as to be beyond their unaided capacity to consume, and they hospitably invited in their friends, the Pimas, to aid them. Old Pasqual describes with graphic gestures how haggard and lank were these visitors on their arrival, and what an unctuous corpulence they bad attained in the end, when, after nearly eating their hosts out of house and home, they were only got rid of at last by force.
III.
Few things are more curious at this time of day than to look back at the old maps of our Western possessions previous to the annexation of Texas. Texas was not then ours; nor were a considerable part of Indian Territory, Kansas, half of Colorado, all of Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. All of this belonged to our sister republic of Mexico, which, as I have said, was very nearly as large as ourselves, and, except for its internal dissensions, could by no means be considered a puny antagonist.
An impressive vagueness attended the delineation of most things west of the Mississippi. There were great tracts hardly more known than the centre of Africa. The upper regions of Mexico were distinguished as Interna; New Mexico and Arizona were simply Apacheria—Apache Land. Our frontier ran along the line of the Sabine River to the Red, from the Red to the Arkansas, and from the Arkansas, on the 42d Parallel of latitude, straight west to the Pacific Ocean. By the peace of Guadalupe Hidalgo our frontier became the Rio Grande and Gila instead, and the line had dropped from Parallel 40° to Parallel 32°.
I have called this territory heretofore, by way of figure of speech, an
Alsace-Lorraine of Mexico, though it is not probable, vacant as it was, and Americanized as it now is, that a serious grudge is still borne us for it, or that there will ever be momentous wars for its recovery. However this may be, it has been the making of us. We
should be in but sorry shape indeed had we to go back to the limits of the thirteen original British Colonies, or even to these with Florida, purchased from the Spaniards, and Louisiana, purchased from the French, added.
The Mexican acquisition gave us one-third of our domain that which is now most open to the teeming millions of Europe and that which avails us our repute for
essential Americanism abroad. It gave us the field of the Bret Harte school in literature, our chief marvels and wonders, our mines of the precious metals, and the command of the Pacific Ocean.
The lower belt of Arizona was not even comprised in this. An area of 460 miles by 130, below the Gila River, was not obtained till "the Gadsden Purchase," in 1853. By the payment of the sum of $10,000,000 under this treaty we obtained a number of decided advantages. We rectified our boundary line, confused through the inaccuracy of the map of one Dwindle, on which it was based. We got rid of an embarrassing engagement, of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, to protect the Mexican frontier from Apaches—leaving them to regulate this service for themselves. We secured the right of way for a railroad across the Isthmus of Tehuantepee, which was thought desirable for speedier communication with our new possessions of California.
But above all we acquired, in the easy levels below the Gila, the natural route for a Southern Pacific transcontinental railway. The files of the Congressional Globe of that date are full of the necessity of binding our Pacific acquisitions securely to the rest of the country, and the most effectual of all the means proposed was considered to be a transcontinental railway.
Well, we are bowling at last along that now actually constructed Southern Pacific Railroad, once discussed in musty debates of the Congressional Globe. It increases our respect for predecessors to whom we may not have given any great consideration heretofore to find how sagacious they were. We reach Stanwix, with its lava beds; Painted Rock, named from huge, mysteriously-decorated bowlders; Casa Grande, from its architectural ruins of the Toltecs; and Tucson.
Adopting the policy of leaving Tucson to be examined on the return, let us push on to the extreme end of the Territory—to the eccentrically-named Tombstone. Benson, the point of departure, from the railroad, for Tombstone, is 1024 miles from San Francisco, and probably 2500 from New York.