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Show MINING IN 1882. 587 a branch runs along the old Atlantic and Pacific line to a point nearly a hundred miles west; so all that long dry way I journeyed with United States mules, is now traversed by rail, and the sad- eyed Zunis and strange old Pueblos are brought within four days ride of Cincinnati! Whither shall the enterprising traveler now go for wild adventure? From Albuquerque the road continues down the Rio Grande over 100 miles and bears off to Florida Pass, where, as aforesaid, it now connects with the California Pacific. Thence south-ward it will continue so the sanguine projectors assure us down to Mexico City, sending off branches eastwardly to El Paso, and west-wardly to Guayamas. Already the work is being pushed rapidly from the Mexican ends of these lines, and the long criticized unenter-prising Spanish- Americans seem stirred into wonderful activity by the Yankee railroad builders. These wonderful schemes, so near comple-tion, almost force us into rhapsody; our most eloquent praise is a plain statement of what they have done and are doing. The coffee lands of Mexico are brought within a week's run of Boston; the Orient is at our back door ; Australasia is our near neighbor. From the San Francisco end of the Southern Pacific we run rapidly southward, and soon emerge on the awfully barren sand plains and red deserts of southeastern California. By common consent the Mohave and Yuma Desert, running away up into Utah and Nevada, is considered the most uniformly barren of any large tract in the Far West. Making all possible deductions for oases and green vegan, it contains at least 80,000 square miles of irreclaimable desert. A nar-row line of faint green relieves the eye at Fort Yuma, where we cross the Colorado, to Yuma City on the east side, and soon after enter on the Gila Valley. This has an occasional oasis, but the Pueblos unite in testifying that from the date of their oldest traditions moisture has been decreasing and barrenness growing; and the local evidences prove it, the country being thick- set with the ruins of abandoned towns. First is the noted Casas Grandes, a vast pile of ruins with form enough to show that it is the remains of many immense adobe buildings all terraced and run together like those I described at Moqui. Smaller ruins are found by hundreds; by digging in them one can always find the floor of an old Aztec house, and under the hearth one will almost always find human bones, showing that they buried their dead there. In the Salt River valley are the remains of a canal nearly a hundred miles long, which once brought water from the Verde River to irrigate a large tract. Now the miners and pros-pectors are rapidly developing a new civilization on the tombs of the |
