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Show 244 WESTERN WILDS. little basin would bloom like a garden, supporting a thousand people in affluence. About 3 o'clock next morning we were awakened by a terrible racket and barking of dogs, just in time to see that our mules had broken corral, and were lighting out towards Wingate with a speed which showed there was no place like home to them. The soldier went in pursuit, and I visited the Red Butte and the old crater. The butte is nearly two miles long and a mile wide, rising evenly from the plain on every side, and so abruptly, by a series of " benches" or nar-row terraces, that it can only be ascended in two or three places, and the dimensions on top are only one- fourth less than at the bottom. M. Provencher's theory is that the entire valley was the original crater, and, when it had slowly died out, a smaller one formed at the center. The butte appears from the plain to be level on top ; it is, in fact, a mere shell a little copy of the walled basin around it. From the narrow rim there is an abrupt fall towards the center, and inside it has the appearance of an old furnace, long since burnt out and abandoned. At midnight the soldier returned, hitched up at daylight, and, in a steaming state of military wrath, whipped his mules through the forty-three miles to Wingate by sundown. Twenty miles east of that post we passed the dividing summit of the Rocky Mountains ( or Sierra Madre ; both names are used indifferently there). We reach the west-ern slope through a long pass, in many respects resembling the South Pass of the old California trail. It is simply a high and sandy valley through the mountains, bounded on the north by almost perpendicular sandstone cliffs from five hundred to a thousand feet in height, and on the south by scantily- timbered hills which rise one above another to the highest mountain peak. In the pass and neighboring hills rain is frequent; twenty miles east or west of it none falls for three or four months at a time. The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad line is located through this pass, and the grade is so gentle that no difficulties are met writh. For three hundred miles west of the Rio Grande nature seems to have provided a series of valleys especially for a railroad. The real trouble is that the country has so little in it worth building a railroad for. It is a splendid country to travel through ; a miserably poor one to stop in to make a " stake." On the evening of May 31st \ ve drove into " VVingatc ; my soldier " reported," and in precisely twenty minutes was a close prisoner in the guard- house " held for trial." " Charge Unwarranted disposition of stores placed in his care." |