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Show 248 WESTERN WILDS. forty- five miles, which we traversed in nine hours, finding water at but one point on the road, namely, Stinking Springs, sometimes po-litely called Sheep Springs. Our mules drank of it, under protest, and with many sniffs and contortions of the lips; and I tasted it from curiosity. It looks like a solution of blue- dye, and tastes like white-oak bark. To some it is a dangerous cathartic, but to most a power-ful astringent. Four miles from Wingate the valley makes a great U to the northward, and our road runs over the foot- hills for three miles; then enters the valley again, which there narrows to a mere pass. A vast dyke of hard trap- rock extends across the country from north to south, standing out above the sandstone like an artificial stone battlement, and runs out from each side of the valley in abrupt causeways, leaving a rugged gap only a hundred yards wide. This opens into a broad and fertile valley, across which three miles bring us to the Rio Puerco of the West. The Puerco I crossed on the 26th of May runs south- east into the Rio Grande ; this one south- west into the Colorado Chiquito. We cross this Puerco, rise again into the northern foot- hills, and stop for noon in a pinon thicket. Next we reach the " Hay Stacks," a series of cones of yellow sandstone, some-thing over a hundred feet high, and fifty feet wide at the base, running up to a sharp point. They stand upon an almost level plain, but half a mile away is a rocky ledge containing a vast natural bridge, arched gateway, and all the forms of rocky tower and battlement which can be imagined. Eight miles farther brought us to Defiance, situated at the foot of a low rocky range, and almost in the mouth of Canon Benito. Approaching the post across a sandy plain we first come to a dry river- bed, with enough of stunted grass to show that water still runs there sometimes. Following up the stream we find first a pool of water, then a flock of sheep, then Indian farms, and occasionally a hogan, from which the Navajo squaws and children peep out at us with a sort of hungry curiosity. We cross a common field of a hun-dred acres or so, which the Xavajoes have thrown up into beds two or three rods square for irrigation, and ride into the fort, which was my headquarters for the next ten days. |