> 3> ^ > '^ > - :> » ^i^5 :?-^JS>-> y.1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. %pp.^^:.^:itijoingj^ fo Shelf _,B32__ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. ^^^ ► > >^ i> _ * _^ ^' > ^'^ >> 1^ ^ > > >> "> >:^ » ~" >. » J> :» >' » 3-2>> ^ ::5> ^ 3^ p :» ^ '^ ^ 5> ~^> ^ ► >^ ^ ^ » 2» ^ -^ ^ ^> ^ ^ * :» ^ H .>^ ^ ^ » 5^ ^ » ^ ^ J>:> 5r^ ^ ag> S ^ » s^ ^ >:> >^ - ::» >^ s :i> J>T^ • '^ -^ 4? ^: ^ >:S " ^ -> _> ^ ^^ ^ >:> ^ ^ ^> > >'■ ^ ^ . . :> > i/i ■^ ^ ^ j> > .f> -> > J > Ji» ' 3 > . 3 :> ^ ^ >^ > ■ >-)^>» _:>-_> j^v~,^. > > j> :» >> ?>r ^^ :>■>>>; ;":>^ >:> i>: ^:>"> >> J3Z» >3 > o ' >3:> >.>^ > )>:r >:r> > :>> 5: > >3> >' '5 >>> ^ > 2> >> ^ >>^> > ^ > ;>:> >i> > :> > » 2> > :> > >3 > ^ > ^ > » -> >^ 3 5^ 3 > ^ D ?> ^ > o > X> ^ ■ .:> z> > • > 3 ^^i ^^T >^ ^ :> ) y .T> --- ^>^ m^i-2^^^^ ^c^:> ^ . y i^ ^ ^^>:^>;^ ^' ^> 13^^12 3^>^:>; 3X>J \S> > .jl> ^ ^ _ .^ r^ -■>> r7» > J> > -> ^^ ;^3 ■j,.r'M'>,.aLi>kih,iMiiSi^ NEW EDITION-ENLARGED. ^,^- RAND,M?NALLYaCD? lUFOHNIA, Arizdna, New Mexico, Cdldrado, Kansas. LOMBARD INVESTMENT COMPANY. CAPITAL, SURPLUS, $1,150,000.00. $400,000.00. 13 Sears BiiildinK, Boiiiton, Mass., I 150 Broadway, New York t'ity. 133 South 4th Street, I'kiladrlphia, I 150 Leadeuhall 8t., Loudou, Kansas Cliy, Missouri. Six per Cent. First Mortgage Real Estate Coupon Bonds, secured on both City and Farm Property, worth three times the amount loaned. Both Principal and interest Guaranteed. Seven per Cent. Mortgages, Unguaranteed. Conservative investors will flud sufficient reason for the great strength of the guaran- teed securities of this old reliable company in the followint^ f.icts: 18t. Over 30 years' experience of its management. 2d. A guaranty of over $2,500,000.00 against loss, besides the real estate mortgage. 3d. Record of management tested by every emergency liable to occur. 4th. A stronger financial condition to day than ever before in its history. 5th. The unmatched list of over 300 New Englaud and Philadelphia stockholders. 6th. Over 50 Savings Banks and over 200 institutions hold loans made through this company. Report of the Bank Commit-sioners of the State of Connecticut on this company's con- dition, in compliance with the stringent act of the legislature of the State of Connecticut, in effect June 1, 1887, will be gent on application. f[atioM ©' -THE- it oi Kansas flilii KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI. J. S. CHICK, President. "W. H. CHICK, Vice-President. "W. J. ANDERSON, Cashier. F. N. CHICK, Ass't Cashier. "W. F. SARGENT, Second Ass't Cashier. CAPITAL, $1,000,000.- * SURPLUS * AND UNDIVIDED PROFITS, $280,000. Transapts a General Banki ng Business Having a thorouerhly organized correspondence throughout the country^ and the closest cersonal attention being given to all matters entrusted to it, this Bank sohcits thebusinesof Banks, Bankers, Corporations, 1 irms and Individuals, and guarantees entire satisfaction to all its patrons. ^-^CCOajVTg RECEIVED OJM TflE PO^T LIBERAL TERJslS.-J:- Particular attention paid to the business of correspondent-, the interest of all cur pat- rons carefully guarded and promptly served. Corresfiondence invited. Inquiries, wtiether from regu.lar correspondents or not. receive prompt attention and are carefully answered. SAFE INVESTMENTS. For the purpose of making you some m:.ney, we wish to call your attention to Kansas City, Kas. The f^c; is established, that the portion of Kansas City west of the State line is better adapted for wholesale and manufacturing pu.pDses than any other portion of the City. That at present there is business sufficient upon the west sida to more than furnish one-half of the clearances of Kansas City. That your money invested here will be a sure source of revenue to you. That we handle and own many of the finest properties in this part of the City. Among them are the additions of BRIGHTON HILL, -^ SILVER PLACE, ORCHARD ADDITION, m and BRIDGE PLACE. We w^ill take pleasure in answering any correspondenc3 regardino- them. We have opportunities for loaning money at good rates, and upon flrst-class property. We refer you to the First National Bank of Kansas City, Kas. Yours, FORD &, TROUP, 548 Minnesota Avenue, Kansas City, Kas. L. H. WOOD. W. L. WOOD. '•9 L. H. Wood & Co. Real Estate, Loan INVESTMENT BROKERS. Choice Residence and Business Property. Acre Tracts for Platting. ►^Safe Investments for Non-Residents. -i^^ CORRESPONDENCE SOLICITED. L. H. WOOD & CO., 509 Minnesota Avenue. Telephone 1530. KANSAS CITY, KANSAS. T. F. WILLIS, President. W. H. HALL, Vice Fre^idciit. SELBY JONES, Sec. and Treas. HALL & WILLIS HARDWARE CO., HARDWARE cut^lIeiry. SI»ECI^Ii .A.a?TE]SrTI03Sr (3-IVElT TO ]yt.A.IXj OI2,I3EK.S. TINNERS' STOCK. KANSAS CITY, MO. Trumbull Reynolds Sl Allen, SEEDSMEN, JOBBERS IN Clover, Timothy, Blue Grass, Orchard Grass, Red Top, Millet, Hun- garian, Seed Potatoes, Onion Sets, Seed Grains, Garden Seeds, Tree Seeds, etc. "Write for Catalogue and Prices. THE KANSAS CITY STOCK YARDS Are by far the most commodious and best appointed in the Missouri Valley, with ample capacity for fecdini?, weighinfj and shipping Cattle, Hogs, Sheep, H rses and Mules. They are planked throughout. No yards are better wate'ed, and in none l3 there a belter sysiem of drainage. The fact that HIGHER PRICES ARE REALIZED Here tl.an in the East is due to the location at these yards of eitrht Packing Houses, with an aggregate daily capacity of 3,30ii cattle and '2T.'-'00 hogs, and the regular attendance of sharp, com- petitive buyers for the packing houses of Oniatia, 'Jhicago, St Louis, Indianapolis i incinnati, New T. rk and Boston. All the tliiiteen roadsrunnlng into Kansas City have direct conneclion with the Yards, afford- ing the best accoiiiniodatinn for Stock coming from 1 he preat grazng grounds of all the Western Stat<-« and Territories, and also for stock destined for Eastern Markets. The business of the Yards is done systematically and with the utmost promptness, so that there ia no deltiy. and no clas)ilng, and Stockmen have found here, and will continue tj find, that they gel all Ihei'r stock Is worth with the least possible delay. C. F. MORSE, E. E. RICHARDSON, H. P. CHILD, General Manager. Treas. and Sec'y. Superintendent. THE LARGEST SCALE MAP EVER MADE. WE HAVE JUST COMPLETED A NEW SHIPPER'S RAILROAD MAP OF THE SOUTHWEST, (SCALE: EIGHT MILES TO ONE INCH. Lines Printed inlSeparate Colors. All Railroad Stations Shown.' . ISend for Descriptive Circular. RAND, McNALLY & CO., 148 Monroe Street, CHICAGO. CALVIN XOOIMEY, COR. TENTH AND GRAND AVE., M'f'r of the Celebmled "TOOMEY" SPORTING VEHICLES Ot every Description, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI MANUFACTURER: Toomey Road Wagons. Toomey Skeleton Wagons. Toomey Track Sulkies. Toomey Sulky Cushions with Weight Pockets. Toomey Speed Poles. T-oniey Road Carts. Toomey Pole Carts. Toomey r>reaklng Carts. Toomey Pole Jogging Carts. Toomey Jogging Carts. B. F. BERRY, ][eIl ^ sfTfE IIealer; 505 1-2 MINNESOTA AVE., Ki^NS-A.S CITY, K^ISrS. I have Extra Choice Bargains in all parts of the City, the Beautiful Addi- tions, and Wyandotte County. Lots in HUSTED & BERRY'S ADDITION, Near Elevated Rail Road, for only $30 per foot. Money Loaned— Houses for Rent— Improved and Unimproved Land iu Kansas and siirronnding States, for sale or exchange. Refers to the Banks of the City. Twenty Years" Experience in the Business. This City will have 1 00,000 People in 5 Years. HOI^EL BRUNSWICK. CORNER BROADWAV AND I Ith STREET, KANSAS CITY, MO. This new Hotei is rrovicled -with, all modem conveniences. Passenger Elevator, Fire Escapes, and Fire Alarms la every room: heated by steam tbroughout. Location the beet, one block from Coates' Opera House : cable and street cars pass the door from Union Depot and all parts of the City, and is justly regarded the best hotel in the City. American Flan : Terms $3.00 to $5.00 per day. E. H. HAYES, Prop'r. .Rand, McNally & Co.'s NEW OVERLAND GUIDE PACIFIC COAST. CALIFORNIA, ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO, COLORADO AND KANSAS. / By James W. Steele. ^V^'^cO?' '"' CHICAGO: Rand, McNally &. Company, Publishers, 148, 150, 152 AND 154 MONROE STREET, and 323 BROADWAY, NEW YORK. 1888. Lies immediately West of the State line dividing Kansas and Missouri, The \mm ^M ^toc\ Yard^, ARMOUB, FOWLER, KINGAN, SWIFT, ^ © MORRIS S BUTIS. AND ULCUTT i»aok:iino houses. The Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific Railroad Shops, and a host of smaller Manufactories and Shops. Is growing more rapidly than any City in the State. "Will very soon be the Largest City, Numerically, as it is now in importance, in Kansas. Has in operation the only ELEVATED ROAD Outside of New York City, a first class Cable Road, with several more in course of construction. For Safe, Seciire and «o There can be no equal to the opportunities afforded in 'K%w>W> City, K^nsh?- JAKTES D. HXJSXED, Real Estate Dealer 1st National Bank Building, KANSAS CITY, KANSAS. American Bank Building, - - KANSAS CITY, MO. Copyright, 1888. l).y Rand, McNally & Co. 1 State Map of the United States. CVTTfWl. 1«» •» «"^- "'^"^ * Co ,. MM. NTENTS. PAGE Preface 3-5 The Journey : Kansas City — Scenes at Union Depot — The Cit)''s History and Peculiar Features — Westport Landing — The Trail — Growth and Trade of Kansas City — Railroads, etc 7-17 Kansas : Some Statistics — The Pawnees — The Kaws — Historical Notes — The Arkansas Valley — First Male White Child Born in the State — The State University — Lawrence — Topeka — Some Reminiscences — Emporia — Climatic Changes, etc 18-47 Colorado : History — Topography — Bent"s Fort — The Indians — Trinidad — Raton Tunnel — Mountain Scenery and Health Resorts — The Staked Plain. . 4S-64 Pan-Handle of Texas : Location and Peculiarities — The Cattle Baron — His Anomalous and Lawless Position — The Cowboy 65-70 New Mexico : Its Antiquity — Still Full of Ancient and Picturesque Nooks — A Land ot Health Resorts, Beautiful Valleys, and Lofty Mountains — Descrip- tion of the Territory — Topography — History — Some of Its Native Inhabitants — The Pueblos — Silent Ruins — Raton — Las Vegas — Glorieta Pass — Old Pecos Church — Apache Cafion — Starvation Peak — Albuquerque — Laguna — La Mesa Encantada 71-100 Arizona : Its Magnitude — Undeveloped Wealth — Desolate Appearance — The Mojave Desert — Water-Worn Rocks — The Sand-Blast — Wingate — Navajo Church — Rio Puerco Valley — Isolated Rocks — Holbrook — Flagstaff — The Cliff Dwellings — Petrified Forests — The Natural Bridge — The Painted Desert — Grand Caiion of the Colorado — The Needles 101-126 California : The Entrance to the State Dismal and Uninviting — Barstow — Topog- raphy and Clim.ate — Valleys and Mountains 127-143 THE LARGEST MANUFACTURING CITY IN THE WEST. In the year 1887 Colonel Leavenworth, of the Tliii-d U. H. Infantry, selected the fort on the north of this city as the most suitable place for a Western post. Fort Leavenworth, which is named after the Colonel, is now the most important Government fort in the country, being situated in the geographical center of the United States. It is gradually becoming the central depot for military stores. A militai-y school has been estab- lished for yoimg oflBcere. which will soon have a i-eputation equal to that of West Point. The Government Reservation consists of 7,000 aci^sof land, barracks, officers' quartei-s. the D. S. military prison and hospital. The department is under the command of General Wesley Merritt, and comprises the States of Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and Arkansas, New Mexico, Utah and Indian Tenitory. The fort and military school are under the command of General A. D. McCook. The city of Leavenworth was located in June, 1S54, and is the oldest city in the State of Kansas. During the war I.#avenworth became the shipping point for the Westoni States ; people from every part flocked to the city on account of its pro- tection from Fort Leavenworth. After the war the city was mainly sup- I>orted by the fort, on the north, and the State penitentiary, on the south; the amount of money spent by these two institutions was sufficient to support a city of 15,000 people. In 1S70, Professor Hawn induced a few friends to sink a coal mine, giving it, as his belief, that coal would be found beneath the city. After about ten yeai-s of pei-scvrrriiirr-, .-im^ flu:- organization of several feet. The company was put on a paying basis, present, being made fr( ^(jmpanies. coal was reached at the depth of 710 bought up by capitalists, and, fifteen yeais ago, The above illustration shows the mine as it is at m a photograph ; it is one of the best equipped in America, and gives emidoyment to 50u men. Theie are now three mines, giving employment to 1,100 men, and lifting to the surface every day 29,000 bushels of coal. By actual tests it is now known that the city of Leavenwoi-th stands on three veins of rich bituminous coal, being 84, ■26 and 2s inches thick each, and the lowest veiu only 1,U22 feet ill depth. From a careful calculation made by experts it is ascertained that there is 1,830,000,000 tons of coal— as much as would supply the whole of the United States for twelve years. The demand for Leavenworth ceil has become so great that thousands of car loads could have been sold last winter. Seven new companies have been organized, with ample capital, and by next year it is expected that ten mines will be in operation. Five yeai-s ago real estate had very little value. In 1885 the transfers amounted to $ti84,93i.47 ; in 1886 they amoimted to $1,666,643.91 ; and in 1887 they amounted to 15,739,256.35; and now there is agieat demand for both city and country property. During the last five years the popula- tion has increased 16,000. Three years ago the Government selected this city for the Wostcnl SoUliei-s' Home. The city gave 620 acres of land, and now, on the south of the city, stands one of the largest and best Soldiers' Homes in America, and at the present time 1,920 old veterans are living in it. Geologists believe that natural gas exists below the city, and at present a well is being drilled to ascertain it such is the fact. Last year three new railroads were budt into the city,— the Leavenworth, Northern & Southern; the Wyandotte & Northwestern, and the Bapid Transit. This year the following roads are aiTanging to come : the Chicago, St. Paul & Kansas City; the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul ; and the Leavenworth & Denver Air Line. Leavenworth is the largest city in the State of Kansas. Leavenworth is the largest manufactuiing city in the West. Leavenworth is the great- est coal center of the State and the entire West. Leavenworth has more wealthy citizens and fewer mortgages on her property, she has a better class of mechanics, pays more money in wages, and has cheaper real estate than any city of its size in America. At hei- present rate of pro- gress, she will have 100,000 people in lees than ten yeate. Her railroad facilities ai-e equal to the best. A splendid system of water-works*, unequaled sewerage. The healthiest city in the Union, accoi-ding to population. Excellent schools and church privUeges ; the best banking facilities ; the finest parks and drives. Parties wanting information about this great manufacturing center should write to H. MILES MOORE, Sccrotaiy Board of Trade, Leavenworth, Kansas OVERLAND GUIDE. Southern California : page Its Past and Present — Equable Temperature — History of Its Discovery and Occupancy — Annexation to the United States — The Colorado Desert — The Valleys of San Gabriel and San Bernardino — What Irri- gation Does for the Soil — The Charm that Hovers Over the Countrj^ — A Land for the Wealthy, the Indolent, and the Sick — The Poor Man Has No Business There 144-167 Climate : Variations of Climate Governed by Topographical Features — ^Warm Days and Cool Nights — The Californian Climatic Puzzle — Tables of Comparisons and Mean Temperatures — Causes of California's many Variations of Climate — Effects of Altitude and Configuration upon the Climates of the smaller Valleys 167-182 In General : The Mojave River and Cajon Pass — Routes through California — -The Yosemite Valley and the Big Tree Groves — The Sequoia the Last of the Race of Giant Trees — Peculiarities in the Flora and Farna of the Pacific Coast — Absence of Eastern Varieties of Plants and Animals — The Tarantula, the Mosquito and the Flea — Scorpions — Snakes 183-192 As A Health Resort 193-196 APPENDIX. Itinerary . From Kansas City to Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Francisco. . . . 197-198 Spanish Geographical Names 199-212 Preface. fHIS GUIDE is intended for the convenience of those per- sons who, wishing to make a jour- ney to California, find their most convenient route to He through Kansas City. Such persons would live as far south as Memphis, for instance, and as far north as Chicago. There are many thousands of these annu- ally; for California, and especially Southern California, seems to have become a subject in which a great portion of the American people are interested. Why this is so may "^ir^^i^^ in some measure appear in the ^" following pages. There is no country whose history is more curious or whose changes have been more astonishing. Simply as a study; as a chapter out of mod- ern American history; as an example of the results wrought by steam, water and human industry, — California, upper, middle or southern, is worth some attention, if not very careful consideration. This narrative will also include a glance, as careful as space will admit of, of what lies between; — Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. All these that have not already come to the front in public estimation are rapidly coming, and all are interested from at least one standpoint ; — that which regards them as the seat of future empire, the homes of countless thousands of people who will be all Ameri- cans, all speaking the same language, wearing the same dress, following the same customs, and under whose touch every desert will yet bloom, every mountain nook become a home. There are many trans Continental lines. They all offer their attractions and advantages. But the tide of travel has for the past year or two sought the most (3) 4 OVERLAND GUIDE. direct lines westward, and the shortest is the one whose features are of the most interest to the average traveler, other things being equal, and that is the route described in the following pages, so far, at least, as to Southern California. A guide of travel that attempts a description of all possible routes at once, jumps here and there without sequence or order, confusing the reader, to whom time-tables are always accessible, and adding little or nothing to the interest of any one route. Nearly all guide-books are so made, and nearly all are, in this regard at least, unsatisfactory. An attempt is here made to depart from this ancient plan, and to give the reader a consecutive story, from day to day, of at least one route. It is not an advertisement, but is printed and sold for the usual publisher's reasons. The first editions have offered encouragement for the project of not only reprinting it, but re writing it. The changes of two years have been like those of a fairy tale, and an attempt will be made in these pages to overtake them. But this is a journey over mountain and plain, over granite, lava and sage, through a country which changes in its industrial features almost under the traveler's eye. It crosses mountain ranges almost incomparable in beauty and vastness, and wide plains, where the rim of the horizon is but a pale mist against the arching sky. It includes the homes of a civilization older than any American historj', yet where the original inhabitants still live and toil, and it traverses the still plainly visible re- mains of a civilization yet older far, at which modern science and investigation make only plausible guesses and derive only possible inferences. Specimens of the races that the lapse of time has not affected, and whose ideas and ancestry are alike prehistoric, gaze listlessly at you and your train as you pass by. The most un- appreciative traveler, making this journey for the first time, must at least perceive that he is under strange skies. There are new sensations. There is a foreign feel- ing. Some effort is n-^cessary to convince oneself that this is still the domain over which floats the familiar flag; that it is still an integral part of the mightiest empire the world has ever seen. A long journey by rail is usually only a respectable mode of solitary confine- ment for as long as it lasts. There are only glimpses caught of the country by daylight, and one grows tired because he does not know anything of the history, traditions or industries of the country he is traversing. He does not know what to look for, and all his information must usually be obtained from what is termed a " folder"; a monotonous list of stations and distances that does not even name the country in which one may chance to be. Otherwise he must obtain information from some other form of railway adver- tising, and in this he puts so many grains of salt that he may usually be said not to believe it at all. PREFACE. Though no guide was ever more than partially successful ; though all items of interest can not be included; this little volume is intended, as far as possible, to cover these deficiencies. It covers a long distance, and ends at last upon the shores of that boundless waste of waters that, to one accustomed to seeing the ocean face him the other way, seems the end of all things. It ends in a countrj- that is as yet an enigma to itself. Southern California is an Eden that has sprung up out of a soil that looks like concrete, and that fifteen years a^o was one of the most hopeless of the foreordained and irredeemable deserts. One can not believe, amid the scenes that lie around its gateway, that nestled here is the garden of the United States; that it is Summer all the year; where roses and castor-beans alike take upon themselves the similitude of trees, and where the fruits and flowers of tropical islands, and curious perennials from across the seas, flourish .better than at home. OVERLAND GUIDE. Hi =» HE 'eURNEY. fiHE beginning is at a place worth more than a casual mention. Kansas City is one of the towns that began in time, and established a Union depot. For some years now, and since the tide of immigration began in earnest, this has been almost a depot for the Union. The crowds that have of late years gone out to people that God-forsaken desert which now produces its hundreds of thousands of bushels of wheat and corn, have mostly come stream- ing through the narrow gateway of the Union depot at Kansas City. Every traveler now sees this celebrated spot at its best, if its best is when it is liveliest. Two or three times every day, for two hours at a time, it is Pandemonium of a rather pleasing type. There is a vast crowd that is mostly American, with a sprinkling of every nationality. Waiting-rooms for both sexes are full, and a small army of both sexes and all ages is marching back and forth outside. It is a human ant-hill. Everybody is on business of a puzzling kind. They are all away from home, hundreds of them for the first time, and unfamiliar with the great how-to-do-it in the way of tickets^ trunks, trains, direction, distance, locality and time. Counter res- taurants are confronted by hungry rows, some of the people having on overcoats, and some linen dusters, thus showing their various (7) « OVERLAND GUIDE. conceptions of climate, and the wide-apart localities from whence they have come. There is an expression of resignation on the faces of some, of per- fect weariness on the countenances of others, and of uncertainty in the demeanor of most. For a dozen trains are making up. Long lines of cars stand waiting, so arranged as to be all accessible, and into these the crowd is slowly percolating. Policemen in gray, armed with patience and an unusual fund of information instead of clubs, are kept very busy. The trains are all headed to the East or to the West ; the one with its headlight toward the setting sun, the other looking back toward where most of this company came from, and where many a homesick one doubtless wishes he was again. This scene changes daily in a certain sense, for if you come again to-morrow at the same hour you will. see the same crowds, the same hurrying, anxious throng, but not a single person you ever saw before. They will have passed hence as entirely and completely as though yesterday were a quarter of a cent iry ago. They are gone toward the four winds, and will never come again. It is a daily gathering of that innumerable and various company whose fixed purpose is a new home. Old places and associations have seen them for the last time. The great country to the westward swallows them up. It evei. in a great measure changes their characters. It moulds their interests, tastes, hopes and inclinations. It makes them forget all they have deemed most worthy of remembrance, and teaches them new themes. The gigantic growth of beech or oak to which they have been accustomed is exchanged for the treeless prairie where the nodding yellow sunflower is the highest growth, and they are not astonished. A quiet country neighborhood or little town, where every man knew the genealogy of every other, and there has been no change within memory, is given away forever for a land of booms and beginnings, and there is no surprise. This power of the far West to educate people is one of the curious things. To the old time westerner it invests this crowd with a peculiar interest. KANSAS CITY. 9 Illinois and Indiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania, have lost these men and women as irrevocably as if they were dead. They will soon cease even to talk about the old homes. It is true ; — they will not come back. It may be at ten o'clock in the morning, or the same hour at night. In either case Kansas City — the city itself — is invisible. It is a queer spot in which to build a town, and, like all other cities of importance, it was not built — it grew. The fate that makes them does not wait upon the intentions and tha designs of men. It is a place of steep river bluffs. It is all up-and-down. Some of the principal streets have been cut through high banks of clay, leaving houses perched airily seventy or a hundred feet above the roadway. It is a place where cows used to fall out of pasture and break their necks, and where one's door-yard may be as dangerous as the brink of Niagara. Yet it is destined beyond doubt to become, if it be not now, the com- mercial capital of a great valley. Its beginnings are as of yesterday. Within the memory of many of its citizens, it was but Westport Landing — a place where steam- boats pushed their noses into the muddy banks of the Missouri and were made fast to a tree. In those days there was one long, steep road up the bank to the top of the hill, and on the hill there were some dilapidated warehouses, a store or two, and the usual rough accompaniments of the Western trading and freighting post. All this was no longer ago than 1855-60. A little later, Leavenworth was conceded to be the metropolis, with St. Joseph as something of a rival. Something happened ; nobody knows precisely what, per- haps ; and the place began to grow. It was the bridge over the Mis- souri ; it was a caprice of the railroads ; it was natural situation. Nobody would ever enquire what it was, but for the wonder of a phenomenal growth, and they will soon cease to enquire at all. There is one curious thing. A great, growing, beef-and-corn pro- ducing State like Kansas, could not control the destinies of any city of her preference on her own soil. She has poured her trade into 10 OVERLAND GUIDE. the lap of a Missouri town, notwithstanding that the two States have a grudge against each other almost as rancorous as a Kentucky family vendetta. The town is but just far enough within the line to induce the belief that it is a curious and an unfair thing that a Kansas- made city should stand on Missouri soil. But the inexorable State Line intervenes despite all sentiment. The cause of the feeling between these two States is a matter of history. It belongs to that time which now seems so far in the past ; " before the War." Descending through at least one generation, it is now but a remi- Camping Freighters. niscence. But it is a vivid one. The rights which the young men of Missouri trampled in the brown Kansas dust have long since triumphed. There are no slaves, and there is no slave territory. There is no cause of quarrel, yet for many years Missouri has been the bridge and Kansas City the gateway, by which more than a million people have passed into Kansas. That is simply another instance of a drift toward greatness for which no adequate cause can be assigned. For Missouri herself, with all her political offenses KANSAS CITY. 11 against her sister on her head, is still one of the most splendidly equipped in natural resources of all the galaxy of States. But the old times were the romantic and interesting ones for Kan- sas City. The stranger who visits the place, and takes the pains to ride up the hill, or through it, on a cable car, will see from the elevation a fair country of hill and wood. There is nothing wild or strange about it. It is old, refined, cultivated. Let him imagine these hills as they were but yesterday. Gaunt and long-horned oxen wandering over them, but lately released from the yokes they had worn over a thousand miles of mountain and plain from a country as far and fabled as Cathay. There were men there such as civil- ization does not produce, bronzed, bearded, wide-hatted, swagger- ing. They were the typical frontiersmen whose shades now linger in song and story. From every ravine and hill-side arose little thin blue columns of camp-fire smoke. There was whiskey-merriment, shouting, grotesque dancing, and the popping of enormous whips. For this lonely and most unprepossessing river-landing was to these men high civilization, [t was indeed, after all the lonely reaches of Llano Estacado ; after days of wind-swept silence and nights of watch- ing ; after the weary tramp through aland that held no human habita- tion ; after months of wandering where countless herds of buffalo blocked the trails ; after hunger and thirst and Indian-fighting, a full measure of civilization. For Westport Landing was the beginning of one of the great ^' Trails," one end of which must of necessity be more or less civil- ized after the fashion of those days. A " Trail " is a curious thing. The word is one of the most com- mon in both western and eastern literature now, and frequently requisite in ordinary conversation. Yet it now has a meaning so far in the past that the first significance is hardly thought of. It may mean, but does not always, a road. At first it never did. A trail was a path, winding away crookedly and endlessly, leading somewhere, but never definitely and certainly. Ages before America 12 OVERLAND GUIDE. was discovered by Europeans the aborigines of the country had paths through the woods and swamps, across the plains and over the mountain ranges, crossing zones and climates, and reaching to the utmost verge of the land from Great Bear Lake to the Gulf, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The trails of one region and tribe, or confederation of tribes, ran imperceptibly into those of another. Along these paths the light of thousands of camp-fires was always shining by night, and silent files of warriors, one behind the other, were always passing like dusky ghosts. There were trails and Indians and camp-fires everywhere, yet so far apart that it would almost seem that there were none, and that the vast continent was not inhabited. Rivers and lakes were crossed in canoes, and the trails went round, over or through all natural difficulties. There was even a kind of commerce in those days without records, and tribe exchanged with tribe the rude necessities and commodities of savage life. There were vast regions where there were no metals accessible ; yet every tribe had its armlets and nose-rings. There were districts where there was no flint or obsidian for arrow-heads ; yet all had these articles of prime necessity. What was not got by exchange was taken by theft or conquest. But these were not colonists. They never -stayed ; they did not acquire, or try to acquire, territory. They came and went, and left not a shred of the history of conquest. It can hardly be conceived of in these days that what was considered worth toil, wandering and privation ; what was worth fighting and dying for ; was not wort^ even so much record as a heap of stones. The North American Indian was, and still is, a curious specimen of humanity. Guided by an instinct in wandering as unerring as that of the wild goose, the wilderness remained, save for these dim trails, absolutely un- changed by their presence through uncounted centuries. It is a very curious fact that these trails ; — at least the principal and main ones ; — have had a most decided effect upon modern commerce. KANSAS CITY 13 The Original Trail-Makers 14 OVERLAND GLUDE. They are the commercial highways of the present. Starting from the Atlantic coast the traveler will closely follow them even to the Pacific coast. Wherever the railway lines cross the mountains the track lies almost precisely in the old paths. They were deepened and worn by white men who imitated the Indians, long bef'ore the railroads took them for the last use that has been found for them in these later times when the chiefest consideration of life is trade and transportation. For the prehistoric savage ; — the old Indian who lived and died long before he had been dreamed of as a subject of song or story, or as the owner of valuable lands, or as a " ward of the Govern- ment "; — discovered and used all the notches nature has placed so far apart in the grim escarpments of the Rocky Mountains. His trails crossed them, leading up to them from far across the plains. Raton Pass is in this sense one of the oldest gateways of the world. The existence of it gave rise to the great trail from the bend of the Mis- souri, where now is Kansas City, to the Valley of the Rio Grande, down that valley to El Paso ; — an ancient rock- An Early Explorer. bottomcd ford ; — down to the high- lands of Mexico, or, by other passes beyond, to the Pacific coast. This, in much later days now historic from our view, was utilized by white men. The few Spanish soldiers who followed Coronado on his celebrated expedition to Quivira, came and returned by it, guided by an Indian whose tale of Quivira was but a fabrication to lure unwelcome visitors away from his people. Later, and, indeed, comparatively very recently, the traders took it. It became the " Santa Fe Trail." The bend of the Missouri, as anciently, was still KANSAS CITY. 15 its western end. We measure the place by our own standards ; but it was of immense importance long before it had become even West- port Landing. This old trail, lined with graves and wet with tears, the scene throughout its weary length of innumerable battles that are not named in history, the place of toils and perils that can never be lived again, was the origin of the idea from which was born what is now known as the Sante Fe Route. We are interested in this fact, and in all that may be said about the various trails that have been usurped by the most colossal of the commercial achievements of man, because we shall follow one of them on this journey ourselves almost as it lay a thousand or two years ago. Perhaps we shall find that its interest has not all quite departed. Yet Kansas City, by that name at least, is not a city of reminis- cences. The western, or Santa F6, trade did not begin from it until 1832, when Independence, its now near neighbor, became the " out- fitting" point for the western freighters. " Outfit " — " to outfit," — seems to be another peculiarly western term, now become a part of the language. The first stock of goods was landed at the present site of Kansas City in 1834. But even this was some time before the quarrel, for the boundary line which placed the then unmade and undreamed-of city in Mis- souri was not established until 1836. In 1839 a few houses seem to have been erected, and in 1853 the village had, at most, only 478 souls. In 1843-44 came a flood which submerged the place. This was followed by the cholera. The growth may be said to have stopped during this period, and for some years after. In the same year the difficulty between Texas and New Mexico — this is again to our eyes quite prehistoric — rendered an armed escort necessary for a Santa Fe train. This doubtless interfered very seriously with business. But so important was this trade already grown that books were 2 16 OVERLAND GUIDE. published on the subject about this time. They read like foreign travels. In August, 1843, ^^^ the Mexican frontier ports of entry were closed, and remained so until 1S50. This had the effect of blockading all the Missouri river towns. Mr. D. W. Wilder (" Annals of Kansas," p. 49) says that on August 26, 1854, Leavenworth and Kansas City were first mentioned in the New York Tribune. This, then, seems to have been about the beginning of the history of the present era. They may have been mentioned before, but the Ti-ibune settled the question as to its having previously been worth while. Another record states that "in 1857 the city had grown to 8,000 inhabitants, with a list of mercantile houses surpassing any Missouri town, and with a larger trade than any city of its size in the world." It is not known whether or not the writer means that Kansas City was not then a Missouri town, or whether he excludes St. Louis and other places from his mental list of " Missouri towns." It may have had the 8,900 inhabitants mentioned, but as late as 1859 it did not look as though it had them, at least as permanently established citizens. But, at least, Kansas City is one of the places that has grown, and grows, almost as fast as they say she does. This, of itself, consti- tutes the place a western phenomenon. In 1870 the population was stated to be 32,286. In 1873, 40,140. In 1S85, 128,474. It now claims, per directory, 180,000. Mr. Jay Gould, in 18S6, is reported to have distinctly stated in an interview with a prominent citizen that " in twenty-five or thirty years more you will see Kansas City as large as Chicago and St. Louis are at that tinted There is therefore little use in asking " upon what kind of meat doth this our Caesar feed." It is a wonderful place, offering to the tourist from older communities the most wonderful of all the instances of western growth. The same circumstances that gave the far-western trading-post her business a quarter of a century ago, feed her now. The causes of greatness are perpetual. Many a KANSAS CITY. 17 reader will have no taste for the comparisons of local history and the reminiscences of a quarter of a century. Many a one would have more, could he but remember the wilderness as it was, and compare the present with the dim past of so little a while ago. It is •one of the valuable lessons of the trans-Conti'iiental journey these pages are supposed to record. From the Other End of the Trail. K^ANSAS. [O get back to the depot again, to see the crowd that was not here yesterday and will not be here to-morrow ; yet the same crowd ; is an awakening from the dream of the Beginning which may possibly seem to have been indulged in. You have the names of the trains called in the long-drawn and sorrowful tones customarily heard at depots, and there begin to be- long vacant spaces under the shed. This train and that one slip silently away ; one to Chicago or St. Louis, or both ; one to Omaha,, another to Denver and San Francisco. There are more than a dozen of them altogether, and these very long and very well filled trains represent about thirty thousand miles of track. Within the- past year Kansas alone has had her surface gridironed by about 1,700 miles of new steel. A very large number of people are statistical, and every man m. these commercial times who can quote figures, is respected accord- ingly. Still thinking of the ox-teams, and huge wagons, and bull- whackers, of twenty-five years ago, the waiting reader may be greatly- interested to know that so long ago as during 1886 there were 981,- 264 trunks handled ; — they call it " handled " from a mere native- sense of humor — on those platforms, and looked for and enquired about, and tumbled and slid and rolled, under and across that time- worn and battle-scarred piece of timber at the door of the baggage- room. This represents an immense and unknown sum in ladies' and gents' furnishing goods. During the same year 4,960,320 people got on and off these trains. This is not counting travel by suburban trains, or the uncles, cousins and aunts who accompany bridal parties to the depot. (18) KANSAS. 19 There are about $8,000,000 actually invested in railroad property within the limits of the city. All the steamboats that ■ever plied the waters of the Missouri since the little stern- wheeler that made her astonishing appearance here in 181 9, March 2d, if they were tied end to end and trailed out by the current, would not represent this sum in value. This last statistic is guessed at all the more freely since it is understood that the railroads have the entire business. The boats have gone with the camp-fires. " Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. All aboard for Kansas, Colo- rado and Southern Cal — " That is ours ; let us go. You are no sooner away from the shadows of the building than you are on modern historic ground. There is often very little justi- fication for this often-made remark. All ground is in a certain geo- logical sense historic. But it is made in this case very appropri- ately. A very distinct group of sensations are evoked at the name of Kansas, and, after all the strictly historical part is done with, the fact remains that in all the history of civilization, of which Kansas makes one of the most brilliant chapters, no territory of equal extent lias ever afforded so great and lasting a benefit to the average struggling and energetic man. The ground now comprising the State of Kansas was once mostly •owned by the Pawnee nation of Indians. These people had their vicissitudes, for when settlements began first to be made the •country was held by the Kaws. The remark about vicissitudes is merely an inference drawn from the fact apparent to anybody who ever knew the Kaws, that if they could take a country away from anybody, the party of the first part must have previously had vicis- situdes, or something almost as bad. The Kaw, or Kansas, Indians gave the name it bears to the State. Very frequently it has been questioned why these two names were interchangeable, and why the Indians, and the river upon whose branches they lived, should be known by the one name or the other, 30 OVERLAND GUIDE. indifferently, or the Indians by one name and the State by another^ or vice versa. Kanza, Kanzas, Kanzoe, and the same name with an " s " instead of a "z" partakes of the common fate of all our Indian names. The Kaw Valley Peopie of 1855. " Illinois," certainly, has had the same troubles. " Kaw " is the understanding the first settlers had of the pronunciation of the word " Kansas " by the French voyageurs, who were the tireless wanderers of the early times, and who were of course encountered here. KANSAS. 21 Actual history, in our sense, begins about April 30, 1819, upon which date the treaty was signed by which France ceded to the United States the Province of Louisiana. This included all of the present Kansas except that strip of it which now lies south of the Arkansas River. That strip seems to have been won by conquest, contrary to what they call the " time-honored " policy of our Gov- ernment. It came in as a result of the outrageous little war in which we aired our valor before we began fighting in earnest, with something to fight for. The territory that came with it was an enormous slice, covering almost the whole of the journey we are now making. After the traders, the very first who came to Kansas were the Missionaries. From the records, publications and journals of these little missions, the information has been derived which seems to have settled definitely and at last the disputed personality of that bold frontiersman, the "first white male child born in Kansas." The matter is only mentioned here because of the offense having fre- quently been laid on the wrong person. Very appropriately, and with poetic fitness, that "first," etc., was the grandson of Daniel Boone. His name was Napoleon Boone, and he succeeded to his inheritance of fame sometime during the year 1825. Somewhere about the southern line of what is now Jefferson County, the event occurred. It was well inland, and is thought not to have been such an unlawful importation of a voter from Missouri as became too common at a later date. Some of the most charming literature in the English language was published in this year 1825, and about this country. But Washing- ton Irving was very indefinite in his geography, in the two books, "Tour of the Prairies," and "The Adventures of Captain Bonne- ville." It only appeared to him as it must have to those early missionaries and Santa Fe traders. It was a beautiful and silent vastness. The country had been "explored," but there were no boundaries, and very few names. Zebulon Pike and his brethren 22 OVERLAND GUIDE. had made these deUghtful marches that hundreds of boys have since envied, through a land that was so full of meat that the meat was in the way. What is now the pretty city of Council Grove had after- ward witnessed a meeting of Indian head-men with the United States Commissioners appointed to solicit of them the privilege of crossing the plains, their undisputed country, from Independence to New Mexico, 780 miles, and they had graciously given a promise they only kept at intervals, for the Santa Fe Trail, as has been stated, was a scene of ambuscades, surprises, and bloody fights always. It is curious how valor can have been so persistent without accompanying fame, — for there were no newspaper reporters in those days, — and how the blue-stem grass or the waving corn has long since overgrown a thousand bloody graves and the scenes of a hundred displays of the same courage that is commemorated now in our national cemeteries. Within a mile of the Union depot the train enters Kansas. All the hills you see rolling away to the southward were not long since covered with diamond-shaped wagon corrals, and glowing in the dusk with camp-fires. It was, within two or three miles of the river, a vast overland camping-ground. It was, so to speak, the delta of the great trail; — a curious community lacking only one feature of the picturesqueness of the West of a little later. The revolver had not yet been invented. Whiskey was there — much more of it, and probably much better, than there is in later times in this virtuous com- monwealth; and there was an occasional gun. But it was of the long, old-fashioned, slender-gripped kind, that loaded at the muzzle, out of a powder-horn, and that had a beautiful piece of mechanism in the shape of a flint-lock. It seems incredible, but with this museum relic all the sharp and desperate battles of the trail were fought. With it a continent was practically won. All American history is based upon it. To recall i.t with all the vividness one can, only causes us to come to the conclusion that the Americans of those days would, had there been necessity, have conquered their way to empire with wayside stones. KANSAS. 23 At the beginning of the journey it may be well to formulate a few of the plainest and prosiest of the facts about Kansas. There is plenty of romance ; and a long category of peculiarities, for the State has a most remarkable modern history; but the material things very likely come first in the minds of the majority of readers, though it was sentiment, elan, pluck, that made the State more than the material advantages or favorable circumstances that are so much discussed in the tens of thousands of pages of descriptive printing that have been issued since in her behalf. Kansas is a symmetrical and well-proportioned oblong square, lying, as a whole, quite in the centre of the Union. This square is four hundred and ten miles long, and two hundred and ten miles Early Kansas Residence, wide, and has an area of 81,318 square miles. The only deviation from a square in the configuration of the State is caused by the Mis- souri River, with a northwestward trend, cutting off a slice of the upper right-hand corner. One must think twice before he can quickly comprehend what has passed in this quadrangle of soil in the way of material develop- ment in the past few years, and when one lends himself to a con- templation of the picture, judging by the past, the result must be nothing less than a general feeling of astonishment. Were Kansas as densely populated as New England is, it would contain thirty- three million people. As the soil is so much better that there is 24 OVERLAND GUIDE. KANSAS. 25- no comparison between the two sections in that respect ; — indeed, Kansas soil would be worth almost anywhere in New England probably twenty-five cents a cart-load as a fertilizer ; — one can but fairly conclude that in the course of a few years that enormous population must be attained. Were the population as dense as it is. even in Ohio, there would be six millions of population. In i860, the year before the State was admitted, there was a population of 107,206. There is a very slight doubt whether there were quite so many as that. At the end of ten years, or in 1870^ there were 364,369 people. June ist, 1880, showed a population of 996,096. March i, 1885, by a State census, there were 1,268,530 people. There is, even from a modern and western standpoint, something extraordinary in this high percentage of increase. But there is. another view from which it is much more remarkable. This increase, it must be remembered, has taken place in the heart of a desert. No allusion is made here to the "Great American," etc., of the old geographies. That glossy and polished chestnut has been passed around for twenty years, and no one who knows how the geographies are made ever wonders at their teachings. It was a desert in the opinions of men who had tramped and camped all over it; who knew it well. The explorers believed it uninhabitable. The traders and freighters agreed. The more learned wrote elaborate treatises of warnmg. The judicious grieved. The writer hereof once had the adventurous spirit (under orders) to travel from end to end of the very best of Kansas, — the Arkansas Valley. He was possessed of an amiable mule, which he rode, and when the mule was unamiable he walked. The whole country had been swept by the besom of desolation. It was not only a homeless solitude; there were reasons palpable and undoubted why it should never become the home of civilized man. Now, I presume, the Arkansas Valley in Kansas contains six or seven hundred thousand people. Now, there is every reason per-^ 56 OVERLAND GUIDE. fectly apparent why it should become one of the most prosperous agricultural regions in the world, yet now, even yet, one is aston- ished at the fool-hardiness, the temerity, the fatuousness, that induced the building through this waste, at that time, of the great railroad upon which we now journey to the Pacific coast. It was the great cause of settlement, and there was not a habitation even in hope when it first stretched its lonesome lines of iron across the silent landscape. And yet, they say that " capital is timid." The fact is, that capital is merely strange. If there is anything which makes an unneces- sary fuss ; that sings when it is saddest and is most hilarious and seemingly jocund when its back is broken, it is capital. It is the human institution that has a thousand forms of deceit. But it is useless to say, after the western railroads, and the money it took to build them, and the circumstances, that capital is "timid." Kansas is subdivided into ninety-five counties. An average one of these counties contains about a half-million acres of land. Most of them approach very nearly the form of the square. All old-fashioned notches and diagonals are left off. The simplicity of the Government surveys has been adhered to wherever possible. It is all prairie. Only a very small fraction of the surface ever had any timber growth. But in many instances that which was prairie has become timber. Millions of trees have been planted, and have grown into fair-sized timber within a brief time. Trees have completely changed the original appearance of the country in very many cases. The horizon has departed, and clumps interrupt the once almost boundless view. Kansas, revisited by the very early settler, has a tendency to make him retire behind a hedge or a red barn, for the purpose of castigating himself for not guessing in time at the capacities of a country about which every common- sense indication, every gloomy prophecy, was alike completely at fault. They said, among many other wise things, that trees wouldn't, wouldn't grow. God did not intend they should, or He would have KANSAS. 2T planted them Himself. It was a pious conclusion, built upon the ideas of the Old School. But, like others of the same kind, it appears to have been erroneous. Trees not only grow, but in this- soil that, never since the dawn of the present creation until now felt the thrill of a creeping rootlet, they grow better than they da elsewhere. The general idea of a prairie country is that it should be flat. This is not; though the State can not boast a mountain, or even anything that can be called a hill except by a considerable stretch. of courtesy. There is said not to be a swamp within its bound- aries. The country is what is called " rolling," and the undulations are very charming to the eye. From May until November, Kansas is well worth a visit for the mere sake of feasting the eye upon probably the most charming pastoral landscape, and the most exten- sive, in the world. It will not answer to allow yourself to become attracted by it unless you propose to listen to the promptings which persuade you to remain. "Horizon hungry" is a phrase that has. crept inadvertently into the language. It is not entirely hyper- bole. Nooks and valleys historically charming will thereafter lose their spell to you, — because they are too small. All Kansas people are celebrated for an unreasoning poo-poohing of all other localities. It is aut Kansas aut nihil. Sometimes one thinks they would like to wall her in, and have everything to themselves, with a few reciprocity and other treaties with those they liked, and with a set of histories, newspapers, periodicals and poets all to- themselves, and to suit them. This spirit of loyalty has aided largely in the wonderful growth of the country, and has its avail- able side, and is entirely excusable as an effect of locality and climate. But it has made possible a variety of treason not con- templated by the Constitution, and that is punishable only by epithets, and has called out a retaliatory crop of denials and counter- charges. This is the land of pretty towns, as you will find to be the case as KANSAS. 29 you rapidly come nearer to the middle of the " desert." They have grown and changed with unequalled rapidity within the past two years. In each of them the school-house is the prominent object. Only in the very newest neighborhoods is the school-building a poor one, and it may be said with certainty that it never long remains so. The system of public education is one of the most complete possible, and public and private interest in the education of the masses has not flagged from the beginning. A heavy indebtedness for school- buildings is not complained of, and the first and latest effort of every man who comes is to get, first a school-house ; second, a railroad. There is one eastern feature that will be missed ; there are no ** saloons." It is true. This hideous feature of ■civilization is actually eliminated. The Kansas " cranks " are made of that kind of material that they actually mean their theories. So far as human wisdom can see, there is no hope of the re-establishment of this most - horrible of industries. There is now no question of either the wisdom or the strength of the anti- saloon movement. It is not a movement ; it is a fact acquiesced in by everybody. There is, among minor considerations, something very remarkable about the "luck" of this peculiar commonwealth. Every mishap that could befall her by conspiracy of all the malignant powers has befallen her. Nothing could be more terrible than the drouth of i860, of which the half has not been told, or the grasshopper scourge of 1874. They both, to all appearances, resulted in a splendid advertisement and succeeding booms. Everything that it was said Kansas could not do, and was not fitted to do, she has done. In early times her climate was most discouraging from its very inherent and incurable disagreeableness. The wind was always blowing. It amounted to malice. Everything that was portable was taken by the wind to some other locality. This perpetual sirocco was not occasional, but continuous. It did not rain with 30 OVERLAND GUIDE. any regularity even during the (comparatively) ^^^^ years, and, in fine, the weather, and anxiety about the weather, was the burden of common life. This is all changed, as the world knows. Why ? The last "streak " of industrial luck that has struck the country is the sugar industry. This sugar is made from " sorghum " cane, yields largely, can be made with certainty, and is profitable at four- and-one-half cents per pound ; perhaps less. There is no locality outside of its native Africa where this cane grows so big, and thick, and tall, and sweet, as it does in Kansas. As usual with enterprises here, this industry is destined to grow with great rapidity. There will soon be sugar-houses with tall chimneys sticking up out of the landscape everywhere. Nobody will have ever seen these chimneys before except in the midst of the palms, and with at least semi- tropical surroundings. And for years they have been raising sorghum in the western por- tions of the State as a forage-crop. If that despised region can now come forward as a sugar-country, it will succeed in turning the tables very handsomely upon previous reputation. There is a good deal of Kansas history of a more modern date than any thus far mentioned. All the hills you see beyond the timber, and out to the southward, have been in a later day than that of the historic trail tramped over by those who were making history with great effect, and more of it, probably, than they at the time supposed. All the trails leading westward from the Missouri over this part of the State have been tramped over by armed men. They did not live here ; in point of fact they had not the least business here, and did not come to stay. At this date, and to younger men, the whole story of the attempted conquest of Kansas by people who came here purposely to do it, and in the interest direct and avowed of an institution as dead now as Pompey the Great, seems absurd. But they did come, and they came so near to success in their efforts that for a while they were KANSAS. 31 :sure they had succeeded. However, later times have shown that this was but the sign of an approaching revolution. This is the sense in which the first battles of the great war were fought in Kan- sas ; a remark that is often made. "No wonder they wanted it." This was the only remark made on the subject by a gentleman looking out at the car win- dow on this same route, when his eye fell upon the landscape State University a few miles east of Lawrence, where the VVakarusa joins the Kaw. The country had a charm even in those gloomy days. They " wanted " it. A few minutes before noon the train reaches Lawrence. It is now a town embowered in trees, and a place of elegant houses, often referred to somewhat tritely as "the Athens of Kansas." For the State University is here ; a beautiful building crowning the hill west of the city, and visible for many miles in all directions. It is 32 OVERLAND GUIDE. an institution that has received especial care from successive Legis- latures, and that is rapidly growing in influence and educational facilities. But the State is full of " institutions of learning," de- nominational and otherwise, and the public interest is largely con- centrated in the schools. Here, on the right of the train, one may see a curious sight, — for Kansac. It is a dam across the Kaw River ; the only one in sight in a long journey. It is the only one ever built across this sandy cur- rent, the "bed-rock" of which almost always eludes the eye of industry. As a point of historical interest, Lawrence takes high rank. The place was the centre and capital of the Free State side of the Kansas struggle, and, then and since, its streets have witnessed strange sights. Here, on the then extreme verge of western civiliza- tion, it has been burned, purposely and by enemies, two several times. First, when it was a mere village, but a very widely known one, on May 21, 1856, and last, on August 21, 1863. The following two accounts of the last burning are given in. Wilder's "Annals of Kansas." The first was written by the Rev. Richard Cordley, D. D. The last appeared in a book called "Shelby and his Men," printed in Cincinnati in 1867, and it gives a Confed- erate view of the massacre. Mr. Cordley's acconnt: "Early in the Summer of 1863, a large band entered Olathe, one night, about midnight. They took most of the citizens prisoners, and kept them till their work was done. They plundered the town, carried off what they wanted, and destroyed other property, and left before daylight. They killed some seven men. "Some time after they sacked the town of Shawnee twice. In addition to rob- bery, they burned most of the town. Several were killed here also. Individual murders and house-burning were common. " On the 2oth cf August, a body of between three and four hundred crossed the State line at sundown. Riding all night they reached Lawrence at daybreak. They dashed into the town with a yell, shooting at everybody they saw. The surprise was complete. The ^lotel, and every point where a rally would be possible, was. KANSAS. 33 seized at once, and the ruffians then began the work of destruction. Some of the citizens escaped into the fields and ravines, and some into the woods, but the larger portion could not escape at all. Numbers of those were shot down as they were found, and often brutally mangled. In many cases the bodies were left in the burn- ing buildings, and were consumed. The Rebels entered the place about five o'clock, and left between nine and ten. Troops for the relief of the town were within six miles when the Rebels went out. One hundred and fonty-three were left dead in the streets, and about thirty desperately wounded. The main street was all burned but two stores. Thus, about seventy-five business houses were destroyed, and nearly one hundred residences. They destroyed something near two millions of property, left eighty widows and two hundred and fifty orphans as the result of their four hours' work. Scenes of brutality were enacted which have never been surpassed in savage warfare. The picture is redeemed only by the fact that women and children were in no case hurt." The Confederate view: "About daylight on the morning of August 21, 1863, Quantrill, with three hundred men, dashed into the streets of Lawrence, Kansas. Flame and bullet, waste and pillage, terror and despair, were everywhere. Two hundred were killed. Death was a monarch, and men bowed down and worshiped him. Blood ran in rivulets. The guerrillas were unerring shots with revolvers and excellent horsemen. General Lane saved himself by flight; General Collamore took refuge in a well, and died there. Poor Collamore! He should have kept away from the well, upon the principle that actuated the mother who had no objection to her boy's learning how to swim, if he didn't go near the water. Printers and editors suffered. Speer of the Tribune, Pa'mcr of the Journal, Trask of the State Journal, hadn't time even to write their obituaries. Two camps of instruction for white and negro soldiers, on Massachusetts street (of course), were surrounded and all their occupants killed. Every hotel, except the City Hotel, was burned. Other property, valued at two million dollars, was also fired and consumed. . . . . Massachusetts street was made a mass of smouldering ruins. Sometimes there is a great deal in a name — in this instance more than is generally the case. After killing every male innaJ^itant who remained in Lawrence, after burning the houses in the town and those directly around it, Quantrill very quietly withdrew his men into Missouri and rested there, fol- lowed, however, at a safe distance, by General Lane, who made terrible threats, but miserable fulfillments. Two hundred white abolitionists, fifty or sixty negroes, and two millions of dollars' worth of property were fearful aggregates of losses." 34 OVERLAND GUIDE. The purely political history of these times in Kansas is very inter- esting, especially in the light of later events. But it can not be given here. Eleven miles west of Lawrence is another celebrated town. It is Lecompton, the ancient capital of Kansas under the pro-slavery organization. It is now a country hamlet, changed in its politics and ni all other aspects. Here, overgrown with vegetation, and looking as ancient as Thebes, are the ruins of the old times. There are foundations of an elaborate Capitol building whose walls never grew beyond the basement and upon which a religious college now stands. There are the remains of the jail where the "Yankees" were confined, when caught, upon charges of high political crimes, and under a peculiar construction of the constitutional definition of "treason." Many of the first settlers of Kansas obtained on this historic spot, and in this " Bastile," their most valuable political cap- ital, upon which they did a fair business for many years afterward. Reminiscences and association might have a rich field here, but it is a busy country, and a very changeful one. The growing trees, the fields of tall corn, the creeping carpet of sod, seem to have con- spired with the new-comers and the rising generation to obliterate all the past. There is no country where less attention is paid to the has-beens and the might-have-beens. The revolutionary war is scarcely more a memory than are those recent times when men seem to have gone stark-mad over a political idea ; when, for the sake of perpetuating an institution that was even then doomed if there is justice in Heaven, they were dyeing this virgin soil with the blood of rapine and murder. And all the while, by their misdirected endeav- ors, they were doing what they could to bring about a result pre- cisely opposite from that which they desired. Here they succeeded in awaking that phlegmatic northern lion who had up to that date hardly so much as growled. He stayed awake for five years after ; he refused to lie down again ; and when 1861 came he was still alert, and ready to begin that contest of four years during which he never KANSAS. 35 slept. This is the sense in which the War was begun in Kansas. The fatuous -and foolish criminalities of early Kansas taught the country what to expect. Nine men in ten, regardless of mere party,- were angry about it. Old John Brown, beginning his career here, went on to Harper's Ferry. Mrs. Stone had written " Uncle Tom," and Helper contributed his prophetic book. The country is still full of grizzled old fellows who were partakers in every peril of those times. Some of them, as they pass by on a railway train that was not dreamed of then, may look out at Lecompton with a grim smile, — remembering how full the place was of the preliminary parodies upon their own later experiences. At one time nearly a hundred free State men were confined here, and had many of the experi- ences of prisoners of war ; vermin, bad food, etc. They kept escaping, and could not be caught again. One night all who remained were released by a surprise party of their friends. At about one o'clock, Topeka is reached. Here is served the first dinner of the journey, in the first of the longest series of hotels on the continent, and whose cookery and attendance one dis- covers to be an especial feature of the trip. The dining-car system has not been adopted. The journey is a long one, and it is pleasanter for passengers to seat themselves at a table that stands still, and enjoy a meal for which the old-fashioned twenty minutes gives place to a full half-hour. Very little of the actual Topeka can be seen from the depot. The extensive village in the neighborhood of the depot consists of the very extensive shops, warehouses and yards of the Company, and the homes of a small army of employes. The Santa Fe system was born in Boston, but it was conceived in Topeka. Away back in the sixties, when the infant State was at that age when nothing could be foretold of her more than can be of the average infant, the scheme which has since developed into some eight thousand miles of steel track occurred to the private consciousness of a citizen of the little prairie village. Of course, 36 OVERLAND GUIDE. the origin of the idea was the trail, and the fact that an extensive trade existed in the precise direction to be taken by the locomotive ; . — when it should come. This dream, which should then have consigned its author to a lunatic asylum if there had been any, should now constitute a sufficient reason for his perpetuation in bronze. The story of the difficulties encountered before the " timidity " of capital could finally be overcome, would, if truly told, constitute an attractive industrial romance of itself. The dream came true. It remains a fact. The dreamer, now only in middle life, has long been enjoying the substantial fruits of per- sistence in a chimerical idea. One of the secrets of the success of Kansas has been that the State was from the beginning specially helped by a peculiar quality of brains. The dreamers have made it. A hundred schemes have been born since then, all of them ridiculous in the beginning, but a considerable percentage of them very successful now. The con- servatism of old communities has never had a place. The field was wide, and everything was to be yet done, and they did it. The Santa Fe Route is only one example. But it was the boldest of all. There is a sense in which the State of Kansas owes more to this extraordinary conception in the mind of a private citizen than she does to any other fact in her history. About the time of the beginning of the idea of the Santa Y6 Route, the village of Topeka was decided upon as the capital o''-':he State. The prominence of the place was thereafter more or less assured. There are now about thirty thousand people here, and it is the political and social centre of the commonwealth. This road has two Missouri River termini ; one at Atchison, the other, and chiefest, at Kansas City. The stem of the grotesque "Y," for the two arms of which Topeka is the junction point, extends almost indefinitely down to the southwestward. They call it " down " here, presumably because it is up. It is a western fashion ; they frequently call a man " Governor " during all the KANSAS. 37 remainder of hia life, simply because he never was a governor, and is known to have sincerely wished to be. It is really up ; about 8,000 feet of steady climb before one reaches the crest of the long slope which is the western side of the Missouri-Mis- sissippi Valley at Raton Tunnel. For instance, Kan as City is 765 feet above sea-level. The short distance to Topeka includes a climb of 135 feet. A hundred and thirty-four miles farther, at Newton, just at the beginning of what in late years has been distinctively known as 8 "the plains," you are 1,454 feet high; — S a climb of 554 feet more; — and so on c westward. Reduced to a scale whose CO -0 differences are appreciable to the eye, as i- in the profile, and it is the steep side of I a gigantic ridge. It does not take many c: 1 hours of travel to reach an elevation as c I high as Mount Washington, and one never -S thinks of the fact, since nothing in the •5 surroundings indicates it to the eye. > i^ So overgrown with trees is Topeka that in Summer it almost produces the im- pression that it is situated in native and natural woods, where only some of the trees, and not enough of them, have been cut out. Grass, of the thickest and green- est variety, is also plentiful. Also, in Summer-time, the outlying streets and vac- ant lots are thickly grown with gigantic yellow sunflowers. But there is nothing else about the place thaf would indicate ^.<'*„ V '-^0% Mr o o o b o o o o ; OOOOOOOn- a lM'ol nil ■*1 n1 wU]' 38 OVERLAND GUIDE. any particular devotion to the sestheticism of which this weed is the- accepted emblem. This growth of trees and vegetation is not so remarkable unless, taken in connection with another fact ; that the soil upon which the city stands was always celebrated for its poverty, being of the hardest and yellowest variety of "hard-pan," which twenty years ago was not considered capable of the faintest of those cachinnations the earth is said to indulge in when tickled with a hoe. It was covered with a short and wiry growth of grass that looked like dead moss and was the recognized emblem of poverty. This may answer for a hundred or more places in Kansas, and seems to be one of the features of that much-discussed "climatic change " that has wrought a miracle upon all the country lying west of the Missouri for five hundred miles, still growing less and less apparent as the limit is approached. Time was- when no upland in the State was considered valuable. The majority were of the opinion that it could never be tilled. When Western Kan- sas is reached the reader will form that opinion of it, forgetful of the fact that the whole State was once under the same ban. This opinion was almost universally entertained about a quarter of a century ago. The view, in Summer, from the roof of any public building in Topeka is, excepting the San Gabriel Valley of California and the; famed Valley of Mexico, the most beautiful pastoral landscape in. this country, or perhaps in any country. Immediately south of Topeka we pass the Osage coal-fields. These were a great find in their day, because they solved the ques- tion of fuel for the country west, of whose resources little was then known, though it was known that wood for fuel was one of the things not to be thought of. The mining villages of this region are like those elsewhere, and seem an incongruity in the surrounding landscape. One of the pretty cities of Kansas is Emporia, passed about the middle of the afternoon. It is also reputed to be the wealthiest city per capita. Its main street is headed by the State Normal School, visible at a glance as the train passes. KANSAS. ■ Sd* Emporia is situated in the centre of what is perhaps the richest agricultural region in any of the western States. The valleys of the Neosho and the Cottonwood meet here, and either of them may be very well compared in extent, richness and variety of products- with the Muskingum, the Scioto, the Mohawk or the Connecticut. A few miles below, and at the junction of the two "creeks," as they are usually considered here, is a natural curiosity for this country. It is a body of timber considerably larger than any other betweea the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. • Newton is reached at about six o'clock. It is an eating station,, and a most comfortable, not to say an imposing one. But did the reader ever hear of Newton? Look out over the pretty town, as civil a place as one could wish to see; enter this dining-hall where a meal is served that is scarcely to be excelled in Chicago, and not certainly elsewhere west of the Missouri; and then recall what Newton was about eighteen hundred and seventy-two. It was the extremest verge of the civilization that was beginning to creep over the face of the plains, and was the " hardest " commuaity on this continent at that date. Only Julesburg had in its day been worse. They counted that day lost whose low-descending sun saw no man killed or other mischief done. There is a spot near where they used to "plant " them in those days; those distinguished ones who " died with their boots on." Poker and monte, and the dispen- sing and imbibing of drinks were the only industries. The town was a slab and canvas emporium, full of idleness, prostitution, vice of all varieties, squalor, and general and unmitigated horror. There were no farms, or any thought of agriculture, and the silent plains, and the treeless valley of the Arkansas, stretched westward to the mountains. It was the "western progress" ridiculed by the eastern press, and dwelt upon at great length in all its hideous phases. It is the idea of western progress still cherished by hundreds of well- meaning people. Look about you now, as the sun sets upon the fair scene, and you 40) KANSAS. 41 will be able to carry away with you a picture of the actual progress with which the other had nothing to do ; a pretty town, farms lying on all sides, leagues of fruitful soil, happy homes, church spires, school-houses, all the sounds and sights of prosperous industry, and a visible wealth that is growing so rapidly that there are almost no poor men. There are scores of towns like this, and Newton is not an excep- tional place. There is a long night before you, to be passed in the rumbling oblivion of the sleeping car. If it were only daylight there would be some curious experiences for one making the journey for the first time. As it is, if at any time before one o'clock in the morning you look out of the window, you may see a white glow upon the horizon and specks of brilliancy that look like rows of setting stars. These are the electric lights of the towns strewn along the track in the "desert." For at Newton you are really entering upon that historic deso- lation. Not with reference now to the humorous geographies ; not by inference and ignorance ; but actually. Some concessions had been made by the public to eastern Kansas, and thus far only the facts of the geography had been exploded. This region was not included in that kindness. The line was drawn about here, and all to the westward was at least " uninhabitable." The plainsmen them- selves agreed to this, and this railroad company, who then owned some three million acres of land here, did not insist upon its value west of a certain line more or less definite. The last acre of this land has long since been sold, and of the alternate sections belonging to the Government there is not a " quarter " left. Absolute scientific fact was of no value here. People did not believe the deductions were correct. They came anyhow, and no man is so well acquainted with human nature as to be able precisely to tell, even now, after the fact, why they came. All the ancient and striking features of the Arkansas Valley, and the wide country that lay on either side of it for some hundreds of 42 OVERLAND GUIDE. miles, have been changed. Perhaps it is the breaking of that oppres- sive spell of silence that used to hang over it. Perhaps it is the consciousness that people do live here, whether we see them or not. At any rate, the old times are gone. Crossing the almost level plain between Newton and Hutchinson,, the Arkansas Valley is entered at the latter place. Thence west- ward for three hundred miles the route lies beside, or near, that silent stream. It has been called the " Nile of America." It is not known pre- cisely why, but the idea seemed poetic and attractive, and we will consider it to be such, in the want of any other convenient Nile, and in view of the necessity for having one. It was silent, lone, treeless; a break in the prairie without banks or bluffs on either side for long distances ; sandy, shifting, treacherous, and its unattractive and unromantic current the color of ashes. Its sources were for a long time untraced, and it reaches the Mississippi a thousand miles from where we now see it in Kansas, after passing through two or three climates and as many States, A dozen years ago its banks were as uninhabited as those of any wilderness river in any corner of the world. The prairie-dog towns, were built beside it, their outraged inhabitants seeming to hold indignation meetings, and barking querulous protests against the other diggers and delvers who were lately come, against the rumble and roar and sounds of escaping steam that had begun to disturb the peace and quiet of these exemplary burghers. The two very lonesome lines of steel among the sedges were unauthorized by either the dogs or by the common sense of the times. They have long since been worn out by traffic, and been replaced. They have ceased to be lone- sorhe, and are now a part of the landscape. Yet, there is still something almost supernatural in the distant flash of the headlight as it creeps nearer and nearer through the silence and darkness across the reaches of the prairie by night. There is still something ominous in the long trail of heavy smoke that lies along the horizon by day.. KANSAS. 43 The picture of the old time does not occur to many of the push- ing inhabitants of the plains now. It has gone in the past, and is of no concern to modern interests. Away from the town and the track, and between fields, as it were, one might still see something of it. Glimpses of the historic trail may be caught occasionally from the windows of the train. The dog towns are still there, half- deserted it is true, and lacking the air of opulence and prosperity A Kansas Dog-Town. which once characterized them. But the chiefest and mOst striking mark of the departed days are the buffalo trails, now obliterated near the line but still visible, after twenty years, among the hills. The couiTtry was in those days crossed from South to North by innumerable paths cut deeply into the sod. They were almost endless, for they began in Texas and ended in Manitoba. The bison trailed himself in long lines and innumerable hosts northward in the spring, and back again in autumn. Filling himself with grass 44 OVERLAND GUIDE. he lay down to ruminate upon it, cow-fashion. Rising up, the great host began its journey again. Every day some miles of progress were made. As it went, the herd fell into parallel lines, one animal walking behind the other. Thirst impelled them to a more rapid progress over the "divide" to the next stream. Good pasturage delayed them. One herd was followed by another as long as the migrating season lasted. And so across the plains, for a width of two or three hundred miles, these deep paths lay side by side innumerable. They are now all that is left to remember the bison by, though so short a time ago he was here in such countless multitudes. The plow obliterates them with all other signs of a curious Past. Then the gray thief of the wilderness yelped the night watches away, barking to hear himself, and enamored of his own voice. The camp-fire was his guiding star, and he smelled the frying-pan from afar. In the early morning, herds of antelopes would appear for a moment on the hills, and then were gone like phantoms of the mirage — the gracefulest and nimblest of the denizens of perpetual silence and unbroken peace. Skulking bands of Apaches or Kiowas, dragging all their posses- sions on lodge-poles that trailed behind lean ponies, and riding single-file around the hills, added the only feature of human life to a scene whose wildness was otherwise unbroken for hundreds of square miles. As to climate, it is the great question now; it was then. It was a dry country, but nowhere could it rain harder and faster than it did on the plains. The terrific storms of midsummer were prom- inent among the reminiscences of the old plainsmen ; the rain came down, not in showers, but in sheets, and the deluge was accom- panied by terrific thunder that broke in three or four sharp explo- sions in the same spot. Electric phenomena of other varieties were not uncommon. Balls and circles of fire rolled along the ground. Stock was stampeded by unusual exhibitions of flame and sound, all KANSAS. 45 the low places would be flooded, and rivers would rush down the water-courses, carrying everything before them. In the morning all would be over and the ground almost dry. The fuzzy grass shed the water like a thatch. No rain ever soaked the plains. The sun. come out again, a relentless tyrant who burned the long day through, for weeks at a time, without a cloud. All Summer a wind that never ceased or rested swept across the country from the South. It bore all the aridness of a thousand leagues of heated soil upon its wings. It was often so hot that it seemed to scorch. Flying dust came with it, and the good-sized. Holding an Indignation Meeting. pebble stones stung the face like hail. There was a mixture of "alkali," also, and this blistered the lips and inflamed the eyes. Only when night came again was there peace, and a more splendid sparkle of moonlight or stars, a balmier sweetness of the air, were never known. In Winter, the wind came just the same, but from the North, and laden with the breath of the Arctic zone. There was not then, and there hardly is now, a more striking scene of desolation than the plains in winter. A snow storm is a terror, not from quantity, but because it stings and numbs and blinds. It is not of the quality of 46 OVERLAND GUIDE. the heavy snow-falls that fill the northern woods. When it comes, there is nothing to do but to wait until it is over. It means less now ; there is shelter; there are hedgerows and houses; there are landmarks and roads. Then, to the wayfarer it was death. Western Kansas Cattle. If you could see this same picture now, in the light of a Summer morning, you would think the above one of the most uselessly extravagant sketches ever written. In the morning especially under consideration now ; — something less than twenty-four hours from Kansas City; — you will find your- self somewhere very near the western boundary of Kansas. Break- fast should await you at La Junta, Colorado. You may fancy that KANSAS. 47 your car has an imperceptible slant upward at the forward end. There may be perceived, perhaps, a faint balsamic odor in the air, ■and vast blue shapes, tipped or sprinkled with pure white, may lie upon the horizon. You will see at hand the fiat-topped hills called mesas (w^j'-sas) from their resemblance to a mesa; — a table. You will have attained an altitude of about four thousand feet, and be able to see b)- a hundred new sensations that you have changed your zone. The old journey of forty days you will have passed in a single night, and while asleep. You have gone by an empire of farming lands, all destined to immediate occupation, and some of them now worth per acre considerably more than Napoleon got for a county when he sold it to us. You have passed some thirty-odd thriving towns, some of them daily-paper and electric-light and water-works cities, and each with a "boom " or a prospect of one. There have been, besides, some hundreds of thousands of spotted cattle that have taken the place of the bison, and the homes of more than a third of a million of prosperous and contented people, with all that belongs to a civilization that in its rapid development is more like a dream than any chapter ever before written in the history of •civilization. You can have caught but a glimpse, but it is, perhaps, sufficient to impress the stranger to these scenes with a new idea of his country and its possibilities, and with the fact of how easy the slow and painful processes of civilization may become with steam as a pioneer. Also a realization, more or less vivid, of the folly of adopting the Chinese idea of a region because it is not one's own Tlowery Kingdom, elsewhere in an Eastern State. ■L0RADI [HE Santa Fe Route traverses only the southeastern corner of P Colorado. Coolidge is the last town in Kansas, 469 miles from the Missouri. Seventy-five miles west of the State line, in Colorado, and 555 miles from the Missouri, at about half-past eight in the morning, we arrive at the first distinctively Spanish name, and also at breakfast. La Junta {La Hoontah) means The Junction. The name is not very felicitously chosen, as it also means the coming together of a body of men, such as a legislature or the city council. But it will do. It is a little town apparently in a valley, but it has an elevation of 4,061 feet. The mountains lie just beyond, over the hill as it were, and Pike's Peak is north of us some ninety miles. The cottonwoods and gray stream one sees are still those of the Arkansas, and this is the last glimpse of the stream beside which we have been for the past twelve hours, and on whose banks we may be said to have slept. Its small beginnings amid mountain snows are still many a mile away. La Junta is not a romantic spot, and exists chiefly for railroad — and, from appearances, for " saloon " — purposes. Here is where trains are made up. Travelers for the mountain resorts of Colo- rado, and for Pueblo and Denver, have their cars shunted off to the northward among the foothills of the eastern slope of the Rockies, or to take the Colorado Midland road for the direction of Salt Lake and Ogden, while those who, like ourselves, are content with nothing less than the Pacific coast direct, are trundled away to the south- westward behind a monster called a " Mogul " engine, who backs himself up the track and joins the procession with a snap. (49) 50 OVERLAND GUIDE. While we are waiting it may do no harm to enquire into some of the facts of the State of Colorado. To make up Colorado, parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Utah and New Mexico were taken. The land, like Kansas, was acquired partly by conquest and partly by purchase. Some of it came from Mexico, and some of it was included in the Napoleon Bonaparte real estate deal. Colorado was admitted to the Union July, 1876, and is fondly known as the " Centennial " State. In history she is a partaker with all her far-western sisters who were subjects of Spanish rule, and has about the same musty histori- cal facts, though not so many of them, to her credit. The Spaniards wandered among her canyons more than three hundred years ago, looking for the gold that, like that of California, seems through a singular course of events to have been mostly reserved for the Saxon. The first American explorer was Major Zebulon M. Pike, who came so long ago as 1806, and has a monument which will stand in perpetual commemoration of his name ; — Pike's Peak. Colonel Long, and still later John C. Fremont, made expeditions through Colorado and across the mountains. About 1858 gold was discovered in what is now Gilpin County, a few m.iles from where Denver now stands. This gave great celebrity to the monument of Major Pike, and " Pike's Peak or Bust " passed into history as the watchword of western pluck. Colorado has an East and West length of 380 miles, and is 280 miles from North to South. It is in form, like so many of the newer States, almost a perfect parallelogram. There are thirty-three coun- ties; they being very large; with an area of 104,500 square miles, or 66,880,000 acres. There may be said to be three natural divisions of the State; — the mountain ranges, occupying the central portion from North to South, the foothills, and the plains. There are three generally parallel ranges of mountains, with intervening plateaux generally known as COLORADO. 51 "parks." These last are a special feature of the State. They lie at an elevation of nine or ten thousand feet, are almost surrounded by high mountain.s, and are beautiful to the eye and rich agriculturally. About one-third of the area of the State is plains. They lie in the eastern part, and are the steep western edge of the great central plain which the traveler from the east has just crossed. The further west one goes, the steeper becomes the plains-slope until the foot-hills appear. A Colorado Beginning. The character of Colorado as a mountain resort is well known. Beauty of sky and scene, purity of air, equability of temperature, have been written of to the extent of scores of volumes — thousands of pages. Formerly the country was exclusively devoted to mining, and undoubtedly is excedingly rich in mineral resources. But of later years she has been discovered to possess very valuable agricultural resources. The farming area is not extensive, but what is raised is of the best. Colorado wheat, vegetables and beef have a character of their own. Dairy products are a special feature. These interests 52 OVERLAND GUIDE will all grow, and even now make an aggregate showing much better than that of some States that have no resources other than agri- cultural. Southern Colorado seems to have been about the northern limit of Spanish occupancy. They crept up the fine valley of the Purgatoire {Voyageur for " Purgatory"; — vernacular, ^'■Picket-wire") — to Trini- dad {La Trinidad — "The Trinity'"), and still further to Las Ani- mas (''The Souls"). The river also takes that name among the Mexicans, probably from the habitual, and perhaps very proper, association in the Spanish mind of Purgatory and Souls.* Where the Purgatoire enters the Arkansas, at the old Mexican town of Las Animas, on the verge of the plains, their northern occupation stopped. Pueblo is also one of the old places ; an extreme frontier village of the Mexican civilization. About this latitude the Indian occu- pancy began ; the Apaches, worst of all Indians, held the ground, with other tribes almost as bad, to the Missouri. Thirty years ago this Indian occupancy was complete, and ten years later it was still unsuccessfully disputed. This was the south- western boundary of it. A few miles west of La Junta, on the north side of the Arkansas, we can see from the car-windows one of the mementoes of that time. This is Bent's Fort. It was famous in its time. The straggling line of dug-outs, log huts, covered wagons, and tents that marked the then frontier, was away behind it. As skirmishers preceding the line of civilization, the gaunt, adventurous, nervy, desperate American frontiersmen pushed up the valley of the Arkansas. They were further advanced here than at other parts of the line because this valley was a favorite trail, and not because they were making farms and homes in it, as has since occurred. The occupants of Bent's Fort were hunters by predilection. They loved the wilderness, and never returned to civilization. They were fur-hunters and Indian traders and Indian * Las Animas Perdidas is probably the original Spanish name. COLORADO. 53 fighters at the same time. They kept no records ; they did not •care. The American history they were making never got into any books. They were intolerant and savage-tempered men, despera- does on a pinch, every one. Their ranks were recruited by fugi- tives from justice. Life was held v<.ry cheap. They were so accus- tomed to the law of self-defense that it was second nature to them. They hated Indians, and doubtless with reason, for it is undoubt- edly true that all who have lived among them do hate them unless, as often has happened, they were so bad themselves that they could not live even among their desperate white companions. A Colorado Ranch. At Bent's Fort a sod wall, thick and high, enclosed about an acre. There never was a more terrible acre of ground. It was full of the most reckless men ever gathered in one spot. Every one of them was, in our conception, a murderer. They had a different idea of crime. They gambled, they got drunk, they fought Indians, they stole stock, and they "traded." The man Bent was the recog- nized head of them, and was afterward the first American Gov- ernor of New Mexico. The commercial idea was probably predom- inant, for everything was kept for sale there. The place was in the midst of a great buffalo range, and around it Apache, Cheyenne, 54 OVERLAND GUIDE. Comanche and Pawnee gathered and hunted and fought. They used, when lacking a quarrel among themselves, to attack the fort. They charged the wall on horseback. They never captured it, but if one should visit those ruins now he might be sure that he was standing upon ground that had been repeatedly soaked with human blood. All down the valley, so peaceful now, it was the same thing. Hostile tribes met in sight of the place, and fought it out almost under its walls. The great battle between the Sioux from the Black Hills and the Pawnees began close to Bent's Fort, and did not end until both sides had fought their way down to what is now Pawnee Rock, in Barton County, Kansas, which was passed at about ten o'clock p. M. Mr. Frank Wilkeson gives the following graphic picture of the doings of which Bent's Fort was the nucleus. It affords a glimpse of those old times which have so far gone that no thought is ever given them. Boone, and the settlement of Kentucky and Indiana, have more or less passed into history. All this, as bloody and as interesting, is curiously left out. "As emigration increased on the Arkansas trail, Bent's Fort became an important place. United States troops, marching to the Southeastern Territories, camped there, and frequently secured guides from the post. Thousands of dollars' worth of goods were sold annually. Enterprising young men bought goods at Bent's and loaded them onto their pack animals. Then they rode North, South, West, in search of Indian camps, which they entered and there traded with savage custom- ers. The peddlers of the plains traded only for the more valuable furs. They penetrated into the remote recesses of the Rocky Mountains. They crossed that mighty snow-capped range and drummed up trade in then unnamed valleys where unknown Indians lived. These men acquired trading routes along certain trails and jealously defended them against all intruders. They recklessly entered all the Indian villages they discovered. In time, if they were not shot or burned, they became widely known among the Indians, and were welcomed and trusted. They sup- plied the warriors with powder and lead and percussion caps. They also dealt in traps, bright-colored cloth, beads, knives, axes, fishhooks, buttons and brass wire. Many of these traders married Indian women, and from these unions sprang the half-breeds — dangerous men in whom the courage of their fathers was supple- COLORADO. 55. mented by the crafty treachery of their mothers. Some of the white traders, especially in the Rocky lyiountain region, adopted the dress and habits of the Indians, and frequently became men of consequence in the tribes. " Other men, lured from the bloody frontier by hope of profitable barter or love of adventure, or who sincerely desired to put a greater distance between themselves and pursuing sheriffs, loaded wagons with goods and drove westward to the buffalo range, expecting to meet wandering tribes of Indians. They were careless whether they met Sioux, Cheyennes, Crows or Blackfeet. These men generally traveled in groups of three or four, each driving a team of horses, behind wh'ich rolled a heavily-loaded wagon. Today they traded with Sioux; tomorrow they met Coman- che braves; the next day painted and blanketed Cheyenne warriors crowded around their wagons and exchanged furs for powder, balls, blankets and hardware. Or, today they fought, and tomorrow their corpses lay blackening in the sun, and glossy ravens perched on their scalpless heads and plucked their eyes, and foul buzzards stalked around them and prairie wolves tore them to pieces. Their goods were scattered throughout the villages, and their scalps, suspended from sticks thrust in the ground at the entrance of lodges, waved in the wind, and little Indian children spat on them as they played." Long after the times spoken of above, the plains Indians contin- ued strong and defiant. In November, 1864, what is called the " Chivington Massacre" occurred, on Sand Creek, not far from the site of Bent's Fort, and on the old fighting ground of the tribes. Chivington was a Colorado colonel, and his action was alternately condemned and defended. As late as the Summer of 1867, after railroads had begun to be built, and when 10,000 children attended Sunday-school in Kansas, there was an Indian raid in what is now a thickly settled portion of the State. Still later a Kansas governor resigned to take command of a battalion of Kansas militia, and went into the field. The same Summer General Custer lost sixty men in a fight with Indians on the Republican River, in what is now Republican County. On September 17, 1868, Col. G. A. Forsyth, a soldier of the war and a skillful fighter, was surrounded by Indians on the North Fork of the Republican, probably in what is now Jewell County, and remained so for eight days. He was almost mortally 56 OVERLAND GUIDE. wounded, and lost several men and officers, among whom was Lieut. F. H. Beecher. This seems not to have been the last of the Indian exploits in this bloody raid, though its details are among the most thrilling in the annals of frontier warfare. In the Summer of 1869 they were still raiding Kansas. These were expiring throes. By that time RM'^M-.C^ Indian Aristocracy. the railroads, farm-making and popu- lation had advanced to an extent in- compatible with Indian hostilities. Only the perpetual and deathless de- sire for revenge could have brought them about. They were entirely useless and hopeless as attempts to recover lost territory or stop the fateful march of civilization. La Junta marks the shore of a new order of civilization; the oldest of the continent. Here begin the swarthy faces, the curious COLORADO. 57 dress, the adobe dwellings, the laden donkeys, the huge and ironless carts, the curiously yoked oxen, the plows made of crooked sticks, the growth of crops by irrigation, the Catholic faith and the Spanish tongue. We shall see greatly more of all these un-Ameri- can things as we go westward, and with them a still older and stranger civilization; that of the Pueblos. Amid varying scenes, and upon a track that, without any refer- ence to sacred poetry, may be called a devious way, we pass most of the forenoon. The difficulties of nature are obviously increasing, and during this forenoon we shall climb about three thousand feet. Magnificent glimpses of mountains are just before, and there is rock, canyon and pine on either hand. A rushing stream is occa- sionally passed, and plow-land is one of the things of the past, away back beyond the western edge of Kansas. What few houses one sees remind one of things noted in desultory readings about Pales- tine, and, indeed, there is a relationship between them as near as that usually existing between Irish cousins. The style of the Mexi- can house is of Eastern origin. It came to Spain with the Moor, and from Spain hither. Before noon we reach Trinidad. The old town, the Mexican Trinidad, is not visible from the station. It is spoiled by civilization, ■even if it could be seen, and is not recognizable by the visitor of fifteen years ago. It seemed then to have an air which it has now lost. Beside its brawling stream ; Mexican, and not a mixture; sur- rounded by beautiful mountains, with an air that was balm; after three months of the hot breezes of the plains, it seemed a haven of rest. And the worst of the plains came last, for there is not a mor,e God-forsaken tract of soil in the whole journey from Westport to the mountains'than that which lies between what is now La Junta and Trinidad. The flat-top mountain which seems so near, beyond the town, and which changes its aspect curiously as seen from different points, is Fisher's Peak. It is named for a pioneer. (58) COLORADO. 59 On the right, going west, there is a yellow cliff rising brokenly to a height of some five or six hundred feet. Good eyes and close scrutiny will enable one to see upon this an upright monument. Another of the old settlers chose to be buried there. The top of the cliff was the scene of an Indian siege during his lifetime, in which he took an enforced, but prominent, part, and when he died he was carried thither. It is at Trinidad that we really begin to climb. It is twenty miles to the Raton (Rah-^one: — "a mouse") tunnel, and there are more than sixteen hundred feet to climb in those twenty miles. Raton Tunnel is an elongated perforation through the back- bone of the continent. But this " backbone," so often mentioned in contemporaneous literature, is a desultory bit of geography and is scattered about over a vast extent of country, and occurs in places hundreds of miles apart. This is one of the most prominent pro- cesses of the continental spine, and you come as near its exact location as you can at any one place on a journey that certainly does get around or over the vertebral column somewhere. Around Trinidad lies one of the best and most extensive anthra- cite coal-beds of the country. You may see the coke-ovens smoking in the daytime and glowing at night, any time of the year. This railroad has had great luck at striking coal-beds. It has them in Kansas ; extensive ones in the mountains just beyond La Junta ; here ; on the other side of the tunnel near Blossburg; and conven- iently strung along the line almost to El Paso on one hand and Cali- fornia on the other. Considering the frantic coughing of two enormous engines, the clouds of smoke, the dribbling sand and the very perceptible slant, you will conclude that coal in considerable quantity is needed just about here. While the train is toiling up the steepest portion of the grade just east of the tunnel, if the day be fair you will find it to be worth the trouble to look backward. At a certain point you will see rising up out of the immensity a vision that has often been declared worth the 60 OVERLAND GUIDE. journey thus far; an almost unreal and unearthly panorama of pale blue mountains flecked with white against a sky as blue as sapphire. The pines and canyons of the lower regions lie between. Over all hangs a haze so thin and so ethereal that it gives to the momentary picture the semblance of a scene out of some gigantic fairy-land. There is something in the mountain scenery of these regions that impresses every man. But it can not be put into words, and has never yet been either painted or described. Nothing but actual presence will answer, and then, on a railroad train, there is but a glimpse. One can but sit at a window and take in the general sen- A Glance Backward. sations. Then, after going over the same route a score of times, one will continually be finding something new, and be smitten with a species of remorse because he was so stupid as never to have seen it before. Much of the best is unfortunately passed in the night. The railroad waits for no man as a rule, and when it does it usually happens in an uninteresting place. No rhapsodies will be indulged in here. They seem puerile when compared with the actual scene. The skies of these New Mexican and Arizona regions alone are enough to furnish occupation. Perhaps there is nothing like them elsewhere in the beautiful world. COLORADO. 61 Raton Tunnel is 7,622 feet above sea-level. It is nearly a mile through it, and it continues to be up-grade to the middle of it, and then it is downwards for the rest of the way. When you enter the darkness of the eastern end you are in Colorado. When in the course of a few minutes you emerge into daylight at the opposite end, you are in New Mexico. Just before entering the tunnel one may see on the mountain-side above certain apparently prehistoric remains. They are those of the "switchback," by means of which trains were taken over the mountains while the tunnel was building. One would think from the indifference with regard to it of those who built it and all the rest of the line, that a " switchback " over the narrow crest of the Raton Mountain, and all the other engineering feats in the neigh- borhood of the backbone, were the commonest things in life. In truth they are not. Only absolute necessity invented them in the later years. The modest men of the times are the civil engineers^ They have builded, to stand a thousand years, some of the most astonishing of all the monuments of human genius, perseverance and energy, and you can not even get them to talk about it. Some of them were fighters, too, and knew how to march and camp and watch as well as any trained soldier. They did not leave behind them a trail of desolation, but of progress, industry and lasting ben- efit to the country and the world. It is, as is not unusual in human affairs, bard to get up at Raton Pass, but it is still harder, in this case, to get down. There was an engine to pull, and one to push, in the ascent, and there is now one Titanic monster exercising his utmost endeavor in what an engine does not like to do — holding back. There is often a thick smoke which makes one imagine there must be a hot box; — several of them. But there is not ; it is hot tires. The brake-shoes have made the rims of all the wheels hot enough to burn the oil with which the surface of every car-wheel gets coated, and the resultant smoke suggests a smouldering conflagration. •62 OVERLAND GUIDE. Observing these things one wonders how this and other steep grades could be descended without the aid of the air-brake. No :stalwart brakeman, with a pick-handle thrust into the spokes of the brake-wheel, could hold the shoes to the tires with force enough to make them all hot, and yet loosely enough to permit the wheels to turn. It is all done now by the engineer, with his thumb and finger on a brass cock. There are many contingencies for nervous people to think of, but an accident has never happened. It reminds one of the curious fact that there is greatly more danger in riding from your house to the depot in a hack, or even in walking, than there is in the whole of the journey from the Missouri to Los Angeles or San Francisco. El Llano Estacado. But we seem to have quite lost sight of that suggestive T kail with which we started out. Well, it is here, more prominently than ever. As you toil up the grade east of the tunnel, you may see a house, built of adobe and once plastered, but now troubled with an eruptive complaint and looking patchy, down in the canyon to the right. This was once the place where toll was collected for that part of the trail which was a road winding through Raton Pass. The man to whom it was a source of revenue still resides there, with his occupa- tion as far gone as ever Othello's was. The old track is still visible beside his house, but there is no toll to speak of. Through this narrow notch in the mountains has screeched many an ox-drawn COLORADO. 63 cart laden with goods from Westport, or Independence, or Lex- ington, or Leavenworth. It seems worth while to try to think how slowly, according to modern ideas, we have come thus far, and then endeavor to substitute for our twenty-eight hours, or less, the old- fashioned four months. Not four months of sitting upon red mohair, •either. The first merchandise coming by this famous route was sent all the way from Kaskaskia, Illinois, and as far back as 1804. From 1822 to 1856, it was an almost continuous traffic, interrupted only by Indian raids and our difficulties with Mexico. In 1846 the value of the goods carried across the plains and mountains was $1,752,250. The sum does not seem large by modern standards, but it required a good deal of toil with the means then at hand to do as much, and the trail must have been a scene of camps from end to end. This traffic employed a large number of men, who became professional in it, and could fight Indians, find water and feed, take all the chances of the wilderness, and make the round trip within a few hours of a given number of days. And there was still another road. It left the main trail somewhere near where the western line of Kansas now is, and turned southward across a place, — a vast country, in fact, — the very name of which was a synonym of danger before civilization came, and which is still almost unexplored. For this nearer trail to El Paso, and the City of Mexico may also be included, lay across El Llano Estacado ( Va/ino Aistahifrtido, — The Staked Plain), and was in all likelihood the very dreariest road ever traveled. The distances were immense, and must be made. Water was not plentiful, and Comanches were. It had its name from the fact that the early Spaniards — priests, they say — had taken pains to mark the first route with stakes, so that others might come and they return. Well, it is still " The Staked Plain," for it has been staked again, this time not by Spaniards, and presumably not by priests. Starting from a point on the lines in Southern Kansas, the Santa Fe Route 5 64 OVERLAND GUIDE. has already built southwestward to the verge of this dreadful coun- try, and will eventually cross it. More than this, it is, like the Kansas, "desert," — not so bad as believed. There is nothing, no miracle, that can so quickly change a country as the advent of a railroad. Men of this generation will live to see this paradise of the Comanche and the coyote, this hideous wilderness, this unknown dread, covered with settlements and rich in spotted herds. The northeastern boundary of the old Llano Estacado is what is. known as the Pan-Handle. Pan-Handle ep iEXAS. [HOUGH aside from the narrative of any overland journey, the Pan-Handle is so curious a combination of frontier barbar- ism and growing civilization (besides being accessible by the same lines of railroad), that a brief sketch of it is inserted here. It is the extreme northwestern corner of the Lone Star State. It is bigger than all the New England States with New Jersey added. It is practically, so far, a region without law ; it is a law unto itself. Its remote and peculiar population pay little or no attention to the Texas Legislature, or Courts, or Governor, or Sheriff. The only means of reaching them is to send a company of the Rangers into the region. This body of troops is under State pay, and regularly enlisted. They go in squads or companies, are fighters to a man, and command respect even in the Pan-Handle. There is nothing to hinder the whole of the six companies of Rangers being sent there at one time. If they should come, that which they were look- ing for would very probably be found. So, when a squad of them makes its appearance, there are others who go. Cattle are left to take care of themselves. No-Mans-Land, Colorado, New Mexico and southern Kansas have some distinguished visitors who come on horseback. Within the confines of the Pan-Handle are mountains, rivers, lakes, deep gorges, cliffs, heavy timber, rich farming lands, and un- counted miles of rolling prairie. If the country were not fairly well watered it could not be used for its present purposes, for it is the home of the Cattle Barons. This is a picturesque character. He is an Arab by custom and instinct. But he is a Bedouin without being a Moslem, and he has (65) 66 OVERLAND GUIDE. no religion. He fears not God or the devil, and man only when the man is a Texas Ranger. Under his rule there has grown up in the Pan-Handle an anomalous condition of society which has never been known elsewhere. The term " Baron " is not entirely mis- Woman's Rights in the Pan-Handle. applied. He is still, notwithstanding the changes taking place since the country has been penetrated by the railroad, the sworn enemy of the man with the plow. He had, and still often has, a small army of retainers, from thirty to two hundred, all armed to the teeth, and all believing in his right to all he claimed, which was, almost literally, PAN-HANDLE OF TEXAS. 67 the earth. The Baron did not, and still does not, own any of this vast territory. He divided the country up with his lordly neigh- bors, and they made common cause. They kept everybody else out. They would not permit settlers to come. They paid nothing for the use of the land, and never intended to. When they wished they fenced it. There was no difficulty in finding men who owned fifty thousand head of cattle, claiming of absolute right the " range " they had seized upon for them, thousands upon thousands of acres. Their ranch-houses were arsenals ; their liegemen were armed retainers. It was, and in many cases still is, a complete baronial establishment. All this time this unique system of armed communism was as much in defiance of all law as though there were no Texas, and no United States. These men refused to pay taxes, refused to pay rent for the land they occupied, refused to appeal to the State courts for any wrong done or suffered within the confines of the Pan-Handle, and declined in all respects to recognize the right of the State to have anything to do with them. They do not vote. The Pan- Handle contains forty-eight or fifty counties. There are thirty-three million acres of school-lands, and three million acres of Capitol lands within its boundaries. There are also several million acres of alternate sections of lands granted to railroads for construction. The cattle barons occupy all this. Sometimes these offenders are corporations, the chief stockholders of which reside in New York, London, Glasgow, Paris, or Berlin. The State of Texas adopted a curious plan for building a capitol. She' owns land in any quantity, for when she entered the Union by her own volition, and by annexation, she retained possession of all her lands. She has a homestead law of her own. A syndicate was given three million acres to build a capitol. This syndicate con- verted most of these lands into a huge range. It is already worth ten millions of dollars. The following story is told by a correspondent of the St. Louis Globe- Democrat^ and is illustrative of the curious doings that may 68 OVERLAND GUIDE. occur when the "desert" begins to be redeemed to civilization. The story of the frontier, never half told, is a very strange one, illustra- tive cf all the varieties of action that may be prompted by the bar- baric selfishness of men: "The largest range in the Pan-Handle, perhaps, is that controlled by Goodnight & Adair. This firm controls over a million acres, and perhaps does not own a thou- sand acres all told. Their chief ranch is the Palo Duro, situated in Armstrong County, with Clarendon, Donley County, as post-office town. The Palo Duro ranch embraces fully 600,000 acres, and covers nearly all the good pasture land in Armstrong, Donley, Randall, Briscoe and Swisher Counties. It is fenced on the west mostly by a natural precipice, on the east with barbed wire, and on the north and south is guarded by line riders. There are about 75,000 head of cattle on this ranch. They are fed almost exclusively on free grass, or, as it is called in Texas, the "children's grass" Charles Goodnight is the manager of the ranch. He is a strong, rugged, fairly educated man, and enjoys the distinction of wearing his real name. He moved from Colorado to Palo Duro canyon, in the Pan-Handle of Texas, about the lime the civil war broke out. Adair, the other member of the firm, is an Irishman, a landlord and an Orangeman. He does not stay in Ireland much, nor does he spend much of his valuable time in this country. He is in a perennial row with his Irish tenants. When the legislature of Texas passed the lease law, and made it an offense to inclose public lands, or private lands without the consent of the owner, the land board called on Mr. Goodnight to put up six cents an acre for about 500,000 acres cf school lands that his herds fed on, and that his fences and his cowboys held exclusively for his use and benefit. Goodnight flatly refused to put up. The attorney-general notified him that he was violating the law in main- taining fences around public lands. Goodnight ignored the warning. The attor- ney-general concluded that he would make a test case with Goodnight, and made preparations to proceed to the Pan- Handle and have the cattle baron indicted. Then Goodnight got in some fine work. He had Armstrong and Donley Counties organ- ized, and, under the law, certain other counties were attached to them for judicial purposes. The foreman of one of his ranges was maJe sheriff of Donley County, and another of his foremen was elected sheriff of Armstrong County. Let it be remembered that every person residing in Armstrong and Donley Counties were vas- sals of Goodnight. His employes were elected clerks, assessors, collectors, treas- urers, school-superintendents, county judges and county attorneys. Goodnight took a briefless attorney from Mobeetie, transplanted him at Clarendon, in Donley County, and had him elected district judge. When the machinery of the law was PAN-HANDLE OF TEXAS. 69 •complete, court commenced, grand and petit-jurors were summoned, and everything set in motion. Goodniglit himself was made foreman of the grand-jury. The county attorney presented an indictment against Goodnight for maintaining a fence around public land. The grand-jury brought in a true bill against Goodnight — him- self, be it remembered, being the foreman and his employes being members of the grand-jury — and he went to trial. He was acquitted, of course, and a few days later, when the attorney-general arrived at Clarendon with some costly counsel in his train to help him prosecute Goodnight, they found they were headed off. Good- night was tried and acquitted and could not be placed in jeopardy twice. The ,. ,vy,)j; ^0 ,\\l/ .•■,..,^V,1 -^^^tiviV/M^;^;y,„ A Cowboy. attorney-general stormed around, denounced the proceeding as a humbug, but was completely beaten, and narrowly escaped being imprisoned for contempt of court. At the last session of the Texas legislature the house passed a resolution calling upon the governor to remove the judge from office for this proceeding, but the sen- ate, being pretty well controlled by the cattle barons and other corporate influences, refused to concur after a stormy debate. The judge is still in office, and so are the other officers selected by Goodnight for his counties. It is no misnomer to call Goodnight a baron. He is one in reality. He owns all the school-houses, all the churches, all the buildings in Armstrong and 70 OVERLAND GUIDE. Donley Counties. He maintains two school-teachers and two preachers at his own expense. He does not allow any liquor to be sold in either of his counties, and when a cowboy becomes obstreperous he is ordered to move out of the barony, and if he refuses Mr. Goodnight's sheriff arrests or kills him and Mr. Goodnight's judge sends him to jail or holds an inquest on him. Other of the Pan-Handle barons are now attempting to organize their baronies " according to law " a la Goodnight, but so far have not been very successful. Goodnight has not paid a cent of rent to> .the State yet. At every legislative session an effort is made to amend the law so that the venue in suits for rent may be changed from the county where the violations of law occur to the State capital, but Goodnight and the cattle barons- have up to this time been strong enough to defeat it. As long as the trial must take place in the vicinity it is safe to say that Mr. Goodnight and the other Pan-Handle barons will not contribute much to the public school fund." But the old times are passing away. The 30,000 nomads who now inhabit the Pan-Handle must succumb to a new power that does not enforce its edicts by writs and in courts ; the power of immigration^ the forerunner of which is the locomotive. The iron pioneer has. shrieked the death-knell of lawlessness wherever it has so far gone. The " Farewell, festive cuss!" of the Western newspapers must soon be said to all the cowboys. The case of the Pan-Handle, a rich, country that must as certainly be settled by farmers as it is certain that it is there, is up to date a peculiar one. But it will go with the rest. Women will come. That is the sign of doom. American women go to church. Preachers will come. Children will be there, the heralds of the little white school-houses that will shine on the hills, as they do m Kansas. The process will be short, the time brief. It will not be ten or twenty years, but four or five. Those who have not seen the wonderful process have no idea of the aston- ishing rapidity with which the wilderness may be transformed. Exiei (^ O far as its place in the histor}' of American civilization is concerned, New Mex- ico is among the oldest, of the few old things we have to boast of. It is, or it was a very few years ago, very for- eign. There was not in all its mountam realm a single idea that owned the least kinship to American advancement. Spain had, by a transmigration as curi- ous as any theory advanced by Pythagoras, transferred her Sancho Panzas, with a sprinkling of Don Quixotes, to this region. It wa.s. the northern extension of the Latin empire established by the con- (71) ^3B?pP'*'«Pw^®'r 72 OVERLAND GUIDE. quest of Mexico, which within the memory of Hving men existed in full vigor on the main land of this continent. The place you may refer to on any map, or on the time-table, called " Wagon Mound," was the site of a frontier Mexican custom-house, whose collections were supposed to find their way into the national money-box in the distant City of Mexico. Of course, in this empire were included California, most of Arizona, parts of Kansas and New Mexico, and all of Texas. A fact much more curious than the falling of these vast possessions into the hands of the foreordained and pre- destinated Yankee, is the other fact that within thirty years they have become more valuable in dollars and cents, or in escudos and dobloncs if you will, than all that is left of Mexico, with Old Spain thrown in. Notwithstanding the encroachments of the Americans carried hither by the railroads. New Mexico is still full of nooks and corners where eternal peace has her abiding place and broods over the hum- blest and happiest homes in America. In these, the adventurous wan- derer will still find the cumbrous carts with wooden wheels, like those of the car of Juggernaut, and which it is against the custom of the country and religious faith ever to grease. There, the people still live in the homely and most comfortable poor men's houses ever known, built of the sun-dried bricks called adobe (ad-^-bay). There they still plow with the Egyptian implement which is little better than a sharpened stick, and which has come down to them legitimately, and without infringement of copyright, from that far Arabia who is still, at this day, the venerable ancestress of more things in New Mexico than Columbia is, prolific mother though she be. These simple people have another thing, of more importance than a plow, that is also Arabic or Spanish, which are interchangeable terras. They are courteous; they only require half-decent treatment at the hands of the man who habitually calls them " Greasers," and who has not so far given them that, to be found kindly, hospitable, singularly intelligent for their circumstances, and lacking so much NEW MEXICO. 73 ■of being barbarians that the graces of life seem to have singularly flourished among them. New Mexico is a land of brilliant sunshine, beautiful mountains, valleys picturesque and rich, blue distances, wide pasture-lands, pines, pure air, and general freedom from disease. There no dyspepsia, no malaria, no epidemic disease is possible, and all the general pleasures and advantages to be derived from climate are in full force. Of late years ranches have been established in many valleys, and tens of thousands of cattle graze on the mountaia slopes. The An Unprogressive Granger. ■country is rich in minerals and mines, and the general hopes always attached to the mining interest divert the minds of the majority of the foreign population ; for, if it is possible to be a foreigner in one's own country, then the American is a foreigner among the Mexicans. New Mexico is almost as square in outline as the rest of her sisters, being on her eastern boundary 345 miles long, and on her western 390 miles, with an average breadth, east and west, of 335 miles. The Territory contains 121,201 square miles, or 77,568,640 acres. There are only about a dozen very large counties. 74 OVERLAND GUIDE. All of New Mexico is a series of plateaux, lying at an average elevation of about 5,000 feet. Out of these plateaux rise the mount- ain ranges and peaks, sometimes to an elevation of more than 12,000 feet above the sea. Where the plateau in any case is narrow, it of course becomes a valley, often very fertile. The valley of the Rio Grande, (Re-oh 6^rfl!«-day dail Nor-tdiy, " Big River of the North ") is a river valley in all respects, with a rich alluvial soil. This is the principal river of the country, and rises in Colorado at an elevation of nearly 12,000 feet. It runs through the middle of the Territory north and south, and must some day become one of the most fruitful valleys in the world. The diffi- culty now is that it is mostly occupied by the Mexican population, and, in localities, by the PueblO' communities. The land is held under the Spanish grant system, and what Americans and American law consider good titles can not be readily given. This is the case with regard to other portions of the Territory, and constitutes the chief reason why the growth of so fine a mountain and valley country has been retarded. Nevertheless, the Territory contains about sixty million acres of Government land not covered by grant or adverse title of any kind. Most of these unoccupied lands are available for grazing purposes, at least, and a considerable proportion for agriculture. The country generally is not nearly so hopeless-looking as Southern California was a dozen years ago, and the climate is almost as good. The El Hogar Domestico. NEW MEXICO. 75 Artesian well, and other plans for obtaining water, have not been tried with any persistency, and thousands of acres will be redeemed and found to be among the most fruitful and valuable in the world when they are. Aside from this, there is over most of the Territory a well-defined rainy season. None of the water falling there has ever been utilized. The Mexican idea that the land must be soaked by ditches to raise anything, has been until the last year or two accepted as a fact. It has been found not to be true in other similar cases. Intelligent methods of cultivation will raise fine crops on much of the Government land now obtainable. Congressional action in regard to land titles, as applying to lands not now owned by the United States, will be a boon when it comes; -but one-half the energy and skill and money that have been expended upon California would produce results almost as astonishing here. Twenty years ago the country wa§ considered almost entirely water- less. The soldiers who chased the Apaches obtained their supplies long distances apart, and generally from what were called "tanks;" hollow rocks where water gathered in limited quantities when it rained. Where the town of Deming now stands was one of these waterless regions. A few miles east of there the little Miembres River goes entirely out of sight in the sand. Water was conceded to be an absolute impossibility, either by digging, boring or witchcraft, over all that country. Now the passer-by on that branch will observe that Deming is full ■of windmills. There is an ample supply of water out of shallow wells. There is little or no drainage to the country; at least not sufifi- cient to account for what becomes of the water that falls, and that melts from snow in the mountains. The plateaux are fillings. The spaces between the mountains and ranges that now stand up out of them were in the beginning V-shaped, and came together at the bottom. They filled up with the wash from the mountains; the boulders and gravel falling first and lowest; then the soil, which is disintegrated rock. The surface 76 OVERLAND GUIDE. of this filling Is, now the immense tracts a level country character- istic of the region. The rainfall and melted snow goes every year down the sides of the slopes and sinks into the soil. It will be found, when bored for, in the gravel where once was the trough between mountains or ranges. Sometimes it may be near the surface ; at other places it rnay be hundreds of feet below. Geologists have frequently affirmed that this is the first portion of the American continent that lifted itself above a wide and sailorless sea. There are other scientists who state that the eldest of the successive civilizations existed here, and that there was a civilized What becomes of the W^ter. people with arts and a steadfast government, when our fore- fathers were savages under the oaks of ancient Britain or in the woods of Germany. Be this as it may, the country is very old from even our standpoint. The native inhabitants of New Mexico- and Arizona numbered many thousands when the country was first visited by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. It was first visited by one Nunez, a Spaniard, who was followed by numerous others of his kind; Cabeza de Vaca ("Cow's Head," an aristocratic Spanish family name): Espejo: Es-/^j'-ho ("Looking- Glass," also a family name); Onate; Coronado (" The Crowned," — family name). It is not possible, nor important, to know all these people. They came, as usual, for gold, and, as usual not only with Spaniards but with all the rest of us, they did not find much of it lying around loose. NEW MEXICO. 77 Before the end of the sixteenth century a permanent settlement had been made. Santa Fe (" San-tah Fay day San H^wan ; — " the Holy Faith of St. John ") was the place selected. The town, or the immediate vicinity, had been a kind of political and religious capital for an indefinite time before the Spaniards came. These wonder- ful explorers began at Santa Fe, and at San Augustine, Florida, about the same time ; — so nearly together at the end of the fifteenth century that very few people know precisely which of the two towns is the oldest. But Santa Fe was the capital of an organized com- munity and of a form of civilization so long before that date that there can be little doubt that it is not only the most ancient city still existing in this country, but that it is also one of the most ancient capitals of the world. It still remains largely what it always was. It does not de- cay; on the contrary, it is almost spoiled by modern brick houses. It was a much more interesting place twenty years ago than it is now. But now, — to traverse the seventeen miles from the station of Lamy to Santa Fe is one of the pleasantest mountain railroad rides in the country, and there is still interest and oddity enough to occupy the few hours one will stay there. But the actual, original explorers of New Mexico ; — the people who came to stay; — were the Franciscan priests. The difficulties they encountered were appalling. There is a very grave doubt if the original Mexican — whom we now call the Pueblo — has ever been converted. If so, it is not a thorough regeneration, but a mixture of every Christian belief with his ancient religion. This Pueblo lived New Mexico Oven. Pueblo Citizen (from a Photograph). (78) NEW MEXICO. 79 under just laws, justly administered. He had a system of worship and a defined belief. He was, like the modern Chinaman, very hard to convince. Often, like the Chinaman, he complied with the forms, but maintained his private belief. He clung to the religion of his fathers, and hated that of the conquerors, and kept killing Franciscans from time to time. After he had been preached to and enslaved for almost a century; — for the two things went together; — he in 1680 rose in rebellion. All Spaniards suffered together. All the foreigners who were not killed fled toward Paso del Norte. [This is where the city of El Paso, Texas, now stands. Fah-so dail Nor-tdiy is a rock-bottom ford on the Rio Grande, and the name means " Pass of the North." It is the ancient gateway of Mexican trade, used when New Mexico was an Aztec dependency, as it after- ward was a Spanish and Mexican one. An ox-team and cart can be driven without dififiiculty from Santa Fe to the City of Mexico ; — nearly two thousand miles through a country all mountains.] The Spaniards did not regain a foothold for several years, and after many unsuccessful attempts. And then they could not retain it with any comfort until they did what no Spaniard has ever been known to do before or since ; they retracted. They abandoned the mines, and recalled the infamous edict by which the natives had been unlawfully enslaved. This little bit of history has, strangely enough, never excited remark. The Spaniards have never been in the habit of doing such things, and have lost nearly all their immense possessions on this side of the sea by not doing it. The poor Puebio, always respected by those who know him, but still a miserable " Indian," wears this one historic feather in his dilapidated hat ; he made the Spaniard come down. Neither is it generally known, or thought of if known, that the '■'■ Santo oficio, " the " Holy Inquisition," held its horrible functions at one time here. This was before the 1680 rebellion. With 6 80 OVERLAND GUIDE. slavery, a changed religion, and the tortures and punishments of the Inquisition to enforce it, the Indian cup must have been as nearl}' full as it has ever been since, even under our administration of Indian affairs. / Pueblo Mother and Babe (from a Photograph). It is also not usually thought of that of the full blood of the Pueblos, of some of whose villages you will catch glimpses from the car-windows, was the ablest and best of all the presidents of Mexico, NEW MEXICO. 81 Benito Juarez. The present president, Diaz, possesses only a little less of the Indian blood. It is also an historical fact worth remembering that of the twelve million inhabitants of Mexico about ten million are Mexicans; that is, Aztecs; Pueblos. Now, these people have had the life, the courage, the national tenacity, to survive a Spanish occupancy that lasted from the invasion of Cortez to 182 1, and then achieve absolute free- dom, modernized into a republican form of government. Since 1821 they have repelled, under the leadership of the Pueblo, Juarez, the tripartite effort of the European powers to establish an empire on their soil ; a story that everybody is familiar with, but which few think of in this connection. Perhaps the virility of the Pueblo may yet show itself in the making of a great country out of Mexico. Stranger things have happened. That New Mexico should be strewn with ruins is to be expected. They lie in nooks and corners everywhere. But they tell little. The documents by which their history might be ascertained were largely destroyed at the time of the rebellion. The general conclu- sion by every visitor is that it is, historically, a very old country, and details are not sought. Perhaps they are unimportant. The ■old days and the old life are largely swallowed up in the new. To the average American antiquity is a bore, and the present dollar is the only item of importance. Our interest in New Mexico begins in 1846, with the occupation ^of the capital by General Kearney. This was followed by the con- clusion of the Mexican War and the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo. We should unquestionably have held it just the same, but the treaty placed the matter beyond dispute. [Guadaloupe Hidalgo is a village about seven miles out of the City of Mexico. There is a rambling adobe country-house there, in which the commissioners resided and the celebrated treaty was signed. The village, and not the City of Mexico, probably became unwittingly famous as the scene of a very shrewd 83 OVERLAND GUIDE. transaction in real estate through some freak of diplomatic etiquette.] But previous to this military occupation we had some doings quiie after the Spanish fashion. Our Captain Pike ventured into the country by mistake in 1805-6. He excited the suspicion of the Spaniards, who courteously arrested him, and seem to have marched him pretty much all over New and Old Mexico. He did not get back again until 1807. [Zebulon Montgomery Pike seems to have entirely deserved the magnificent natural monument referred to on a preceding page. He was born a soldier, served his apprenticeship in arms in his father's regiment, was the most intelligent and undaunted explorer of his times, and was finally killed in battle under his country's flag. A careful reading of his life and explorations would not come amiss to the average youth of these times.] New Mexico is the land of resorts. The mountain scenery, pure air, brilliant sunshine, and dry climate make it so. There are innumer- able nooks and corners, in addition to the advertised resorts, where one would like to spend a summer on his own account. Las Vegas Hot Springs, a resort near the town of Las Vegas, is one of the most attractive. The Manitou resorts, near Colorado Springs, and reached by a branch of the line from La Junta, are also very popular. There are others coming forward not as yet so well known; Jemez Springs, and Cascade, Santa Fe, and others. For the mere purpose of crossing the country, its beauty is not lost. It is a pleasant land, full of charming glimpses of sky and mountain, and dotted with sufficient population of all kinds to keep it from seeming lonesome. It does not much matter to us, perhaps, what its resources may be. The landscape is ours. Raton is the first town beyond the Pass. It is important in being a dining station in a region where a good appetite is the de- cided rule. Part of the importance of Raton does not, however,, appear NEW MEXICO. 83 upon the surface, as it is the centre of a considerable cattle industry. Just below the town is a spur running to Blossburg; — another coal mine. There may be a capitalist along, and he may be inter- ested to know that in the matter of coal New Mexico is a second Pennsylvania. One-fourth of the whole area of i2'r,ooo square miles is underlaid with coal of the best quality. The measures of which the outcrop was seen near Trinidad, extend unbroken for two hundred and fifty miles. The only anthracite coal-beds found in accessible and paying quantity west of the AUeghanies are in Santa Fe County. The cattle-business, of which the town of Raton has been alluded to as a centre, has attracted thither so distinguished an individual as Ex-Senator Dorsey, and with him is reputed to be interested Col. Robert Ingersoll, of the silvery tongue. Just below the town, where an endless wire fence extends on each side of the road, is the Dorsey ranch. In sight, and not seeming to be sixty-five miles away, is the ■queerly-shaped mountain known as Wagon Mound, referred to on a previous page. At Watrous, a little station that owes its greatest importance to some pretty scenery, the train enters the wide, green plateau named by the Spaniards Las Vegas; — "The Meadows." This is one of the most extensive and beautiful of the New Mexican plateaux. So wide is it, and fenced by mountains on all sides, that it is difficult to think of it as having a general elevation of more than six thousand feet; as being an extensive mountain-top in fact. The plain extends from here down to the Glorieta Mountains, some sixty-five miles, with a width proportionate. Las Vegas is a town which takes its name from its location, and is where the traveler is expected again to indulge his appetite. It also has an old town and a new; the old one being out of sight, with the usual retiring disposition of all New Mexican towns after the rail- ilil,V#iM* (84) NEW MEXICO. 85 road comes. The place is of considerable commercial importance, with a population of several thousand. There is a branch at Las Vegas, of course, but this time it is not to a coal mine. Six miles away, and reached by this branch, is the watering-place and health-resort known as Las Vegas Hot Springs. It is a mountain nook where there are a large number of hot and cold springs, a beautiful hotel, extensive bath-houses, and all the appliances necessary to tired people and invalids. The surround- ings of this spot are very attractive, and the waters have a wide rep- utation for medicinal virtue. [Lahs- Fay-gsihs is the correct pronunciation of this name, con- trary to the usual custom of saying " Loss Vaygus."] It is unfortunate to leave Las Vegas after supper on a moonless night, because the Glorieta Mountains are not far ahead, and they are worth looking at. But time-tables continually change, and the reader may dine at Las Vegas and sup somewhere else ; — an arrange- ment much the pleasantest. There may be a moon ; and when there is it is usually very bright. The scenery of the Glorieta Pass is by no means sublime. Yet it scarcely comes under the head of " prett}^," which the young lady of the party is sure to apply to it. We have now traveled several hun- dred miles without having traversed a forest of any kind except when we entered the mountains just beyond Trinidad this morning. Here are the children of the mountains stretching away in thick undulations as far as one can see. The train threads a rocky canyon, pufifing and twisting up a winding grade only a little less steep than that at Raton Pass. Away to the north the mountains lie piled, in Summer green ; in Winter green-and-white. The air is cool, even in midsummer, and at intervals there is a rushing stream. The whole pass, some thirty miles long, is a scene of beauty so immedi- ately at hand that one has a desire to get out and walk through it. Some of It is like a natural park which no artificial effort could equal. Some of It is made of alternate rocks and deep gorges. Some of it 86 OVERLAND GUIDE. is cliffs, and it is all pines. The summit is the little town called Glorieta ; a place where there is nothing but two houses, a saloon, and scenery ; and from there there is another case of air-brakes and holding back. Half way down is visible through the trees, and in the Valley of the Pecos, the venerable and massive ruin of what is called Old Pecos Church. When found by modern adventurers it had been roofless so long that there was no tradition of when it was not so, but the adobe walls, six or eight feet thick, were still stand- ing, and in a surprisingly good state of preserva- ^^■^^v.U-. . tion. A few years ago the interior was strewn with cedar beams, quaintly carved, -'-^^ -^ but these have long since been car- ried away. -^^ _, Notwithstanding any hints at history that may be noted ^^« on previous pages, places Ts--''~ '-i./ ^j iji^g Pecos Church go far to - convince one that this coun- '^''i'' //// ^^y really has no history. ifl^p-^^ You must guess all the de- > tails of the nast. There is Youth, Sunshir.e and Leisure. evidence that the Pueblos were here a thousand years perhaps, before the Spaniards came. The dimly-defined ruins of an extensive town lie around the church: When Cabeza de Vaca crossed the country in 1536, not knowing where he was, he found this place. It was called " A-gu-yu," and the church was after- wards built to convert the A-gu-yu-ans. About 1540 is the nearest guess that can be made as to the date of its erection. These old walls have been nearly 350 years in crumbling, and, merely dried mud in the first place, they still remain. The ruins around it are perhaps more interesting than the church is, since they have the effect of giving a mere undecipherable hint NEW MEXICO. 87 •of a departed people, of whom less is actually known than of the old- est of the Egyptians. All the valleys are strewn with such remains, more or less distinct, and all indications point to the fact that these and the scattered communities of the Pueblos of to-day are of the same people. Coming to names again, as is frequently necessary in this country, one wonders why a stream should have been named Pecos, {-Pay- cose) which means simply "freckles"; — not spots or spotted, like a •cow, but plain, ordinary freckles. It is of no importance, but some Primitive Industry ■of these names are subjects for a good deal of harmless guessing. As they decline to say "//^^z;^!^ " ('wavas) for eggs, in Mexico, and call them always " blanquillos," (blan-^r^'^:-^.'^!^'>'vkC/%^ ^^ I upper one, the " Mojave Desert," the Atlantic and Pacific road is laid. In Arizona the great record of the primeval world lies open, with the' story of the ages upon its pages. It was once a Paleo- zoic sea, on whose waters no ship ever sailed, on whose shores no man trod. y^'^^'i'. '1 I Water Worn Rocks. It is a land of revelations to the geologist. Nowhere can the past be traced more distinctly. There are everywhere the marks of water. Its erosions are on the cliffs and in t'he canyons. You can see them miles away, and close beside the track. Some of the grinding was done by the lapping waves of the ancient sea, some is the result of floods, oft repeated in later ages, and some of the fantastic carving was not done by either, but by nature's gigantic sandblast; the wan- dering winds of solitude, bearing with them the sharp sand gathered from the ground, have in the course of time cut the cliffs and " mon- uments" into those fantastic shapes, and the process is still going on. ARIZONA. 107 The later history of Arizona is the same, in all essential features, with that. of New Mexico. Arizona remained part of that territory until as late as 1863. It was a portion of the " Gadsden purchase" of 1854. At the close of the Mexican war there were almost no white people here, and fifteen years ago the Apache was lord of all. The building of the railroad was almost the first dawn of the modern era. The Pueblos, almost destroyed by centuries of savage depre- dation, afforded the only glimpses of industrial life at its advent. It .seems almost an intrusion still. The palace-car is an anachronism. The sensations induced by the curious situation may not occur to everyone; they are dulled by use. But, when darkness and silence have shut in the scene, one lies in his bed and listens to the ring of the wheel upon the rail, and knows that the headlight flashes across the waste, that the whistle awakes echoes silent always until now, and wonders at the boldness that has caused so incongruous a thing as a railroad train to dash across these uninhabited silences. In old times they did not make missionaries of wrought iron and polished brass. The world has changed. Taking up the thread of travel again, we pass, ten miles west of Coolidge, the little station called Wingate. Three miles south of this, and distinct in the sunshine, is the military post of Fort Win- gate. It looks a pleasant place, and presents at least one isolated :spot where all the refinements of eastern civilization may be found. Close beside it stands the curious, cathedral-shaped rock known as " Navajo Church." Sometimes the books of travel have in all seri- ousness spoken of this as an actual ruin. It is simply a huge rock that, in the vernacular of the region, " got left " in some convulsion or erosion that tore down the remainder of the ledge. About forty miles from Wingate is Zuiii {Zoon-ye) the Pueblo town and tribe so extensively advei-tised by Mr. Cushing. So ex- tensively has this already been done, that it is not worth while to -linger upon the subject here. Gallup sfation is a place of coal. But the character of the ARIZONA. 109' deposit changes here, and this is a lignite, or brown coal, of a not extraordinarily good quality. For a long distance here we traverse the valley of the Rio Puerco {J?ce-oh F'roerco). You may not be able to discover this fact by simply looking at it, for nothing looking much like a river is visible. But there is an indefinitely defined valley, arable land, and water somewhere. The \n or 6. puerco means filthy, dirty, foul. It is one of the strong terms of the Spanish. It also commonly designates a pig, and is akin to our work " pork.' Twining and bending endlessly through New Mexico, this Puerco River is a very long one, though you can with difificulty see it. It has been a source of life to many generations of Pueblos, and its valley has always been a centre of population. The curious and hideous heaps of black rock you have observed by the roadside are pure lava. Except to crack in cooling, most of it that is visible lies where it was originally deposited. It seems to have been a comparatively recent flow, but in reality it is. not. Nothing in Arizona looked as it does now when this red-hot stream flowed down the valley. Nine-tenths of it is long since cov- ered up. It is only that some of it is exposed here that it seems pecul- iarly a volcanic country in this immediate neighborhood. If you climb to the summit of San Francisco Mountain, you can look down into the parched throats of a hundred craters. Immediately north of the station of Gallup, and some fifty miles, distant, is the enormous reservation of the Navajoe Indians [Nav- ah-hoe). These often come down to some one of the various sta- tions south of them', and display their only interest in civilization by looking at the trains. There is no telling what they think of the in- novation. They can speak Spanish a little if they wish, but are in- variably entirely non-committal as to all personal opinions. The Pueblos often come also. There are certain signs by which the stranger can readily tell the difference between them. The PueblO' woman has always her hair banged. They started the bang several ARIZONA. Ill hundreds or thousands of years ago, and it gives their faces a stupid look. They also wear thick casings of buckskin upon their legs, giv- ing these from the knee down the thickness of ordinary fence-posts. When we reach the open plain near what is called the Continental Divide, we shall see on the north side of the track some of the curious work of the water. For several miles there is a line of red and gray- palisades. Sometimes the face is marked by a long and narrow Isolated Rocks; Casa Grande. Streak of white. Sometimes there is a coping of green, and here and there an isolated mass stands out in the plain. This is a case where a portion of the mass " got left," again. It is evident that the plain was once covered clear across by these strata. HoLBROOK is an eating station, and sixty miles west of there what is called in not very choice Spanish Canyon Diablo (De-a//-blo) is passed. The name means " Devil Canyon," and the place is ARIZONA. 113 Simply a hideous gash in the face of nature 540 feet wide and* 222 feet deep, and running for miles across the plain. The edges are level with the surface of the country, and at a little distance it cannot be seen at all. If it were closed up the projections on one edge would fit with tolerable accuracy the notches on the other. It was caused simply by a contraction and cracking of the surface of the earth in cooling. So, on a much grander scale, was the Grand Canyon off the Colorado. From this point San Francisco Mountain can be distinctly seen, being the easternmost one of the group composed of Kendrick's Peak, Challender Peak, Mt. Sitgreaves, and furthest to the west, Antelope Peak. These form the San Francisco Mountains, shading off into the plateau with numerous smaller elevations. And here the country begins to change into something the trav- eller does not expect. It becomes, and continues for many miles, a beautiful pine forest. The ground is covered with a thick growth of grass. There is to the eye scarcely a more attractive country in all the West. Flagstaff is a brisk little town with an eccentric name, and is a lumber capital. They are cutting out the yellow pine as fast as pos- sible, not for the sake of clearing the land, but for lumber. As for the soil, it is not as good as that of some of the most unprepossessing of the country we have been riding through all day. No means has thus far been devised of obtaining water. There are few streams, and all that lies beneath seems to be volcanic rock of the hardest variety. It is a country of great natural beauty, lying some seven thousand feet above sea-level, and a health resort, but agriculturally, or even for very extensive grazing, nearly, or entirely, worthless. Eight miles south-east f romFlagstaff,and across a beautiful timbered park, lie the famous cliff-dwellings. There is an enormous canyon, the walls of which are composed of rough sandstone. It is in these walls that the dwellings are found. They occupy a space in both sides of the canyon where a soft layer lies between two harder ones, 114 OVERLAND GUIDE. making, from crumbling and falling out, or being easily displaced, a niche or space. A rough wall laid in clay, and extending from the front of the lower to the upper ledge, formed the fronts of the dwell- ings. These rooms are extensive enough to have sheltered an ex- tensive population, and, being situated about half-way up the wall, were, while not inaccessible, easily defended. The remains found in the long-ago-abandoned dwellings are of such articles as arc now in common use among the Pueblos. The only difference seems to consist in the fact that wooden articles found have been cut with a stone axe. This means only antiquity. But the articles unearthed from the works of the Mound-Builders east of the Mississippi are also such as the Pueblos use, and the similarity extends to small de- tails. There are those who are firm in the belief that all one may see at Ysleta, or Tesuque, or Laguna, or Acoma, or here in the sides of the canyon-walls, has a direct connection with the curious tumuli that have puzzled the antiquarians ever since they were discovered. This Pueblo, Aztec, Toltec, Mound-Builder, or whatever he may be, is the most interesting and sorrowful human enigma now known. The remains and traditions of departed greatness hang about him unexplained. There is a peculiar pathos about an expiring race. There is something far more pathetic than entertaining in these de- serted cliff-dwellings, perched between heaven and earth in a lonely canyon, old and futile refuges against the rapine that finally almost destroyed the race. In the immediate vicinity of these cliff-dwellings, but out in the plain, there are other remains of a city. Remains of pottery and domestic utensils offer convincing evidence that the same people occupied both places. About eight miles north-east of Flagstaff, a small and isolated mountain stands in the plain. On the south front the volcanic rock is full of cavities, round in form, that are actually the blow-holes of a gigantic piece of slag. Some of these globular cavities are twenty-five feet in diameter. All of these were a long time ARIZONA. 115 inhabited. They were reached by steps, and sometimes were walled in front. The " Petrified Forest " lies a few miles from the station of The Cliff Dwellings, Arizona. HoLBRooK. It lies over an extent of several miles. The trees are many of them of large size, and their varieties have not been 116 OVERLAND GUIDE. definitely decided upon. One of the flinty trunks is ten feet in diameter. Limbs and branches, petrified into solid rock, lie scattered in all directions. Every color found in nature is reproduced in this agatized wood, and it has become an article of trade in the form of jewelry. There is a natural bridge in Arizona, in comparison with which that of Virginia becomes hardly >vorth mentioning. It is not acces- sible from the railroad, and is merely mentioned as one of the freaks this strange country is capable of. It lies in what is called the Tonto Basin, in the south-eastern part of the enormous county of Yavapai (Yava-//-ee), itself containing something near thirty thousand square miles. (Massachusetts contains only seven thousand eight hundred, and the State of Maine is only a little bigger than Yavapai having an area of about thirty-five thousand square miles.) A man may stand on the crown of this bridge and not know it, for there are about sixty acres of it, and some of this is cultivated ground. It has a span of eighty feet, and its width is a hundred and fifty yards. There is a round hole in the middle of the arch through which one can look at the stream below. The gigantic limestone walls spring in perfect curves to the perfect arch above. A weird and uncanny region must be what is called " The Painted Desert." It is a wild and desolate plateau, also in Yavapai County, but in the north-eastern part. It is absolutely destitute of water or vegetation, and its surface is covered with columns, isolated peaks, and buttes, all sandstone, and worn into fantastic shapes by the wind; — the sand-blast. The peculiarity of this desert consists in its wonderful mirages. There are depicted there palaces, gardens, colonnades, temples, fountains, lakes, islands, fortifications, woods, groves, orchards, men and women, herds of cattle, etc. The Indians are superstitious about it, and have always carefully avoided it. This mirage sometimes plays fantastic pranks with the ordinary senses of the traveller in other parts of Arizona and New Mexico. ARIZONA. 117 A beautiful lake, with islands, a port and town, sailboats, and trees on the shore, may occur at any moment beside the track. The illusion is perfect, except that it is too pretty for the actual thing. The mirage has a most prosaic explanation too. It is nothing but 118 OVERLAND GUIDE. waves of rarified air rising from the heated ground. Any one who> looks across the top of a heated cooking-range through an operk window can at any time have a modified and imperfect mirage for himself. Perhaps the b e s t country in Arizona is that nursery of thieves,, the San Carlos Indian Reservation. It is on the San Carlos River that so many remains of an ancient civiliza- tion are found. The ruined irrigating chan- nels and dwellings that line its banks show that a large population once lived here. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado may be reached most agree- ably from the town of Flagstaff, though the distance is much greater than from Peach Springs, which is the nearest station on the A. & P. road to the great southward bend the gorge makes on the western border of the Territory. The ride from Peach Springs is only some twenty miles, but it is a rough road even for Arizona. From ARIZONA. 119' Flagstaff it is some sixty-five miles, but it is a most enjoyable Sum- mer trip through heavy pine country, over a fairly good road, and in a grass country. It means camping and some hardship, in any event, and should not be undertaken by invalids, or by ladies who are not accustomed to roughing it. A railroad from Flagstaff has been for some time contemplated, and when built will offer facili- ties for visiting a piece of scenery that has no rival in the world, and that is worth the journey hither many times over. There is no intention here of attempting to describe the Grand Canyon. Such efforts, thus far, have been invariably thrown away. A friend of the author once told him the following story, which is only repeated here to illustrate the uselessness of talking about a place which is far beyond any descriptive power, and which, as a noticeable fact, no one talks much about after seeing it. These two gentlemen were Englishmen. When they had alighted from the wagon and gone to the edge of the canyon, they for awhile stood silent. Then one of them ejaculated "'Well, — I'll bed — d!" The other had meantime seated himself upon a convenient boulder, and was weeping like a broken-hearted girl. The scene that affects men's nerves like this, and causes them to utter inane ejaculations or weep, it is useless to dwell upon in types. But, at least, let no one imagine that the Grand Canyon is "pretty." That it is awful there can be no question, and it makes an impression that is never recovered from. No one has ever seen it all, except possibly Major Powell. When you have exhausted all the time at your disposal, you must remember that there are still hundreds of miles of it to be seen, for the chasm is four hundred miles in length. Canyon is not a fit name for it, as its heights and depths must be measured, not in feet, or by ordinary standards, but by miles. As you look down from the top the chasm is a measureless abyss. As you look upward from the bottom the awful walls overwhelm you. The river that has its channel between is not a puny stream, for the Colorado is more than 1,500 miles in length, and the area drained 120 OVERLAND GUIDE. by it is larger than the States of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and all New England combined. There are no actual falls in the Grand Canyon, and if there were they would be the mightiest of the world; but where the Canyon narrows the mighty stream rages through its narrow gateways with terrific force. Floods raise it sometimes seventy feet in a few hours. All the Canyon, and all the world around it, is rock. It is unin- ARISONA. 131 liabited save by a few Indians, and uninhabitable. Domes, cliffs, fantastic monuments, sheer walls, cracks appear everywhere. The half of it is not known; nine-tenths of it has never been seen by white men. It impresses all. No man is so dull as to escape its fascina- tion. A frontiersman of the old times told the author twenty years ago that he had travelled and lurked three days amongst the hostile Indians of those times to get a view of it, and that he went again and again, though as he expressed it, " I had to crawl on my belly to git thar." Geologically, the Grand Canyon is a crack, and has been there since the world cooled. The river did not wear the channel there, but simply flowed into and through it when the time for rivers came. Some time the place will be better known ; this upon the sup- position that it is possible to know a place of such proportions, where all ordinary chasms and gorges would be lost and never even observed. The chasm below the falls at Niagara might be swallowed up in a side-canyon here, and its existence never be suspected. Beyond Flagstaff the road lies in the heart of characteristic mountain scenery. Beyond the station of Williams the descent to the valley of the Colorado is rapid. If it is daylight, the difificulties that were overcome in the construction of the road are very apparent. But, however they may have seemed to the engineers, they are very pleasant to the traveller. They convey the impression that the Atlantic & Pacific road was built in the only place possible, and looking back causes a mental question as to how this one route was ever found. There are not many landmarks except to some accom- plished mountaineer. It is all pine and rock and chasm. But Bill Williams's Peak looks blue above the rest on the left. The inquiry naturally is as to the history of a man who has a mountain named for him. He seems to have been a pioneer of strong character who impressed himself upon his local surroundings, and more than this of him seems dimly traditional. 122 OVERLAND GUIDE. Prescott Junc- tion, a station near the western end of Picacho Canyon, and some fifty miles from tlie dining-station of Williams, is the junc- tion-point for Pres- cott, the capital city of the Territory, by way of the Prescott & Arizona Central Railroad. It is one thousand four hundred and seventy-six miles from the Missouri River to the western boundary line of Arizona, and the Colorado River. As the train glides downward toward this- unpicturesque and useless river, dash- ing its ashen waves against the piles of the long bridge, the surroundings have grown curiously un- attractive. Scurrying through the willow- clumps, or rubbing sleepy eyes at the ARIZONA. 123 door of the wickiup, you miy catch glimpses of ahnost naked Indians. You will see them again, to the entire satisfaction of any reasonable curiosity, when the train has crossed the bridge. The Needles takes its curious name from some sharp peaks on the Arizona side and some fifteen miles away at the northern end of what is called the Mojave (Mo-Zm/i-ve) Range. They stand on the left before reaching the river. The town is celebrated for a climate of almost unvarying torridness, for its surroundings of sandy and lava- strewn desolation, and its convenience as a loafing place for the Indians of the region. Otherwise it is a railroad town entirely, a changing-place for engines, etc. As a dining-station it has attrac- tions. The only ice ever seen here appears on the table, and the profusion of luscious fruits proclaims our nearness, at last, to the vineyards and orchards of Southern California. The Colorado reminds one of the Missouri, except that the current is very ifiuch less sluggish. Its peculiar color is obtained after it leaves the Canyon, and there its waters are amber-color, or white. Next to the Columbia the Colorado is the principal tributary to the Pacific on the continent. It was first discovered by one Fernando 124 OVERLAND GUIDE. Alarcon, May 9th, 1540. He ascended it in boats as far as the Grand Canyon, and is probably one of the few people who ever did, for it is one of the most unnavigable and capricious streams on the continent. Where it ran last year is this year a fertile bottom over- grown with swamp-grass, tall weeds, and willow-clumps. One of the Wild Ones. The Indians you see at The Needles are Mojaves. There'are only some eight hundred of them altogether, but there are about two hundred more known as Chim-e-hu-vis, who live with them. The Mojaves are, as to stature and proportion, not bad-looking; — for ARIZONA. 12& Indians. They were once a fighting people, and gave a good deal of trouble until 1859, when a certain Colonel Hoffman, of the regular service, gave them so crushing a defeat that they have been ever since about as you see them now. Morally they are considered to be very low in the scale. Contact with the whites has brought dis- ease, idleness, whiskey, loaferism and beggary. They are now an in- significant band of tatterdema- lions, amusing and disgusting alike to overland passengers at The Needles. Studied at close quarters the best specimens of the Noble Red Man lack a good deal of filling the ideal of old- fashioned poetry and Cooper's novels. They are all rancid. These Mojaves are neither the best nor the worst. There arc two or three of them, ordinary habitues of this little town whom you will not find it difficult to carry away with you in your mind. One of them is the belle. She wears a hoop-skirt under a calico petticoat, and a gorgeous mantle made of cotton handkerchiefs that have not been cut apart. Bare-legged, bare- footed, bare-bodied and bare-headed, the" remainder of her attire is not worth mentioning. Arizona Belle. 136 OVERLAND GUIDE. Another is the Old Squaw. You cannot imagine until you see lier, what texture the human skin may take when uncovered for half or three-quarters of a century. It is simply living leather, and hang- ing in tough wrinkles and folds, is a modification only of the hide of a rhinoceros. Her breasts hang down to her waist, callous like the rest. Her feet and legs are indifferent to thorns. Heavy gray hair covers her head and hangs in uncombed masses. She is a hardened and brazen old creature, strong and straight, unabashed by the presence of strangers; an epi- tome and abridge- ment of all one has ever heard or read of of the chiefest barbarian of them all; — The Squaw. The Yuma tribe, just below, seem akin to these. They also were once strong and warlike, but since 185 1 have been peaceful on account of having had a chastisement at the hands of one Colonel Heintzelman. The old Fort, historic as the place the dead soldier came back to from hades after his blankets, and built to hold in check this once powerful tribe, is now occupied by the Indians themselves. Like the Mojaves they are passing away. An Old Settler iALIF0RNIA. fiHE crossing of the Colorado, at The Needles, is very nearly at the junction point of Arizona, Nevada and California. The town is in the huge county of San Bernardino, and the track lies in this county almost to Los Angeles, about three hundred miles. It is a very unprepossess- ing entrance intotheGolden vState, for here begins a semi- desert consid- erably more barren than anything thus far encounter- ed on the jour- ney. By a peculiar dis- pensation of Providence each transcontinental line crosses one of these, some better, some worse. This is reputed easiest of all. Going to Southern California first, and making the journey by way of Los Angeles, there is one hundred and seventy miles of it from The Needles to Barstow, where the train turns- southward through the Cajon {(Z^]\-hone; a box,) pass into the San Gabriel Valley. In midsummer this half-day's ride, or more, is very warm. But it is ® (127) 128 OVERLAND GUIDE. not necessary to believe that clouds of sand will drift with the wind, or that the heat has any stifling qualities. Many an eastern journey has both more heat and more dust in it. Many who are unused to such scenes find an enjoyment in it through contrast with all the journeys ever made before. This is something like what may be expected : — There is rock, cactus, volcanic scoriae, sage-brush, eternal sunshine and absolute silence. Save where at long distances apart some little sign of water has made a cluster of human habitations, there seems to be no inhabitant of earth or air. The thickest of the stunted herbage is called " sage," and seeming to be always dead and never green, it grows upon a soil that is not soil at all, but a species of concrete. What grass there is grows in bunches. The region oppresses, while it interests you. Vast masses of mountain lie all around, hazy-blue with distance. Gaunt cacti sway and nod in the idle wind. Forests of the curious yucca palm appear at intervals, some day to be all cut down and taken away for the manufacture of paper. There may be rarely a gray coyote, looking behind him, and seeming to smile when he lolls his red tongue. Occasionally a jackass rabbit lays his long ears down, and makes a gray streak of himself as he departs for some locality where there are fewer myste- rious rumblings and less smoke. The effects of the sunshine are something like those of the electric light; the lights are intensely brilliant and the shadows black. The scene is not wanting in a weird and mysterious charm. Silence, loneliness and vastness, have the effect of entertaining and pleasing, where there is no danger and little discomfort, and where by simply sitting still the panorama will unwind itself and pass away. This lacks only yellow sand and a string of laden camels, instead of ice-water and the luxurious interior of a Pullman car, to give one all that sense of solitude, that feeling of the danger of being lost, that utter isolation, the pilgrim to Mecca must have as he crosses the wastes of the Sahara. Sometimes, far ahead, a brown dot in the landscape indicates a CALIFORNIA. 129 Station-house. One of them, for some unknown reason, is called Bagdad. Another is called Siberia, possibly because it is the hottest place on the road. But Ash Hill was named in good faith. It is deemed not improbable that water can be procured here by boring wells, and people who have had their lessons about deserts are looking forward to the time when at least a portion of this may The Dessrt. be made not only inhabitable, but very fruitful. Climate is the chief inducement to these speculations. Yet, except in nooks and corners, it is not free from frost. Barstow, the junction-point for Southern California direct, forms the terminus of our west- ward journey. The place is one thousand six hundred and forty-five miles from the Missouri, Here the cars destined for Los Angeles and San Diego turn directly south- ward. It is the end of the desert. By a contrast and transition so striking as to be almost marvelous, you stand at this lonely little {(/■■ '. /i>''' 130 OVERLAxND GUIDE. desert station almost upon the verge of a country where all the products of two zones grow side by side, with a luxuriance unknown elsewhere on the globe, and beneath a climate that within the past five years has attracted tens of thousands of permanent residents. If in Winter you go south into Southern California from the main line of the Atlantic & Pacific at Barstow, you will find the north- ern side of the San Bernardino Range to be frosty. The beautiful mountain scenery of that range, fliough green with grass, pines, and the variety of California shrubs, ma}'^ be flecked with snow. The moment one has emerged from Cajon Pass on the southern side, however, the scene changes, and one enters the now famous cli- mate of Southern California. The situation is peculiar. Climates are not ordinarily capable of being fenced. This is. The San Bernardino Range runs almost east and west, with a trend toward the south-east. It is the barrier which fences off all that may be found inhospitable, in a climatic sense, to the north of it. All the railroads from the East, previous to the construction of the California Southern and Central lines of the Santa Fe system, were built with especial reference to that portion of California that for thirty years or more had been the only portion of the State in which any interest was felt. Up to within about a dozen years ago, Cali- fornia meant that part which lay above the thirty-sixth meridian. The southern portion of the State was considered, and indeed was, a desert. In all the wonderful history of early California after it came into the hands of the Americans it had no part. Yet it is very old in the fact that it was the first locality upon American soil to be occupied by the civilization of Europe. It has a story of its own, and a curious one, apart from that story of California which began in 1846. The San Bernardino Mountains are but an extension of the Sierra Madre Range, and the name is applied for local convenience. It is the spur that cuts off the Mojave rrom the so-called Colorado or ^ CALIFORNIA. 131 Yuma desert. Siera Madre means in the Spanish, " Mother Range." The term "Sierra" (Se-«'/;--rah ; — a saw; — toothed), should only be applied to a succession of sharp peaks. Mr. T. S. Van Dyke, in his " Southern California" says of these : — A Rift in the Sierras. "Few parts of the United States are less known and less traversed than these great hills ; yet they look down upon the very garden of California. Away up there the mountain trout flashes undisturbed in the hissing brook, and the call of the mountain quail rinjs froni the shady glen where the grizzly bear yet dozes away the day, secure as in the olden time. From the bristling points where the 132 OVERLAND GUIDE. lilac and manzinita light up the dark hue of the surrounding chaparral, the deer yet looks down upon the plain from which the antelops has long been driven; while on the lofty ridges that lie in such clear outline against the distant sky the mountain sheep still lingers, safe in its inaccessible home." This range then, is the cause of the distinctive designation "Southern Cahfornia." Practically it is treated separately by all travellers, and its commercial and industrial destiny seems to be also different. It will, at the proper time, be considered separately in these pages. California, next after Texas, is the largest State of the Union. Departing from the usual squareness of the Western States, it has a curious, broken-backed configuration, being in extreme length 770 miles, in breadth 330 miles at its widest part, and at its narrowest not more than 150 miles. Its area is about 188,981 square miles, or 120,947,840 acres. The coast-line is bow-shaped, much indented with long curves and few bays, and is more than seven hundred , miles in length. The State, by way of comparison, may be stated to be one-and-one-half times larger than Great Britain and Ireland, which contain a population of 32,000,000. California is a inountain State, and it is estimated that 89,000,000 acres are suited to some variety of profitable husbandry. It is the only State that may be said to embrace within its boundaries every known variety of climate. Mexico has largely this quality, with a wider area and greater general elevations and depressions. The practical facility with which this climatic variety can be used is an especial Californian feature. Until the southern part of the State became known it was not conceived possible that any country could be tropical without being in the tropics, and could have every known charm, product and advantage, without a single one of the perils or disadvantages of equatorial regions. Indeed the whole State is believed by its oldest inhabitants to be a country of contradictions and curiosities, which must all be learned before its advantages can be successfully used. CALIFORNIA. 133 The topography is peculiar. It is, generally speaking, mountain and valley, but these take unique forms. The reader is requested to imagine California as lying on the Atlantic instead of the Pacific coast, east and west being reversed for the purpose. He vi^ould find it to include the whole shore-line from about Boston to Charleston, with all the area included in ten of the thirteen original States. There are two great mountain ranges which, aside from the smaller ranges and spurs, are its chief topographical features. One of these is the Sierra Nevada {Se-air-rsih Neh-z'^^-ah; — snowy, or snowed,) Range, and the other the Coast Range. The first has an altitude of from eight to fifteen thousand feet, fencing all the eastern border. The Coast Range is more like the mountains we are accustomed to, 134 OVERLAND GUIDE. having a height of from two thousand five hundred to four thousand feet. These hills do not count for much after what the traveller has been accustomed to, and would pass almost unnoticed but for the fact that, in connection with the Sierras, they fence in one of the re- markable valleys of the world. A rough diagram of California would show a very much elongated and very narrow basin, lying North and South nearly, and coming- together at each end with an almost V-shaped point. The northern junction-point is marked by Mount Shasta, a volcanic peak bare and cold, rising to an elevation of nearly fifteen thousand feet. At the southern junction of the two ranges stands San Bernardino Mount- ain, twelve thousand feet high. To an inhabitant of the moon this conformation may rudely seem like the braided chevron on a lady's sleeve, with a gigantic button at. each end. The canoe-shaped valley, wnth its serrated edges, is studded here and there with single mountains, groups, or spurs, and crossed by lower ranges. The cause of the peculiar climate of Southern Cali- fornia, considered with reference to this mountain system is, that the coast range divides, or forks, about the north-western corner of Los Angeles County, and while the main, but lower, range holds south- CALIFORNIA. 135 "vvard down the coast, that which is locally known as the San Bernar- dino Range, or the Sierra Madre more generally, turns sharply south- eastward, almost eastward, and becomes the climatic barrier before referred to. Between the Coast Range and the San Bernardinos, crowded up into the notch, lies the San Bernardino Valley; a pocket 136 OVERLAND GUIDE. as compared to the area of the State, or even as compared to the whole area of that which is distinctively known as Southern California. But the real valley of the State; — that which as to its northern half is known as the Sacramento Valley, and as to its southern half as the San Joaquin (H'wah-ITeen); — comprises what a few years ago was meant by the word California. Usually, a river which trav- erses a valley flows into it at the upper end and out of it at the lower. Here it is not so. The two rivers, Sacramento and San Joa- quin, flow, one southward and the other northward, practically run together half way, and then turn westward and empty into the Bay of San Francisco. It is a case of geographical eccentricity of which California only seems fully capable. These two valleys were fur a long time famous alone. They were the agricultural and fruit-producing California of which so much was said and written. Lateral valleys, nooks, corners and pockets, shared the general reputation. They were famous, and deservedly, quite to the exclusion of that arid southern quarter which was perhaps good enough for the Spaniards, but supposed to be good for nobody else. Enclosed between their mountain walls, once, doubtless, an inland sea, they constitute an immense and fer- tile area which, in its turn, was not appreciated by the Spaniard, but in which the Saxon has grown rich. The Sacramento Valley is forty miles wide. It becomes mountain- ous in the northern part, but contains at least five million acres of fertile land, much of which does not need irrigation. The average annual rain-fall is about twenty inches. And it is an error to suppose that the climatic peculiarities that have made the southern quarter of the State so famous are en- tirely confined to that region. All of California constitutes a climatic curiosity as compared to the East, but Southern California is unique as compared to the world; — that is the difference. In the very northern counties of the State snow rarely lies on the ground more than one day. Domestic animals live out of doors the CALIFORNIA. isr year round. There is frost, but plants that die entirely every Winter in the East, spring again from the roots here in the early Spring. The tenderest varieties of foreign grapes grow. Until lately the Sacramento Valley was the most thickly populated portion of the State. It was unusually attractive; a great level over California Live Oak. which as far as one can see are scattered groves of live-oaks, which make the country resemble a great park. The foot-hills on its eastern side were the scenes of the earliest gold-digging, and a population which went for dust remained to farm. The Sacramento River is. navigable for some distance, and the valley had a railroad some years. 138 OVERLAND GUIDE. earlier than any other portion of the interior. There, between" Sacra- mento and Marysville, lay Sutter's old fort, and around this, and filling all northern California, lay the romance of the gold-digging days; — a romance that appears one of the most attractive in our an- nals to every entirely disinterested person, but which seems not to affect the active participators in it. About Stockton is supposed to begin the southern extension of this valley; the San Joaquin. This end of it has an area of some seven million acres, and stretches from Stockton southward some three hundred miles. It has, not including the foot-hills, an average width of forty miles. These foot-hills are among the best portions of the valley in certain respects. There are, altogether, about eight- een million acres of good land, ten millions of which are considered susceptible of high tillage. Both these valleys, considered together as the great California Val- ley, have an area, including the lower hills on each side, of about sixteen thousand square miles. The greater part of it con- sists of soil washed down from the mountains on either side. It is alleged that it is the richest large body of land in the United States. That statement must now, however, be considerably softened and modified by the immensely rich and wide pieces of "desert" that have been taken in during the past ten years, one patch of which, in 1884, produced nearly fifty million bushels of wheat. With the State of Kansas, wind-swept and blizzard-haunted as she is, staring one in the face, so to speak, it is difficult to prove that California, or any other State, contains "the richest large body of land in the world." But time was, since the American occupancy, when this valley was considered "good for nothing but grazing." The cattle-kings had their day here too, and stubbornly resisted the first feeble encroach- ments of agriculture. In this great valley was tried the first experiment, by the Saxon, on any considerable scale, in irrigation. It was a great and remark- able success that has since turned not only the region where first CALIFORNIA. 139 tried, but also the forsaken sands of Southern California, into a vast garden. In the past fifteen years thousands of English-speaking people have become permanently prosperous and independent by the practice of an agricultural art that, twenty-five years ago, was considered a Mexican and Pueblo makeshift, which it was scarcely likely any but renegade Americans would ever adopt. An Unoccupied Corner. In all California, northern and Southern alike, the winter is the summer-time of the year. This question of Climate is a very prom- inent one, and is often alleged to be the principal factor in all the charms of the country. " Ninety-five per cent, climate," is a very common allegation. Many people have been willing to accept that fact, if true, and to candidly acknowledge the potency of a charm the Spaniards perfectly understood two centuries ago, and which. 140 OVERLAND GUIDE. they themselves have only recently discovered. The idea of a reversal of the seasons is not perhaps pleasant to the thorough- going Northerner. The curious thing about it is that it is not a re- versal. There are two or three facts that ought perhaps to be better understood. First : — Mildness of temperature, blooming flowers, or the plant- ing of ordinary Spring crops in September or November does not mean that there must be cold and frost at the opposite season. Second : — It 'does not mean that, being warm in Winter, it must be proportionately and unendurably hot in Summer. It is, especially in Southern California, largely an anomalous case, and the facts are these : The rains : — there being a distinct rainy season, — begin the last of September or during the first half of October. Ploughing begins about the first of November, and often la*er, and wheat, barley, oats, etc., are sown as soon as the ground can be made ready, but often not before February. The California farmer has about four months in which to prepare his land for seeding. Corn, where it is raised at all, is planted from March to May, and need not be gathered at any particular time. The harvest season for small grains is in the last part of May or the first part of June. The rains having ceased in April, the harvest season is always dry. The grain is threshed and put into bags, and left in the fields, and may lie there at the convenience of the owner. Califorr.ia grain does not "sweat." Potatoes are often left in the ground long after they are matured. Sometimes there are two crops raised on the same ground in one year; — wheat or barley for the first, and corn for the second. Wheat and barley are often sown for hay, and cut before the heads fill. But a couple of acres of beets, replanted as they are used, will keep three or four milk-kine the year through. Sheep are never fed at all. Horses not at work get nothing except what they " rustle for " at CALIFORNIA. 141 142 OVERLAND GUIDE. any season. Alfalfa sometimes yields as much as fifteen tons per acre in a single season, in from six to nine cuttings. Horses are much more easily kept in condition than elsewhere. California is rapidly becoming the blooded-horse country of the continent. The business of raising cattle was, for many long years, — say a century and a quarter, — the only business followed in California. It therefore follows that the genuine, old-fashioned Michigan, or New York, or Kansas, or Iowa Winter is absolutely done away with and unknown in all parts of the State. The remarks above are especially intended to apply to that part now generally known as northern California. So far as that part is concerned, it is true, in addition, that there are frosts except in places especially sheltered; there are cold winds. The farther north one goes the colder does it become, but only comparatively. In the extreme north there is no Winter in our sense. In Southern California both Winter and Summer are further modified by the geographical situation mentioned in a preceding page. .0UTHERN SALIPeRNIA. [HE reasons for the peculiar climatic conditions that have caused Southern California to be set apart by common consent, and considered a separate country, have already been briefly given. So great is the comparative difference between the two sections of the State, that there has been for some years a local rivalry. Indeed it may almost be said that everybody, in California or out of it, regards the two sections as entirely distinct. It is so thought of and spoken of. The distinction has produced a "boom " in which the northern three-fourths of the State has not shared. It has given rise to an enormous literature and endless discussion, all with a climatic ten- dency, and nearly all included under the general head of advertising. For it has been discovered at last, and after more than thirty years of neglect, that all the advantages, benefits and glories of which California-at-large has justly boasted since 1846, exist in intensified form in that neglected corner of her area which was of all men considered as but little better than the Yuma and Mojave 10 (143) 144 OVERLAND GUIDE. deserts lying in suspicious contiguity close beside. Every Californian of the old time who strayed thither strayed out again. There was " Sunshine and Sand." The soil was a species of concrete to any judge of soil, covered with a merely ornamental and superfluous layer of fine sand, that swirled and shifted with every wind. A horrid river-bed, a mere convenience as an occasional sewer for cloud-bursts, wide and gray and dry, and littered with round An Unoccupied Nook. boulders, and treeless and forsaken, was occasionally encountered. A clump of willows or a bunch of live-oaks grew here and there. The brown mountains fenced the valley round, and they were bald, silent, changeless, desolate. There were almost no inhabitants. The old missions were there, encountered far apart and falling into ruin, and once in a long time there was a cluster of adobe houses answering mutely to some sacred and sonorous name SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 145 like NuESTRA Sexora Reina de Los Angeles ; — a glittering city now known as "' Laws Anglees," — and San Carlos de Monterey, San Antonio de Padua, San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Obispo, and a hundred other Sans and Santas, all flavored with south-of-Europe sacredness and Spanish sonorousness of idea and language. The people one met were queer. They were Spanish peasants ; €x-soldiers stranded in this far clime so much like Madre Espana; and poor devils of Pueblos. They held the country long, as time goes modernly, but it turned out that they did not belong there, and •could not stay. As to how some of them went, see " A Century of Infamy," by Mrs. Jackson. There was sunshine, as mentioned, but no water, no soil, no hope. It is not definitely discovered as yet, to whom belongs the credit of re-discovering the country; of seeing with the eye of faith that there was something else ; for his name is drowned in the clamor of a ** boom " to which all other booms that have been are as nothing. Kansas City, and all the Kansas Chicagos, fade into insignificance when confronted with a comparison. It may be in its expiring throes when these words reach the public. If so it will be a late reminis- cence. It is now in the present tense. At this date one hears the buzz all around him if he is there. The stranger is impressed with the idea that nobody has a genuine and unperverted "level " head. All one sees are busily discussing one sole, lone, solitary, isolated question ; real estate. Lone and unprotected office-girls, gaining a gruesome crust by hammering the unmelodious type-writer a little year or two ago, now smile serenely upon a world that has never been particularly kind to struggling females, for they too "caught on," and now contemplate with chas- tened sweetness a bank-account of a hundred thousand or so. Boys and youngsters, all trades and occupations, have shared in the opu- lent results. Old sea-dogs who had sailed the wide world over,and who, .sailor-like, were previously content, have anchored to these rocky 146 OVERLAND GUIDE. hills, and will sail no more. Smart young men from the slow old towns and States where booms are never known, and where the citizens however worthy and pious do but vegetate, find full scope here for a financial genius hitherto unsuspected save by themselves. All are talkers upon one eloquent theme ; there are no conservatives and silent men. The idea that the word " value " retains any of its original significance is discarded. It is all "will be." There is practically no present, and yet to this golden present there Old California Hacienda. is to be no end. It is the curious spectacle of a country originally rocky, sandy, silent, useless, wearing only the pe- culiar charm all sterile countries seem to wear, suddenly acquir- ing a value as though in the core of each of its oranges there was hidden a grain of gold ; as if every acre had suddenly ceased to be merely soil, and was become a new commodity in the markets and desires of men. There is an idea more or less clearly defined that every person in the wide expanse of the Union outside of California is an mvalid, and must come here. There is nowhere else to go. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 147 Perhaps old Palestine was such a land as this when the spies car- ried back that somewhat hypothetical bunch of grapes, but if it ever was the day has passed. Italy is not such, or Spain, with all its olive-orchards which to the mind of Padre Junipero Serra were •doubtless typical of those he and his brethren planted here. For these glowing Summer days there is no change during all the long year. In Winter, — the Winter we fear and dread — the rains come, and dusty nature bathes her face and blooms again. The tender Toses we nurse and watch, here climb the roof-tree in January. The beautiful foliage of Japan rejoices in its exile, and makes the yellow road like an avenue in Jerusalem the Glorious. So tickled was the concrete soil with the first drink brought it by the contriving Yankee out of an iron pipe, that it has not since ceased to laugh. Gerani- ums, verbenas, and such weeds, become trees. Plebeian tomato- vines live and spread and bear from year to year. Oranges, side- by-side with the fruits that everybody's boyhood knows, are expected; nobody notices them, though every tree bears three or four times as much as such trees do in their natural homes in the tropics. All the vast kindred of luxuries patiently waited for and thankfully received once in a while in other States are here a matter of course. We raise grapes, for instance. Certainly; so does God raise them in the woods, for the birds and foxes, and both are about of a kind when one comes to compare them with such as grow here on every vine, that lie in the dust ungathered, for over-plentifulness. Yet the climate that is luxurious in Winter does not grow oppress- • ive in Summer. Of ail dog-day resorts this is probably the best. It is not believed; the reader will not believe it; but it is true. You may walk in the sun, or sit in it, in June or January. It is true that within a very limited area one spot may be much hotter than another; one side of a row of hills may have at seasons a different climate from the other side. A change very perceptible to a con- firmed invalid may be had by going a few miles in the same vicinity; but the general statement is true. You wear the same clothes the 143 OVERLAND GUIDE year round. Ever}' night you sleep under a blanket You may calculate with certainty U])on what, save a woman's mood, is known to be the most uncertain of earthly things; — the weather. It is the south-western corner of the American world. Beyond the rim of mountains that fence it on the East and North lie the Original Ir.habitants of the Sacramento Valley voiceless stretches of rock and sand; grown sparsely with yucca palms and all the stunted family of gnarled and warty vegetation and strewn with volcanic scorite; which you have crossed. Through the notches in its western rim is seen the shining sea. Below it lies the peninsula of Lower California. But the electric light is glinting. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 149 over leagues of what to the Pueblo, the Spaniard, and the early Californian alike, was simply yellow desert. In a brief time the leaves of palms and cypresses will meet across miles of stately avenue, and the white towers of its cities will shine through morn- ing mists hke Beulah from afar. Fenced in by distance, desert and sea, unknown while the Republic grew to fifty millions of people, it was its unguessed destiny to burst at last upon the traveller from the windows of a palace-car. When he has seen it all; when his mixed sensations have settled down to certain con- clusions; when he is tired alike of its oratory and its sweets; when he has learned the alchemy that transmutes sand into soil and yellow and forbidding nakedness into the verdure of Eden; he may as he again turns eastward almost wonder where now is the Angel with the Flaming Sword who by all authentic accounts had orders to stand at the southern end of Cajon Pass; — that is to say, at the gate of the lost paradise. Whatever history California has, began, and most of it was en- acted, south of the Sierra Madre Range, and a review of it is merely a glimpse of those sleepy years when all the life of the country was as much as possible like that of Spain, and under a oiimate so much like that of Spain that these Latins loved it and fought for it to the best of their resources and valor. To begin at the beginning, the Bay of San Diego was discovered in the month of September, 1542, (December 21st, 1620, being the date of the landing of the Pilgrims) by a Portuguese in the service of Spain named Cabrillo {Ca.hrce/yo: — little goat; Kid). He was a wandering mariner in a new world, sailing unknown seas in the em- ploy of the then greatest maritime power of any age. The object was not geographical or scientific investigation, but simple, harmless conquest. He happened upon this finest harbor but one on the Pacific coast, — but no result followed. He merely sailed out again, and the important find was almost forgotten for more than fifty years. 150 OVERLAND GUIDE. During this interval one Sir Francis Drake, wandering abroad like the Little Goat, discovered the place, and had the audacity to name it, and all the adjoining country, New Albion. This is the first name by which California was known to those by whom, after so long a time, it was to be owned and extolled and speculated in. As for Drake, all English-speaking people have been trained to regard him Beach at San Diego. as a great navigator, ranking with Frobisher and Cook. But he was not; he was a "pirate." That is what the Spanish historians dis- tinctly call him, and his exploit in taking in the Bay of San Diego when he did not know anybody had been there before him, so angered Felipe II, when he heard of it, that he ordered the place *' fortified." So a man named Vizciano (a nickname for a man who hails from SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 151 the Spanish province of Biscay; — a B'ls-ke-a/i-no) came here November loth, 1602, for that purpose. This was the first step taken to actually occupy the country by white men and Europeans. The place was named San Diego. For it must, complying with the pious customs of the Spaniards, be San or Santa something. The name is the same with St. James, or James (Santiago) who is the patron saint of old Spain, and whose name has for hundreds of years been the Spanish war-cry. His " day " is the 12th of November; the day of the survey of the Bay by Vizciano; and this is why the place remains for all time not New Albion, but San Diego. As the name is likely to be a frequent one in all Southern California reminiscences, it is well enough to remember that it is not pronounced "Dee-a7<:/-go," but Dee-a-go, with the "a," — Spanish "e " — as broad as one can get it. The name of this holy man is often on the lips of Spaniards, especially sailors in foreign parts. That is why they are universally nicknamed " Dagos," meaning " Diegos "; — Jameses. It is a subject •of appropriate mention here because there are dozens of euphonious Spanish names in California, both the meaning and pronunciation of which are disregarded equally with this. From this 12th of November, 1602, that which is now known as Southern California was called "Alta " California; — an almost pre- cisely opposite designation to the present one, given in distinction to the Peninsula, now, as then, called " Lower " California. The Spaniards of those times knew little or nothing of what we call Cali- fornia. It seems from later events that they were very ignorant of its resources when they lost it, two hundred and forty-four years later. But what they considered to be theirs was without boundary or limit in any direction. As usual, they did not know what they had, either commercially or geographically. Events moved so very slowly in those days that it was not until July I St, 1769, a date which brings us very near to the beginning of our Revolutionary war and something to date from, that the actual occupation of the Pacific coast by Europeans began. Then one of 152 OVERLAND GUIDE. the most remarkable men of those times, a Franciscan friar named Junipero Serra, [Hu-neep-a-ro Ser-ra/i) with his companions, came to San Diego to establish a mission. It is so very easy to say they came, and so easy to do it now, that it is difficult to appreciate the fact that they had a terrible time of it, and that some who started never reached the place at all. The soldier and the priest came Unconverted Aborigines of Southern California. SV^W together, as usual, and the conquest was one of Church and State combined. They camped on this desolate shore to create a peculiar history, and leave results that have not yet departed. San Diego was the spot where civilization began, and the place has also the honor of being the initial point of the second and m.ore wonderful civilization which was to follow, when in 1846 Commodore Stocktoa SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 153' entered the harbor with the frigate Constitution, and proceeded to occupy the antique earthwork above the Old Town of San Diego, which has since then been known as Fort Stockton. The story of early California is a religious history. It begins and ends with the history of missions. The mission of San Diego was. A Miss on School the mother of all the rest. Fifty years after the establishment of this there were twenty others scattered along the coast as far North as San Francisco. Though in many cases they were fifty miles apart, their boundaries joined. They occupied the land. In 1825, when the Spanish rule had departed from Mexico and they had begun to rapidly decay, they still owned 1,200,000 head of cattle^ 154 OVERLAND GUIDE. more than 100,000 horses, 15,000 mules, 100,000 sheep, and innu- nierable swine. They had not less than a million dollars in dust, bullion and coin, not to mention treasures in the form of gold and silver statues, crucifixes, and other church property. They had established a foreign trade, and did a lucrative business in hides, horns, tallow, etc. It was then, and would be now but for the fact that the land has grown too valuable, the finest cattle country of which there is any knowledge. About 1820 this religio-commercial arrangement had grown to be the most remarkable missionary scheme the world has seen. The beginnings had been honest ■enough, entered into in peril and carried out in good faith. In the end, and long before the end, the enterprise had degenerated into a money-making scheme, backed by plain, simple, undisguised slavery. There were twenty thousand "Christianized " Indians in and about the various missions. Every one was an agricultural slave, held and wofked as such for pecuniary profit. When unwilling they were flogged, confined, starved or tortured. Besides these miserable •creatures there were at least a hundred thousand still wild and unconverted ones, to whose spiritual welfare nobody paid the slightest attention. "Ranching" had become the business, with a droning accompaniment of religious services. The civil officers, the alcaldes and commandantes, were partners with the Church in tMs business. During the lapse of a half-century or more, the Spaniards who owned Southern California had every inducement to become the idlest, proudest, most independent and wealthy provincials on the continent. And they seem to have improved the opportunity. You may see the remains of it wherever you encounter a son of the soil. Con- versation with the elders of them always elicits a vain regret that the old times did not stay. The change, when it came, ought to have made a millionaire of every holder of a grant, for it trans- formed an unknown and almost worthless Mexican province into one of the great States of the Union, but it did not have that effect. (155) 156 • OVERLAND GUIDE. These first families often have a bearing that makes you privately smile, for they retain amid all the changes and after so long a time, almost all of the traditional Spanish moods, gaits, hauteurs and arrogances. Sometimes, though not often, there has evidently been an admixture of Indian blood. Nearly all that are left are strong reminders of the happy times when no Spaniard in California €ver actually worked, no matter how poor ; when the Christianized Indians were his own in the name of piety ; when he owned all the surroundings of a narrow and provincial magnificence. An aristoc- racy had grown up here the patent to which consisted only in being a native of California. They had wealth galore. Their beautiful •women grew up sprightly, frivolous and pious, precisely like their ^reat-great-grandmothers in old Spain ; only incomparably richer. They imagined they had all this sunny world to themselves, and were borp and died in it, secure and content. They had practically forgotten Spain, caring no more about it than we do about England or Germany. They called themselves Mexicans only because it was necessary to be something, and they cared very little for that far- away power, or for any other. They did not dream of the destiny, •or want of destiny, in store for them at the hands of a republic of whose existence they only knew from "around the Horn." The change came suddenly. From August 6th, 1846, to December 2d, of the same year, had been passed by a squad of men who were considered "The Army of the West," in marching from the banks ■of the Missouri to a pass on what is now known as Warner's Ranch in San Diego County. They were met there on December 6th, by the Mexican force, and the bloody little battle of San Pascual (Pas- qual) was fought. It was a victory for the " invaders," but it cost the lives of nineteen officers and men, only two of whom were killed by bullets, the remainder being the victims of the characteristic Spanish "cold steel." If there is not a national cemetery in this re- mote corner of our dominion it would seem that there should be. The little command continued its march to San Diego and a junc- SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 157 tion with Stockton, and " Alia California" was practically gone from the Spaniard forever. But already in 1845 five thousand Americans had crossed the plains into California, having made a journey a good deal longer and harder than any mentioned in these pages. It will be recalled that Captain Donner and his party perished in a snow-storm in 1846. Then the romance and the tragedy of California began. After the episode of Sutter's Mill the country filled very rapidly. But the im- Improved. migration tended northward entirely, and the growth of the State was mainly there for thirty-five years. A few years ago the results of agricultural and irrigation experiments began to demonstrate the wisdom of the Spaniard's choice. Southern California has of late years attracted more attention than any other country of equal size has ever done. Southern California, solely considered, has been so much talked of and written about that the idea that it is a geographical and munici- (158) SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 159 pal subdivision of the State would be a perfectly natural one. But it has no specific boundaries. The name is a purely local one. It is supposed to be composed of the counties of Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, part of the huge county of San Bernardino, and all of the equally huge San Diego. That is, run a line East from the northern boundary of Santa Barbara County, and all South of it is, by common consent, Southern California. A glance at the map will show that this is but a small portion of the territory included within the boundaries of this great State. It is outside of the great valleys ; it is fenced off ; it is but a pocket, — a corner. Yet this " small " territory contains nearly ninety thousand square miles. The irregular square comprising Massachu- setts, Rhode Island and Connecticut would be less than one-fourth of it. Los Angeles County; a very small one for California; is two- thirds as large as Massachusetts, while San Diego County is rivalled only by Yavapai, in Arizona, and is considerably larger than an aver- age State. Another curious fact is that only an infinitesimal corner of this corner has given the country its world-wide reputation. The little nook where the Coast Range divides and runs off eastward, while another, and lower range, continues its southern direction, is the centre of richness and celebrity. Everybody has heard of the San Gabriel Valley, yet it is only about twenty miles long and ten miles wide. The whole San Bernanuino Valley, lying south of the range of that name, extends only from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, but it is a present or prospective garden from end to end. It is necessary to take what is called a "bird's-eye" view of the country. If a miniature cast were taken of Southern California, as has been done of Switzerland, looked down upon it would casually appear to be nothing but mountain ranges, spurs, and hills. But, closely inspected, there could be seen some small valleys nestled in between. Therein lies the secret. These valleys ; mere nooks of a 11 160 OVERLAND GUIDE. mountain world ; of all shapes and dimensions; unimportant as to size when compared with the country but big enough of themselves, and each one an Eden of fertility ; have given Southern California the fame no other region ever had. Out to the south-eastward of Los Angeles stretches the Colorado Desert. It occupies, with other and smaller patches of the same desert under different names, the greater portion of the country. It is just like what the wayfarer has recently crossed between The Mountain Glimpse Needles and Barstow. It grows even more hideous in the south- eastern part of San Bernardino County; — on down to old Fort Yuma on the Colorado. There are places there where the climate seems unmitigated by a single redeeming circumstance. One spot* is * On Tuesday last, the men employed by the Southern Pacific Company, three miles east of Indio struck a steady flow of pure water at 540 feet depth. The present flow is about 10,000 gallons per hour, but the engineer in charge expects to obtain a flow of at least 24,000 gallons, when the pipe is cleared of clay and gravel. Work has been going on for the past six weeks on this well, the success of which will undoubtedly result in many more being hored.— Arizona Citizen. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 161 three or four hundred feet lower than the adjacent sea, and is a kind of geographical Hades all the year. Always in sight, from every elevation, are the glowing edges of some desert stretch where man has not dreamed of residence or toil. We will venture the statement that the desert is in nature precisely like the rest. It does not seem so now, but it was so not many years ago, when all the now lovely valleys were sun-baked ovens no one had thought of occupying. The eastern man who is on his way to California should remember that he is about to witness something to which he has heretofore been an entire stranger. The remotest traditions of the Saxon race have left it out. It is the making and occupying of a new country without natural resources except as to climate, by entirely artificial helps. It is a scheme of geographical Redemption. Water is the transforming power. None of this wonderful country ; hardly an acre beyond the occupations of the original Spaniards ; could be occupied now save for the skillful bringing of water where it never was before. If you should go into any nook of the Colorado Desert, and get water there by boring or ditching, you will find the apparently sterile soil the richest in the world. If there is water enough, an Eden will grow green there also. In time to come there will be oases there, and it will be no more strange, no more curious to the visitor's eye, than it is now to see the mysterious streams and flowing wells that are a feature of the redeemed portion. There was, under the Spanish occupancy, a little water. There were " rivers," such as they were, as the Los Angeles, the San Gabriel, the Santa Ana. In an eastern sense they were ridiculous. They did not flow between defined banks; for a good part of the year per- haps, they did not flow at all. They had a way of dodging under the ground for miles at a time. Their wide beds were marked by gray sand and round boulders. There merely seemed to have once been a river there, — perhaps. At other places their current gently flowed, 163 OVERLAND GUIDE. and at these localities the Mission fathers and the Spaniards made- their improvements. But Spanish irrigation was wasteful and neg- ligent of what little water they had. When the Yankee concluded to come he took measures to conduct the streams in cement-lined ditches and through pipes. Then he began to bore. Not content with a perpendicular hole, some of his Artesian exploits are hori- zontal. Boring into the side of a mountain, he coaxes the stream that has sunk there out to him by gravity. The expedient occurred to him of damming the ends of mountain canyons, and making a reservoir. All his experiments have been successful. Indeed the story of the country is a romance of unlooked-for successes. There is much more water than the first settlers dreamed there was, and it requires less to make the country fruitful than the Spaniards thought. Thus, there is likely to be a surprising awakening for any eastern traveller who comes to Southern California with only the flowery side of the country uppermost in his dreams. There are no level, black acres of government land awaiting the plow; there are no roll- ing green prairies. Seen as it lies, and compared by sight alone with such countries as Illinois or Missouri or Kansas, the region is. miserably poor. More than half of it is irredeemable after water has done all that it can do. Barren places abound in the richest parts. Patches pitilessly desolate lie beside gardens. The country can never become either in appearance or .reality a vast vegetable garden. The charm of variety will still remain, no matter what improvements are made. This is fortunate from a view which is undoubtedly the practical one. The country owes its fame and its unprecedented "boom" to the facilities it offers for the enjoyment of life. Both in climate and scenery there is little left to be desired. The struggle with the alternations of intense heat and bitter cold, and deep mud and wet seasons, and coughs and general discomfort, is forever over here. Wherever there is a valley where water has come the productiveness. Mountain and Valley. (163) 164 OVERLAND GUIDE. is enormous. No one who has not seen it can have any conception of both the luxuriance and the quality this disintegrated granite "soil" brings forth. It cannot be judged by the eye. Some of it that appears to be almost pure sand, or even mica, is surprisingly rich. It requires only two conditions to make almost the worst of it more productive than the loam of primeval woods ; moisture and warmth. The last it always has; the first comes by skill and the expenditure of capital. The appearance of the country as nature left if may suggest to the reader none of its capacities. Everything now is an exotic. Everything from everywhere will grow. This is what the country w-as, as described by Mr. Van Dyke, before the modern miracles had been worked. He alludes, of course, to the country as it was then habitable; not to the desert. "Within this enclosure of desert, mountain, and ocean lies a tract that has not its like upon the globe. One sees valleys of the brightest verdure where the grass is fed by the drainage of the surrounding hills, and others always green with the dense foliage of live-oaks that have stood shoulder to shoulder for ages. * * Here a canyon enters the plain with a great wash from some ancient cloud burst or season of unusual rain, cutting the level with a long deep gully, and then covering it with acres of boulders and gravel; and here another enters by a little soft valley, clad in a rich brown carpet of dried clover and flowers, with perhaps a huge rock- pile of ancient granite in its centre overshadowed by the sweeping arms of some venerable live-oak. There lies the great plain itself, with the distant laguna glitter- ing on its breast, with tall slender columns of dust marching slowly over its face where the little whirlwinds move along; the Indian girls, bright with gay calico, jog- ging on their little ponies. * * * Upon a rising knoll shine the white walls of the old Spanish ranch-house, with saddled horses tied to the porch, beneath which the owner and his friends are perhaps rolling cigarettes and chattering melo- dious Spanish, while the herdsmen are driving the herds without. "You see the line of the water course, now perhaps only a long dry bed of white sand, winding seaward through long green lines of sycamore, cottonwood, and willow, spreading out at times into broad groves. Perhaps the water breaks out here and there in a long shining strip, or it may flow on for miles and then sink to rise no more. » * * SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 165 " Along the edges the plains and valleys break into low hills covered with thin grayish-green brush, and the little hollows between them are often filled with prickly-pear, or the still more forbidding cholla cactus, as high as one's head. And often these low hills are themselves hard and stony, and covered with cactus, and often are only concretions of cobble-stones, with which the intervening hollows are also filled. * * * These hills break into higher ones that roll in all sorts of shapes and bristle with dense, dark brush higher than one's head, or perhaps are covered with dead grass and scattered green bushes of live-oak, sumac and fuchsia. Among these bushes smooth boulders of granite often shine afar like springs on the hill-side, or they stand along the crests looking against the sky like houses or chimneys. Again some of these hills are only huge undulations of bare dirt, reaching for miles like chopping waves upon a stormy sea, some gray, some dingy white, others a sickly brown or red. " Beyond these secondary hills rise others, thousands of feet high, covered with dark-green chaparral, through which perhaps a clump of dark-green sycamores marks the presence of water. Or they may be from base to summit studded with boulders, amid which the lilac, manzanita, and live-oak struggle for foothold. Others again have long, smooth slopes, golden with dead fox-tail grass, over which venerable live-oaks stand scattered. And among the fostering shoulders of these lower mountains are often little gardens of living green, some'.imes sunk like lakes into their very tops. Between the ranges of such hills may lie broad valleys, or wide table-lands, with surfaces like rolling prairie, all lifted into the region of abundant rains. And far above all else rise fir-plumed mountains, whose sides are robed in dark forests, below whose heads the clouds float in long streams, whose highest gulches are white with snow far into the summer, while in winter it often lies twenty feet deep, though the orange tree is blooming scarce twenty miles away." This brief and comprehensive picture embodies much of the charm of the country, and is at least suggestive of the fact that the region is unique in appearance as it is in climate and products. The author adds a contrasting picture. He says: "Such was the view of the land a few years ago; but now valley, slope, and mesa, and even the mountain-sides, are dotted with bright and beautiful homes, while villages and even cities are rearing tall spires from the lately bare plains. * * * Hundreds upon hundreds of handsome houses, embowered in every variety of shrubbery, now rise amid orange and lemon groves, fields of alfalfa. 166 OVERLAND GUIDE. orchards where the foliage of the apricot, prune, plum, walnut, almond, peach, or pear hide the ground beneath, vineyards where over sixty kinds of grapes are growing, and the plats of raisin-grapes alone are larger than many wheat-fields of the Middle States." These pictures might be made indefinitely by any visitor who had the love of nature to understand them and the skill to describe them. But only actual presence can give the actual and almost indescrib- able charm. And the growth, the changes, the unparalleled im- provement, is not embroidery. It was done for money, and it brings money. The country is not one for the pioneer; it is rather the land of the millionaire. No man of quite moderate means has any call to California for an improvement of his fortunes. The " day of small things" has passed. It is rapidly becoming the most opulent region under the American Flag. Its acres are purchased as a luxury. When the " boom " is a thing of the past the situation will not be greatly changed, for the reason that there is no other place on earth where a life without toil can be so greatly enjoyed. As a place to go, a land in which to escape from some of the studied cruelties of winter, a country to live m in chronic tiredness and changing health, California has no equal. It does not quite share the fate of the other beautiful countries. They are nearly always poor. All regions of mountaips and sunshine; of pines and falling waters; of natural beauty and wholesome air; are good for little else; — all but this. South of the Range. LIMATE. S to the climatic cure for clironic diseases which come under jWL the general term of "ill health," all grades and varieties of sick people come to California. There are several chronic com- plaints for which the Pacific coast is said to offer certain relief. Among these is the all-but-universal hay-fever. There are innu- jnerable people here who have for some )-ears been rejoicing at the success of a scheme for saving their lives by driving mules or pruning trees. The climate of the whole State is governed largely by the sea. From April to October the current of cold water which pours south- ward out of Behring Strait has a temperature of fifty-three degrees. The north and north-west winds from this, meeting the south-west trade-wind, bring a fog which often wraps itself like a gray cloak around the Coast Range, but which is carried into the interior only a short distance where there are gaps and openings in the range. There are at least two distinct climates; the coast and the inland. These two have each, in their turn, their several gradations. In one place the coast will be unsuitable for invalids; at another locjlity, pos- sibly only five or eight miles away, it will be found entirely different. (167) 168 OVERLAND GUIDE. San Diego has the most equable and changeless climate known,, yet some of the bleakest spots on earth lie in sight of it. A mount- ain, even a ridge, may practically change the climate to an invalid. To realize this fact actual presence is necessary. The State has been from the earliest times a climatic puzzle, though all changes and varieties must come only within limits which seem very narrow to a stranger. One grows very particular after a little whil^. There Sierra Madre Villa— San Bernardino Valley. are wraps and overcoats in plenty on a dummy train between San Diego and National City, for instance, though it be August. One of the places is only five or six miles away, but exposed to the sea- wind, and seems to be looked upon very much as Kansas people look upon Dakota. There is often an apprehension of cold amusing to a stranger, as there is in Mexico or the West Indies. There is comfort in a fire "to get up by," in a California valley where frost CLIMATE. 169 has never been known. Overcoats, or pretences of overcoats, are carried and worn where the bitterest cold, actual cold, that ever comes would not wither the petals of a hot-house lily. These sensations are largely due to variety of surface. In the Valley of the Amazon, in the heart of tropical Brazil, Midnight and Noon are nearly the same the whole year -through. Where there are hills and valleys, a wide and open country round, and the- sea near at hand, the sensations, though not the actual changes per- haps, are very different at noon, night and morning. The following explanation of the great Californian climatic puzzle- is copied from one of the numerous immigration publications, and the name of the author is unknown: " The northern boundary of California is at about latitude 42 de- grees north, while the southern boundary is very nearly at 32 degrees, north latitude. On the Atlantic coast, Boston, Massachusetts, occu- pies very nearly the same relative position as the northern boundary of California, and the city of Chicago is very nearly in the same latitude, while the city of Savannah, Georgia, corresponds with the extreme southern boundary of California. What a stretch of sea- coast for a single State! "One fact will suffice to show the great contrast of climates as. between the Pacific coast and the Atlantic coast. At Oroville, ia Butte County, which is very near the 40th parallel of north latitude, oranges, lemons, limes, pomegranates, and other semi-tropical fruits are produced with as great or even greater success than the same fruits are produced on the coast of Florida, at the 30th parallel of north latitude, or 720 miles south of Boston and 600 miles south of Oroville. When it is considered that but for the ameliorating climatic influences of the Gulf Stream, Eastern Florida could not successfully produce the semi-tropical fruits named, and that Oroville is at least 150 miles inland from the Pacific coast, with the Coast Range of mountains, from 3,000 to 4.000 feet high, intervening, and is located in the foot-hills of the Sierra. 170 OVERLAND GUIDE. Nevadas, at an elevation of about i,ooo feet above the sea, some faint conception of the wonderful contrast between the climates of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts may be obtained. The Big Trees. " Oroville is mentioned simply because it is one of the most north- •«rn points in California in which the semi-tropical fruits have been CLIMATE. 17t. very successfully cultivated, but all along the foot-hills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, at about the same elevation as Oroville, to Los. Angeles county, these fruits may be, and have been, cultivated with equal success. The length of this belt of country is about 400 miles, by from 10 to 15 miles wide. " In many localities in and along the east base of the Coast Range of mountains, for the same distance north and south, the tropical fruits are cultivated with good success. The wide, open valleys of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers and their large tributaries, are not so favorable for the cultivation of these fruits, neither in the composition of the soil nor the characteristics of the climate. "Having pointed out the great difference of the climates of the Pacific coast and the Atlantic coast, by a reference to some of the productions at different points, attention is now called to the follow- ing table, which shows the contrast as indicated by the thermometer. " Taken the months of January and July as representing the ex- tremes of heat and cold of the year, and given the mean temper- ature of place named for each month, points in California are contrasted with other points in the United States and Europe. Tlace. Chicago, 111 Sacramento, Cal . . . Genoa, Italy New York San Francisco, Cal. . Jaclcsonville, Florida Nice, France Los Angeles, CaL . . Savannah, Georgia. , Jan. July. Dif. Deg. Deg. Deg. 10 b3 52 45 73 28 40 77 3' 31 77 Ab 48 58 10 58 80 22 46 76 30 55 67 12 39 82 43 Lat. D. M. 41 00 38 34 44 24 40 37 36 36 30 50 40 52 34 04 32 00 " Thus comparing the weather in January and July, at Sacramento, with that of same months at Chicago and New York, while it is. thirty-five degrees colder at Chicago in January than at Sacramento,, it is but ten degress cooler in July at Chicago than at Sacramento,,, 172 OVERLAND GUIDE. ■and while it is fourteen degrees colder at New York in January than at Sacramento, it is also three degrees cooler at Sacramento in July than at New York. "Comparing San Francisco weather with the weather at Chicago and New York, while it is thirty-eight degrees warmer in winter at San Francisco than at Chicago, and seventeen degrees warmer than at New York, it is five degrees cooler in San Francisco in summer than at Chicago, and nineteen degrees cooler in San Francisco in summer than in New York. North ot the Range. " Going on with the comparisons as between the places named in California, and those named on the Atlantic coast and in Europe, it will be seen that the extremes between winter and summer in Cali- fornia are less than between the same seasons at the most favored localties on the Atlantic slope or Europe. In other words, while there are warmer winters there are also cooler summers. " In addition to the above climatic showings, as indicated by a com- parison of the figures of the thermometer, owing to the absence of moisture in the atmosphere in California in the summer, eighty degrees of heat, as shown there by the instrument, is less oppressive CLIMATE. 173 than sixty degrees, as shown by the instrument on the Atlantic coast or in Europe. In consequence of this difference in the state of moisture in the atmosphere, sun-stroke and like affections are un- known in California. " Owing to the comparative absence of moisture in the air in Cali- fornia in summer, however warm the day may be while the sun is present, the moment he has gone below the horizon the effects of his heating influence cease, and the evenings and nights are cool. Everybody sleeps under blankets. "For a more full exposition of the climate of California, a.Si com- pared with the world's noted climates, we give the following table of mean temperature : Place. Austin, Texas Borden, Cal Cinninnati, Ohio City of Mexico Caliente, Cal Delano, Cal Dijon, France Fort Yuma, Arizona. . . . ■Gilory, Cal •Goshen, Cal Honolulu, S. I HoUister, Cal Monterey, Cal Milan, Italy New Orleans, Louisiana. Naples, Italy Pajaro, Cal Richmond, Virginia.... Santa Barbara, Cal. . . San Diego, Cal Stockton, Cal San Mateo, Cal San Jose, Cal Salinas, Cal Soledad, Cal St. Augustine, Florida. . Vallejo, Cal Jan. July. Dif. Deg. Deg. Deg. 3b 84 48 42 8q 47 21 77 56 52 63 II 46 92 46 47 86 39 33 70 37 56 92 3& 41 78 37 51 91 40 71 7« 7 48 73 25 52 5S 6 33 74 41 55 82 27 46 76 30 49 5a 9 73 77 44 56 66 10 57 65 8 49 72 23 46 59 13 46 69 23 47 65 18 43 70 27 59 77 i3 48 67 19 Lat. D M. 30 36 36 00 39 06 19 26 35 00 35 00 47 00 32 43 37 00 36 00 21 16 36 00 36 36 45 00 29 57 40 52 36 00 37 00 34 24 32 4r 37 56 37 00 37 00 36 00 36 00 30 05 38 05 " A short statement of the peculiar causes that help to form the many climates of California, will help the reader the better to under- stand them. (174) CLIMATE. 175 " The Golden Gate pass is an opening several miles long but of less width, through the Coast Range of mountains, and is the only com- plete break or pass in the Coast Range, from the southern to the northern end of the basin to which it forms the outlet. " Directly opposite the Golden Gate, across the bay of San Fran- cisco, and several miles inland, stands the world-famed Diablo mountain — apparently representing a section of the Coast Range, which, by some ancient disturbance, had been cut out of the space now known as the Golden Gate — and moved bodily inland, and placed firmly on its base agam. Now, this Golden Gate pass and Mount Diablo together form the key to the climate of the interior of northern California. Without such pass as an outlet to the inte- rior waters, the great basin would be an inland lake. Without such pass as an inlet to the currents of moisture-laden atmosphere from the ocean, the same basin would be like an oven-heated, arid desert. Keeping the above statements and formation of the country in mind, the reader is pre^-ared to follow the explanation of the natural causes that produce the climate of interior California. " The trade winds of the Pacific ocean are constant winds blowing from near the equator in a north-easterly direction. These winds are, of course, warm, and carry with them large amounts of warm moisture in suspension. Were there no break in the Coast Range of mountains, they would simply float above them and over the basin of the interior, without condensation, and without leaving any moisture in the form of rain, winter or summer. As it is, however, in the summer these trade winds unite with the cooler winds that sweep down the coast from the norf h — Alaska and Behring Straits — and entering the Golden Gate pass, strike Mount Diablo and divide, the larger portion sweeping up the Sacramento valley, and the lesser portion up the San Joaquin valley — thus producing in both these valleys, in the summer, dry but delightfully cool summer breezes, or tempered trade winds. " These breezes generally begin about noon, and last till about 12 176 OVERLAND GUIDE. midnight of each day. Thus is produced the general summer climate of the interior valleys, the cloudless days and cool nights. And "^I'OlfNALt.Y •^ The Three Brothe''-nah. Arroyo, OR Arroyo Seco. A wash made by water; not a creek or Ar-r^-yo Saj-co river, and shallower and smaller than a canyon. AzusA A provocation; annoyance. The word Ah-soo-sah is colloquial. Ballona If spelled Ball/na (bal-jr-nah) it would Bal-j'^^-nah. mean whale. SPANISH GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES. 201 Belen A seige and capture for which the Spanish Bd.y-latn. histories claim great glory. Bella Vista Pretty View. Bat7-ya. Fees-tah. Benicia. Should be Venecia; Venice. Ben-^^-shah. Bernal Proper name. Ber-nal. Bernalillo Little Bernal. Ber-nal-^^/-yo. Berros, Los Name of a plant, Berro; water-cress. £ay -rose. Buenaventura Good fortune; also a frequent proper £'wain-ah-vsiin-too-ra.h. name. Buena Vista Good View; does not mean " beautiful " B'wain-2h Vees-tah. view, but one unobstructed. Cajon Caja, a box; cajon, a big box, Cajon Pass, Cah-Aone. "box pass." Calaveras Plu. The rattlepates; the mad-caps, or Cal-ah-z'«_y-ras what we call goings-on; didoes. Used modernly only in this sense. Canyon Diablo. Canyon The Spanish spelling is " canon," and pro- nounced can-on by persons not accus- tomed. The Span, pronunciation is csin-yone; the American can-yon. It means the bore of a gun; calibre; a groove, in artillery, the gun itself. As used ordinarily it means a ravine with steep sides between hills or mountains, or a deep crack in the earth. Canyon Diablo; (De-a/i-blo,) Devil's canyon, Canyoncito; {see-to,)< Little canyon. Canutillo A place of small rushes. Can-oo-Zif^Z-yo. •203 OVERLAND GUIDE. Carmelita Name of a flower. Carmel-e.. Los CuEROS Plu. The hides. Lose Quer-ose. Los Gatos Plu. The cats. Lose Ga/i-tose. Los LoMOS Plu. The hills. Lose Zo-mose. Los LuNAS The Moons; Luna, the moon, is feminine, Lose Zoo-nas. and if this name did not express the name of a place that is the residence of the Luna family it would be L^s Lunas. Los Medanos Plu. Sand-banks on the sea-shore. Lose Ma.y-dati-os. Los NiETOS Plu. The grandchildren. Lose Nee-rt!-tos. Los RoBLES The oaks. Lose J?o-h\ais. Madera Wood ; general term. Mah-day-rah. Madron, madrono A kind of tree. Mah- drone. Manitou Indian ; a name for the Supreme Power. Man-ay-to. Manuelito Little Emanuel. Man-wale-if-to. Manzanito Lit. Little apple. A California shrub. Man-zahn-^-to. SPANISH GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES. 307 Mariposa , . Butterfly. Mah-re-/(?-sah. Mendocino Lit. A little liar. Men-do-^^-no. Merced Mercy. Met -said. Mesilla Little flat-topped hill. Mesa (Afay-sah), May-j^^/-yah. from the Spanish word meaning a table, is the name of this peculiarly shaped hill throughout the south-west. Mesquite A shrub of the acacia family growing Mes-/:eef. extensively over the whole South- west and Mexico. MiLPiTAS Lit. A thousand whistles. Meel-/>tas. Modesto Modest. Mo-dat's-to. Monte Diablo Devil Mountain. Afon-tay Dee-a/i-h\o. MoNTECiTO Little Mountain. Mo/i-tay-se-to. Monterey King's Mountain. Mon-tay-r^^. MoNTOYAH Meaning not known. Mon-/^'-ah. Moren A Brown. Mo-ray-na. N ACiMiENTO Lit. A birth. More especially applied to Nah-se-me-d;//2-to the Nativity. Navajo Name of an Indian tribe. JVav-ah-ho. Nog ALES Plu. Walnut-trees. No-^:^a/-ais. Ollita A little water-jar. Sometimes spelled on 0\e-ye-tah. maps "Oleta." 14 208 OVERLAND GUIDE. Ona VA Meaning not known, 0-;/a//-vah. Ojio Grande Lit. Big gold. Gran-ddLy. Ortiz A family name. Ox-tees. Otero A family name. 0-iay-xo. Pacheco A fainily name. Lit. a harmless little Vah-chay-co fellow. Pajaro ... A bird; general term. Fah-h.3h-xo. Pala A wooden shovel. Fah-\si\i. Pasadena A Spanish phrase pronounced " Pah-so- Pas-ah-^oy-nah. <\eh-dain" would mean "Gate of Eden " poetically. Many Spanish words have been contracted, wrongly spelled, mispronounced and misunder r stood as badly or worse than this, sup- posing this to be the real meaning of a name very probably first used by the California padres, and afterwards mis- pronounced, by ear, by the Americans. Paso Robles Oak Pass. Fah-so -^^-blais. Pecos Freckles. Fay-cost. Pesc ADERO A fishing-place. Fais.cdJn.-day-to. PiCACHO Peak. Vt-cah-dciO. PiEDRA Grande Big rock. Pe-a-drah Gran-day. PiNivETA A variety of the pine; veined or fat pine. Fe-x\a.h-7'ay-ta.h. SPANISH GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES. 209 Pinole Parched corn, ground and mixed with Fe-no-\a.y. sugar and water as a drink, or used as food. The go_^o of South America and West Indies. PiNON A species of nut-bearing pine. Feen-jone. Placer The place near a stream where free gold 'Play-sai'r. is found. Lit. pleasure. Plumas Feathers. P/oo-mas. Poncho A cloak like a square or round blanket Fone-cho. with a slit in the centre for the head to pass through. PoTRERO Lit. a place for raising colts; usually Vo-tray-xo. meaning a small stock-farm. Presidio A garrison of soldiers; a penitentiary. Pray-j-^^-de-o. PuENTE A point of land. F'wain-iay. PuERCO A pig; dirty, soiled, filthy. F'wcr-co. Rancho, Ranchita, etc. .Our very common western word "ranch " is in Spanish a mess, as of soldiers, sailors, hunters. Any place where there are buildings for shelter in the open country would be called a rancho. Raton A mouse. This is a case where the usual ^ah-tone Spanish augmentative termination is reversed in meaning. Rata [rah-iah) means a rat. Rio, Rio Vista, Rio Grande, etc A river, river-view, big river. Re-ohVees-tay; Gran-day. Romero A family name. ^o-t?iay-xo. 210 OVERLAND GUIDE. RosARio A rosary. Ro-sa/i-re-o. Sacramento A sacrament. Sah- crah-mam-to. Salinas Places of salt. Sal-^-nas. San Andreas San Andreas. And-rais. San Antonio St. Anthony. An-/o/ie-yo. San Bernardino St. Bernard. Ber-nard-^-no. San DiMAs St. Uemas. De-mas. San Diego St. James. De-a-go. San Dieguito Little St. James. De-a-^c-to. San Fernando St. Ferdinand. San Gabriel St. Gabriel. Gab-re-^?//. San Gorgonio. Gor-go/ie-yo. San Jacinto St. Jacinth. YLah-seen-to. San Jose St. Joseph. Ho-say. San Juan St. John. San Juan Capistrano. . .St. John the chanter, as nearly as the Ca/i-pQCs-tm/i-o. meaning can be rendered. San Joaquin San Joaquin. H'wah-ieen. San Marciat St. Martial. Mar-ce-rt/. SPANISH GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES. 211 San Mateo St. Matthew. Mat-a-o. San Miguel... St. Michael. Me-gai7. San Pablo.. St. Paul. /"a/i-hlo. San Pascual Holy Easter. San Pedro St. Peter. I'ay-dro. San Rafael St. Raphael. Rah-/i?y^-ail. San ToM-as . St. Thomas. Santa Ana; Anita St. Ann; or Little St. Ann, pronounced AA-nah. An-ne-tah. San/^^;/ah, one word. Santa Barbara St. Barbara. Santa Catalina St. Catherine. Cat-ah-/^'-nah. Santa Clara St. Clara. Santa Cruz Holy Cross. Croos. Santa Fe Holy Faith. J^ay. Santa Monica St. Monica. Moft-e-ca.h. Sapinero Sapino, a kind of pine ; a grove of such. Sah-pe-;/a>'-ro. Saucilito A little willow. Sow-se-/ran-ta.y. 212 OVERLAND GUIDE. Socorro Succor;" relief. So-co-ro. SoLEDAD Solitude; lonesomeness. So-\a.y-dad. SoLANA A sunny place; sunshine. So-/a/i-na. SUPAI Su-J>a/i-e. Tamalpais. The country of tamales. The tamal is a Tam-al-^W/-ees. bit of Mexican cookery. Tecalote Tay-cal-^-tay. Temecula. . Ta.y-mec-oo-lsLh. Tiburon A shark. Te-hoo-rone. Tiajuana Tia Juana; aunt Jane. Te-w^a-na; one word. TlMPAS , Teem -pahs. Trinidad The Trinity. Tre-ne-^a^. Tulare A place of rushes. Tu-Zare-Si. Vacaville. Vaca; a cow. Cowville. V.(/i-cah. Vallejo A little valley. Val-A/y-ho. "^^^^ Spanish yard measure; a wand, a switch. Var-ah. YosEMiTE Said to mean a large grizzly bear. Yo-j'^w-e-tay. Ysidora Isadore; a woman's name. Ee-se-a'i^-rah. FAIRBANKS STANDARD SCALES FOR ALL PURPOSES, Guaranteed, Correct, Durable. CCLIPSE U/IND M ILLS iL ARE If THE III BEST. WATER TANKS FOB FARM AND ALL OTHER USES. WESTINGH0U8E STANDARD AND JUNIOR AUTOMATIC ENGINES, "DATT T?DC FEED-WATER DUILUKO, HEATERS. PUMPS. CATAIvOOUES KREE, FAIRBANKS & CO. DENVER. - ST. LOUIS. GRANTVILLE, CALIFORNIA. THE Q. A. R. SOLDIERS' HOIVlE, Is the only place we know of where a small investment is sure to pay. The erection of a beautiful building, with capacity for, say 500 Veterans, with beautiful grounds covered with the flowers and fruits of the trop- ics — all this in the finest climate the sun ever shone on. Neither heat nor cold ; no malaria. Life becomes a pleasure, and grief vanishes. Lots in Grantville can be had for $125 ; $25.00 cash, $25.00 in three months, $25.00 in six months, $25.00 in nine months, $25.00 in twelve months. A/^o interest. Call on, or address W. H. HOLABIRD & CO., -A.BOTJT CREDIXS. To sell or not to sell ; | Will bills be paid when due, That is the question? Whether it is better to sell the lots And take the risk of three payments Or to make sure of what is in possession And by decliuin? hold them. To sell ; to risk ; perchance to lose ; Aye, there's the rub, For when the lots are gone What charm can win them back From fortunate holders ? Or will the time stretch out till crack of doom? What of assignments, what of relative). What of uncles, aunts, and motherin-law With claims for borrowed money; What of exemptions, bill of sale, and the compromise That coolly oflEers a dime in the dollar. And of the real estate dealer's commissions. That eat up even this poor pittance f Yet sell -w^e must, And. some -we'll trust. "We seels the ju.sl; For -wealth -vv^e lust. By some "we're oust, -A.nd. stoolts -will rust; But -we skip the -wust Or -we'd, surely bust. W. H. HOLABIRD & CO., Leading Real Estate Dealers. SAN diego, CALIFORNIA. Alfred Toll, Piest. and Gen'l Manager. L. A. Reed, Vice-Prest. John Ure, Sec'y. Alson a. White, Treae. Badger Lumber Co. KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI. [e ni Yellow Pine IK GARLaOAD LaOTS. Doors, "Windows, Mouldings, Lime, Hair, Cement, and General Building Material at the Lowest "Wholesale Prices COR. OF 9th street AND BROADWAY. Write for Prices. When in the City call and see us. loijal OF KANSAS CITY, MO. The Oldest Naiional Bank in the City. Paid up Capital, $500,000. W. B. CLARKE, President. G. W. Mcknight, cashier. CHAS. S. WHEELER, Vice-President. O. P. DICKINSON, 2i Vice-President. W.B. Clarke, Chas. S. Wheeler, John Long, John C. Gage, W. A. M. Vaughn, O. P. Dickinson, J. M. Cohurn, Walton H. Holmes, A. A. Tomlinson, G. W. McKnii;ht. BANKING IN ALL ITS BRANCHES. Information cheerfully given. Strangers visiting Jilansas City. JOHN SEATON'S GEVEBOL FOOPRY op PIHGIE WOIS, SHOPS IN ATCHISON AND TOPEKA, KANS. ALL KINDS OF ARCHITECTURAL WORK. RAIL ROAD CASTINGS OF ALL KINDS. CAPACITY, THIRTY-SEVEN TONS PER DAY. HEAVY AND LIGHT CONTRACTS SOLICITED. Address either City, to JOHN SEaTON. MISSOURI VALLEY BRIDGE AND IRON WORKS Iron Piers Southern Kansas R R £• ^ 31's=5gf A. J. TULLOCK & CO., Proprietors. Wroiight Iron, Steel and Combination Bridges. Long- Span Bridg-es, Draw Spans, Turn- tables, Roof Trusses, Howe Truss Spans. Lattice and Plate Girders, etc., I^SAVEN-WORTH. - - . TSiANSAS. FIRST RATIONAL BANK OF leave:^worth, kans. OIUUM/.EII l.\ 18G». CAPITAL, - ■ $300,000 U. S. DEPOSITORY. DEPOSITORY OF CITY AND COUNTY FUNDS. Preoiacnt, Ist VlcePreeldent, LUCIEN SCOTT. Uoii.E. N. MORRILL. 8d Vlie-Prex't, Caxhier, J. M. GRAYBILL. J. W. FOGLEU. Collections made on all accessible points, and returns promptly made at lowest rates of excbauee SAML A. GAYLORD. JOHN H. BLESSING. SAM'L A. GAYLORD X CO., Stock ni M Srote, No. 307 Olive Street, ST. LOUIS. We continue to make a specialty of buying and selling E0raNMENT,SM,CflUiTy,Cin,T01, TOWNSHIP, SCHOOL OISIRICT, BRIDGE UNO UUM BONDS, the Motley market will allow. CORRESPONDENCE SOLICITED, ARGENTINE, KANSAS, (TWO AND A-HALP MILES WEST OF KAKSAS CITV, MO.) POPULATION IN 1884, POPULATION IN 1887, 543. 3,670. WITH OVER FOUR MILLION DOLLARS NOW INVESTED IN SMELTERS, FACTORIES, —CAR SHOPS, &C., ^ MAKES IT THE SAFEST PLACE TO INVEST IN REAL ESTATE IN KANSAS. FRANKLIN HEIGHTS, ROCKAWAT, McGEEHAN'S, SIMMONS', COBURN & EWING'S AND ADAMS & KING'S ADDITIONS. Prices, $5.00 to $30.00 per foot. Four Hundred and Sixty Acres, in lots of one to two hundred! prices, $300 to $3,000 per acre. For further particulnrf; write to JNO. B. MARSHEL, p. O. Box 1£0, ARGENTINE, KANSAS. A. H. ABBOTT & CO., Colors, Canvas, Brushes, Art Novelties FOR DECORATION. .MATHEMATICAL INSTRUMENTS, ARCHITECTS' AND ENGINEERS SUPPLIES, TRIANGLES, SCALES, RULES, &C. WHliSafflENfS 50 MADISON STREET, CHICAGO, ILL. S. KARPEN & BROS., MANUFACTURERS OF Pailoi FuiQilure, SINGLE AND BEu ^LOUNGES, <^ ' AND THE FOLLOWING SPECIALTIES: Ottoman Bed Couch and Patent Single Lounges, Upliolstereil on Woven Wire. The Karpen Bed Lounge, The Perfect Sofa Bed, Reclining Rocker and Chair Combined. 42 & 44 So. Oanal St., OHIOAGO. SEND FOK CATALOGUE, (t^- Estimates Furnished on Hotel Work. IVLaips sincl Griiicies TO ALL OP THE PRINCIPAL CITIES AND EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. Globes, Map Racks, Spring Map Rollers, German Maps, Wall and Pocket Maps, Historical Maps, Classical, Biblical, Historical, Anatomical, Astro- nomical, Physical and General Atlases of all kinds kept in stock. Address, RAND, McNALLY & CO., Map Publishers and Engravers, 148, 150. 152 and 154 Monroe Street, CHICAGO. EDWARD E. HOLMES. Pres t ard Treasurer. WILLIS G MYERS, Vice-President. GEORGE M. VAN EVERA, Secretary mie offices: KANFAS CITY. - . MO. PORTSMOUTH, ■ N H. BELOIT, . - - KANSAS. Kcpas (]iti| IpestJijeijt Compttiiii, SIXTH AND WYANDOTTE STREETS, XilAIVSAS CITTY, >IO. CAPITAL PAID, - - $200,000. Investments Made at Current Rates For Long or Short Time. We observe every precaution and make safety the first principle of our business. CORRESPONDENCE SOLICITED. T ilES WgO WE fl BEHP COffLEXIOJ avrXTST "CTSE POZZONI'S MEDICATED COMPLEXION POWDER. It imparts a brilliant transpa- rency to the skin. Removes all pimples, freckles and discolor- ations, and makes the skin deli- cately soft and beautiful. It con- tains no lime, -white lead or arse- nic. In three shades: pink or flesh, -white and brunette. For sale 1:7 all Drugsists as! Fancy Qoods Sealers everywhere. USE NO OTHER. Beware of Imitations. (0 z < o w > X Q. I- z u z LJ >- m Q u o z u o o LJ a: AValt -iVt.-iiA » ;g ^3 #' ^ 5? r^ ^^ ^^^^ 3> ^ m ^y:> 2> ^->^ >^2x>2^:;v>v^ > > >' ^ ■ '^r ^S» # > J> 3- » y> > It »> >> > z> >>> >>J> > > > >> >j» > > :^ > > ' >>> ■> > :> >> ) »> > > ^ - o3 > ^r > ^) .■-> ■ j^>^^^ ^3.^ ''_:>':i:>> ^ > ■ >> 7 > > > > 3:^ > :» x> :x» j v > it> ^> 3 3 J» J> :53>:3> 0> ^ » » -> : » >.> 3. . ^ >■ >t> ^X> >:>>; > >^ 3> ~ 3>J>3^> ^^^ J»3> J> _ 3 3^ 5:> _ >;3> !:> ~ 3> > LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 014 754 328 1* l^':>'