At this same point huge mountains are seen to lift themselves up bodily and squat down again in the highway. Near these buttes, which are known as the Evil Ones, away back in the sixties a small force of cavalry was making its way from Fort Yuma to Fort Whipple. Owing to the extreme heat during the day, and as a further precaution against the hostile Indians, they were obliged to march at night, finding shelter in some mountain cañon during the day.
Shortly after daybreak, as they were preparing to go into camp, a whole legion of painted devils appeared on their front and hardly a quarter of a mile distant. The troops were thrown into confusion, and an order was immediately given to break ranks, and every man concealed himself behind the rocks, awaiting the attack which all felt must necessarily end in massacre.
For some minutes the Indians were seen to parley and gesticulate with each other, but they gave no signs of having noticed their hereditary foe. The unhappy troopers, however, were not kept in suspense long. As the great red disk of the day began to mount slowly up over the adjoining mountains, the redskins vanished as noiselessly and as suddenly as they had appeared.
Used as they were to treachery, and fearing some uncanny trick, the soldiers maintained their position throughout the long hot day, nor did they attempt to move until late in the night. Some weeks later it was learned from captives that on that very morning a band of nearly one thousand Chinhuevas and Wallapais were lying in wait for this same command but ninety miles up the river, expecting the soldiers by that route.
The most remarkable of all the mirages which have been witnessed in Arizona, at least by white man's eyes, was seen some years ago by an entire train-load of passengers on the Southern Pacific Railroad, near the small eating station of Maricopa, thirty-five miles below Phœnix. The train was due at the eating station at 6.30 A. M.
At 6.15 o'clock it stopped at a small water-tank a few miles east. During this stop the trainmen and such of the passengers as were awake were amazed to see spring out of the ground on the sky a magnificent city. The buildings were of the old Spanish and Morisco architecture, and were mostly adobe. Spacious court-yards lay before the astonished lookers-on, filled with all varieties of tropical fruits and vegetation.
Men and women clothed in the picturesque garbs of Old Spain were seen hurrying along the narrow, irregular streets to the principal edifice, which had the appearance of a church. Had the astonished spectators been picked up bodily and landed in one of the provincial towns of Seville or Andalusia, they would not have seen a more dazzling array of stately senoras and laughing black-eyed muchachas of the land of forever manana.
But the vision lasted much less time than it takes to write of the strange occurrence. It vanished as mysteriously as it came. Of course all of the hysterical women fainted. That is one of woman's prerogatives, in lieu of an explanation.
This phenomenon remained unsolved for two or three years. About that time, after the mirage was seen, a young civil engineer who was among the witnesses was engaged on the Gulf coast survey from the headwaters below Yuma to Guaymas. In the course of his labors he found himself at the old Mexican pueblo of Altar, and there he saw the original of the picture in the sky seen three years before near Maricopa Station. The distance, as a buzzard flies, from Maricopa to Altar is more than a hundred miles.
The native tribes are very superstitious concerning the mirage, and when one is once observed, that locality receives a wide berth in the future.