"The country from the Nueces to the valley of the Rio Grande is poor, sterile, sandy, and barren, with not a single tree of any size or value on our whole route. The only tree which we saw was the musquit-tree, and very few of these. The musquit is a small tree, resembling an old and decayed peach-tree. The whole country may be truly called a perfect waste, uninhabited and uninhabitable. There is not a drop of running water between the two rivers, except in the two small streams of San Salvador and Santa Gertrudis, and these only contain water in the rainy season. Neither of them had running water when we passed them. The chaparral commences within forty or fifty miles of the Rio Grande. This is poor, rocky, and sandy; covered with prickly-pear, thistles, and almost every sticking thing, constituting a thick and perfectly impenetrable undergrowth. For any useful or agricultural purpose, the country is not worth a sous.
"So far as we were able to form any opinion of this desert upon the other routes which had been travelled, its character, everywhere between the two rivers, is pretty much the same. We learned that the route pursued by General Taylor, south of ours, was through a country similar to that through which we passed; as also was that travelled by General Wool from San Antonio to Presidio on the Rio Grande. From what we both saw and heard, the whole command came to the conclusion which I have already expressed, that it was worth nothing. I have no hesitation in saying, that I would not hazard the life of one valuable and useful man for every foot of land between San Patricio and the valley of the Rio Grande. The country is not now, and can never be, of the slightest value."
Major Gaines has been there lately. He is a competent observer. He is contradicted by nobody. And so far as that country is concerned, I take it for granted that it is not worth a dollar.
Now of New Mexico, what of that! Forty-nine fiftieths, at least, of the whole of New Mexico, are a barren waste, a desert plain of mountain, with no wood, no timber. Little fagots for lighting a fire are carried thirty or forty miles on mules. There is no fall of rain there, as in temperate climates. It is Asiatic in scenery altogether: enormously high mountains, running up some of them ten thousand feet, with narrow valleys at their bases, through which streams sometimes trickle along. A strip, a garter, winds along, through which runs the Rio Grande, from far away up in the Rocky Mountains to latitude 33°, a distance of three or four hundred miles. There these sixty thousand persons reside. In the mountains on the right and left are streams which, obeying the natural tendency as tributaries, should flow into the Rio Grande, and which, in certain seasons, when rains are abundant, do, some of them, actually reach the Rio Grande; while the greater part always, and all for the greater part of the year, never reach an outlet to the sea, but are absorbed in the sands and desert plains of the country. There is no cultivation there. There is cultivation where there is artificial watering or irrigation, and nowhere else. Men can live only in the narrow valley, and in the gorges of the mountains which rise round it, and not along the course of the streams which lose themselves in the sands.
Now there is no public domain in New Mexico, not a foot of land, to the soil of which we shall obtain title. Not an acre becomes ours when the country becomes ours. More than that, the country is as full of people, such as they are, as it is likely to be. There is not the least thing in it to invite settlement from the fertile valley of the Mississippi. And I undertake to say, there would not be two hundred families of persons who would emigrate from the United States to New Mexico, for agricultural purposes, in fifty years. They could not live there. Suppose they were to cultivate the lands; they could only make them productive in a slight degree by irrigation or artificial watering. The people there produce little, and live on little. That is not the characteristic, I take it, of the people of the Eastern or of the Middle States, or of the Valley of the Mississippi. They produce a good deal, and they consume a good deal.
Again, Sir, New Mexico is not like Texas. I have hoped, and I still hope, that Texas will be filled up from among ourselves, not with Spaniards, not with peons; that its inhabitants will not be Mexican landlords, with troops of slaves, predial or otherwise.
Mr. Rusk here rose, and said that he disliked to interrupt the Senator, and therefore he had said nothing while he was describing the country between the Nueces and the Rio Grande; but he wished now to say, that, when that country comes to be known, it will be found to be as valuable as any part of Texas. The valley of the Rio Grande is valuable from its source to its mouth. But he did not look upon that as indemnity; he claimed that as the right of Texas. So far as the Mexican population is concerned, there is a good deal of it in Texas; and it comprises many respectable persons, wealthy, intelligent, and distinguished. A good many are now moving in from New Mexico, and settling in Texas.
I take what I say from Major Gaines. But I am glad to hear that any part of New Mexico is fit for the foot of civilized man. And I am glad, moreover, that there are some persons in New Mexico who are not so blindly attached to their miserable condition as not to make an effort to come out of their country, and get into a better.
Sir, I would, if I had time, call the attention of the Senate to an instructive speech made in the other house by Mr. Smith of Connecticut. He seems to have examined all the authorities, to have conversed with all the travellers, to have corresponded with all our agents. His speech contains communications from all of them; and I commend it to every man in the United States who wishes to know what we are about to acquire by the annexation of New Mexico.
New Mexico is secluded, isolated, a place by itself, in the midst and at the foot of vast mountains, five hundred miles from the settled part of Texas, and as far from anywhere else! It does not belong anywhere! It has no belongings about it! At this moment it is absolutely more retired and shut out from communication with the civilized world than Hawaii or any of the other islands of the Pacific sea. In seclusion and remoteness, New Mexico may press hard on the character and condition of Typee. And its people are infinitely less elevated, in morals and condition, than the people of the Sandwich Islands. We had much better have Senators from Oahu. They are far less intelligent than the better class of our Indian neighbors. Commend me to the Cherokees, to the Choctaws; if you please, speak of the Pawnees, of the Snakes, the Flatfeet, of any thing but the Digging Indians, and I will be satisfied not to take the people of New Mexico. Have they any notion of our institutions, or of any free institutions? Have they any notion of popular government? Not the slightest! Not the slightest on earth! When the question is asked, What will be their constitution? it is farcical to talk of such people making a constitution for themselves. They do not know the meaning of the term, they do not know its import. They know nothing at all about it; and I can tell you, Sir, that when they are made a Territory, and are to be made a State, such a constitution as the executive power of this government may think fit to send them will be sent, and will be adopted. The constitution of our fellow citizens of New Mexico will be framed in the city of Washington.