After leaving Las Palomas our course lay southward across a high mesa, or table-land, until we reached the Boca Grande River. The scenery along the Boca Grande is picturesque and somewhat peculiar. The river bottom is flat, very wide, and rich in soil; but on the flanks rise the Mexican mountains sheer out of the plains. To the west are the Sierra Madres, covered with snow on the highest peaks, making some of the most beautiful views I have ever seen as presented from different points along the river's course. One of them, Pacheco Peak, in the Boca Grande range (named after the Mexican Minister of the Interior), is shown in the illustration. Slight spurs and mesa lands extend from the sierras in the valleys and often reach the river bank, thereby forcing the road over them, but affording a foundation that any macadamized highway in our own country might emulate. Some of these ridges were ornamented with groupings of cactus (of the oquetilla variety), if their presence can be called an ornament. Imagine a dozen fishing rods, from ten to fifteen feet in length, all radiating from a central point like a bouquet of bayonets, and each rod holding hundreds of spikes throughout its length. You will thus have a faint idea of the appearance of a bunch of oquetilla cactus. These bunches seem to prefer growing along the rocky crests in rows of tolerable regularity that, to a person at a distance, suggest the work of human hands.
OQUETILLA CACTUS.
We traveled some thirty miles along the river without seeing a living thing except a few jack rabbits and coyotes, when suddenly we rounded a bend of the beautiful Boca Grande and came upon a stretch of valley covered with zacaton grass, and which in a few years will be a valuable ranche. Across this we saw two as hard-looking characters approaching us as ever cut a throat. I was preparing to hand over to them all my Mexican money and other valuables when they politely touched their hats and simply said, "Documentos." Here, again, in the far-off woods and hills were more customhouse officials. These men were here to prevent smugglers from crossing the border between the towns and established highways.
We lunched that day on Espia Hill, used formerly as a customhouse post of observation, but the Apache chief Geronimo, raiding through here, collected a poll tax of one scalp apiece, and since then the post has been abandoned. A short distance further the river changes from the Boca Grande to the Casas Grandes.
The Boca Grande and the Casas Grandes are the same river, like the Wind River and the Big Horn in our own country, the two changing names at a certain point. In other words, they have the same river bed, for in the dryest seasons the Casas Grandes sinks and reappears further down as the Boca Grande, the two streams being really identical most of the way, however, and both of them emptying into the great "sink" known as Laguna Guzman. I noticed one peculiarity of the rocky soil on the ridges extending down from the foothills of the mountains that I have never seen elsewhere, and might not have noticed even here had it not been pointed out to me by one of my guides. Great areas of the soil were covered with stones, mostly flat in shape, and so numerous that but little vegetation could exist between them. A decidedly desolate aspect was thus presented; indeed no one would believe that anything except the oquetilla cactus could possibly grow here. One of my Mexican men, however, assured me that the stones were only on the surface, and that by removing them the richest of red soil could be found underneath, not affording a single stone in a cubic yard of earth. The soil had not been washed away when the rains beat down upon it, as this "top-dressing" of flat rock had shielded it from such action, protecting it, let us hope, for the future use of man. They told me this peculiar kind was the richest and most easily cultivated soil in Mexico, but it looked, with its covering of rocks, poor enough to put in some terrestrial almshouse along with the Sahara Desert.
This whole Southwest, or rather Northwest from a Mexican standpoint, is a country of deceptive appearances. Hundreds of my readers have probably traveled over the Santa Fé Railway as it courses through the Rio Grande valley, and, recalling the grassy, pleasant-looking country in the East, have wondered how this cheerless area of sand and sagebrush could ever be utilized. Yet in this valley is a farm of twenty-two acres for which sixty thousand dollars has been flatly refused, although not one cent of its value is due to its proximity to any important point (as the fact is with the valuable little farms around our Eastern cities), but solely to what it will produce. Verily the desolation of the land is deceptive, and, like beauty, is but skin deep.