CHAPTER VI.
ACROSS THE CACTUS DESERT INTO CALIFORNIA’S GOLDEN LAND.
NAVAJO CHURCH, NEAR FORT WINGATE.
Leaving Santa Fe, we continued our journey westward over the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, and striking the Rio Grande a short distance south of White Rock Cañon, followed the bank of that stream through some very handsome scenery until we reached Atlantic and Pacific Junction. Thence for a while the route was through an arid section, where alkali and musquite abounded; an unchangeable waste of black sterility; a country so level that the laying of a railroad track was attended by no difficulties, but keeping it clear of sand is a work of great perverseness. We were now on the line of the Atlantic and Pacific, which crosses a branch of the Rio Grande at Rio Puerco, and soon after follows the valley of that stream for about sixty miles. Laguna is on the way, and north and south are mesas, dry lakes and lava beds, but there is no picturesqueness of landscape. South of Fort Wingate, just east of the Arizona border, is the Zuni Plateau, in which several old ruins are still to be seen; but if we except the Indians, who exist in the most miserable condition, and old ruins and craters of extinct volcanoes, the region is without interest, and has few features worthy of the photographer’s art.
After reaching Arizona, the road passes through a corner of the Perco and Zuni reservations, and follows the old trail leading to Prescott. Immediately south of Flagstaff, and in sight of that place, are more ruins of cliff dwellings, built in the banks of Walnut Creek, but so faded as to be scarcely distinguishable now. We are now in the Cactus plain, where immense stalks of that curious vegetable growth rise to the dignity of branchless trees, prickly and often grotesque.
THE NEEDLES ALONG THE RIO GRANDE.—The Needles are a part of the Rocky Mountain chain, and they derive the name from their sharp-pointed and splintered pinnacles, in which respect they differ from all other mountains in America. Their peaks tower into the regions of perpetual snow, which cools and tempers what would otherwise be an almost intolerable climate. The Needles first come into view after emerging from the western extremity of Animas Cañon, and their white turrets are then visible for many leagues as the train glides along parallel with them.