We had fine grass and pond water here, and are off for Altar.
September 9th. Altar. We reached this place yesterday after eight days journey over barren, sandy hills exactly like these which surround this town. What an eight days it has been, I hate to recall to my mind even by writing these brief notes. Half of us are on foot, our clothes are ragged and torn, and we have lived on half rations, often less, of beans, and what we call bread. Several days we were twenty and twenty-four hours without water, no grass for our horses, and inexpressibly weary always. Yet we are well and not as much depressed as might be supposed, and while we are short of nearly everything, money included, our courage is in no degree lessened.
Altar is a miserable collection of adobe houses, with perhaps a thousand inhabitants; there are only one or two grandees here, but nearly all are of Indian mixture. At one of the little villages through which we passed, La Nada, we had all the town about us, admiring our white (?) faces, and asking hundreds of questions, many of the girls had pretty Indian faces, and beautiful teeth and hair. Great quantities of peaches grow in the valleys and irrigated gardens, but what comfort there is is very primitive. Plenty of the California partridge are here, but the black-breasted is nowhere to be seen; the California quail is found, and Gamble's blue partridge.
I saw yesterday the most wonderful rainbow, or rather mass of prismatic mist; a heavy thunderstorm, one of the most furious we have encountered, took us just as we had left a rancho, formerly an old Mission, with a very fine reservoir two hundred yards square, built of stone and the exhaust arch of brick, and we rode on in drenching rain for nearly an hour. The storm abated just before sunset, leaving all of the west, below the lifting clouds, of that indescribable, furious red, which follows such blows, and the receding storm receiving the light and blending into an immense mass of rainbow haze.
The people here are not at all friendly to us, and instead of having them come out to see us at our camp, as at other places, often in such numbers as to be a nuisance, we find them cold, and almost uncivil. We are not looked upon with the same interest as heretofore, and could neither buy nor beg what we required for our use. We, however, succeeded with some difficulty in getting good flour and pinole, at eight and ten dollars per cargo. We had to make a kiln and burn the wood for charcoal, which we needed to make horseshoes, and we paid sixty-two and a half cents a pound for the only bar of iron we could find.
CHAPTER V
THROUGH ARIZONA TO SAN DIEGO
September 14th. Leaving Altar on the 10th we crossed a desert-like plain or prairie for many miles to the Rancho "La Sone," as usual a miserable cluster of mud jacals and surly Mexican vacheros, but we did not care for that. We bought and killed one of their cattle, paying four dollars for it; the next day the seller returned and asked seven, which we refused.
On the lagoon near here we found the American Avoset, long-billed curlew, and Canada crane; I thought I saw the sandhill, but it was so far off I could not be certain; the red-shafted woodpecker is seen daily, and many small birds, new to me, but not so abundant as two hundred miles behind us. The soil of this country is beautiful in many places, but the want of water and timber renders it difficult to live here; the government is feeble, and desolation and poverty show that better days have been seen. Tomorrow we start westward at 4 a. m. for our march to the Colorado; how we shall get through the twenty leagues with almost no water or grass I do not know, but it must be done.
Some of the men hearing the rattle of the snake of that name, in a small bunch of musquit and cactus, took shovels to dig him out, and after clearing away the brush soon found the holes the snakes live in. At about two feet down they came to a tolerably large female, which had in her nest nine young; beautiful little creatures, about a foot long; they had great courage, and coiled and struck with fury at anything placed near them.
September 17th. Near Papagos[24] villages. Last night, as for many preceding evenings, we sat down to our supper of bread and water, our sugar, coffee and all other matters culinary having been used up, and the country affords no game. We all felt the want of coffee or meat, after being up from 5 a. m. to 7 p. m., but we shall I hope, soon be through this desolate country. Four days since one of the party killed the largest and finest buck antelope I ever saw, and we expected a treat, but it was like the meat of a poor two-year-old beef, hardly so good. We found the horns of a Rocky Mountain sheep, and of the black-tailed deer, but none have been killed, or even seen as yet.