We awake in the Santa Cruz Valley, with the preposterous cactus poles and posts standing up as stiff and straight as sentries "at attention," and looking as if they were doing it for a joke. There is no unvegetable form that they will not take, for they mimic the shape of gate posts, semaphores, bee-hives, and even mops—anything, in fact, apparently that falls in with their humour, and makes them look as unlike plants as possible. I am not sure that they ought not to be punished, some of them. Such botanical lawlessness is deplorable. But, after all, is not this America, where every cactus "may do as he darned pleases"? These cacti, by the way—the gigantic columnar species, which throws up one solid shaft of flesh, fluted on each side, and studded closely with rosettes of spines—are the same that crowd in multitudinous impis on the side of the hills which slope from the massacre-field of Isandula in Zululand, down to the Buffalo River. How well I remember them!
If it were not for the cactus it would be a miserably uninteresting country, for the vegetation is only the lowest and poorest looking scrub, and water as yet there is none. But now we are approaching what the inhabitants call "the ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson," pronouncing it Too son, and ancient and honourable we found it—For does it not dispute with Santa Fe the title of the most ancient town in the United States? and was not the breakfast which it gave us worthy of all honour?
It takes, reader, as you will have guessed, a very long journey indeed to knock into a traveller's head a complete conception of the size of North America. Mere space could never do it, for human nature is such that when trying to grasp in the mind any great lapse of time or territory, the two ends are brought together as it were, and all the great middle is forgotten. Nor does mere variety of scene emphasize distance on the memory, for the more striking details here and there crowd out the large monotonous intervals. Thus a mile of an Echo canyon obliterates half a state's length of Platte Valley pastures, and a single patch of Arkansas turtle-swamp whole prairies of Texan meadow. But in America, even though many successive days of unbroken travel may have run into one, or its many variations—from populous states to desert ones, from timber states to pasture ones, from corn states to mineral ones, from mountain to valley, river to lake, canyoned hills to herd-supporting prairies, from pine forest to oak forest, from sodden marsh to arid cactus-land—may have got blurred together, there grows at the end of it all upon the mind a befitting sense of vastness which neither linear measurement in miles nor variety in the panorama fully explain. It is due, I think, to the size of the instalments in which America puts forward her alternations of scene. She does not keep shifting her suits, so as to spoil the effect of her really strong hand, but goes on leading each till she has established it, and made each equally impressive. You have a whole day at a time of one thing, and then you go to sleep, and when you wake it is just the same, and you cannot help saying to yourself: "Twenty-four successive hours of meadowland is a considerable pasturage," and you do not forget it ever afterwards. The next item is twenty-four hours of mountains, "all of them rich in metals;" and by the time this has got indelibly fixed on the memory, Nature changes the slide, and then there is rolling corn-land on the screen for a day and night. And so, in a series of majestic alternations, the continent passes in review, and eventually all blends into one vast comprehensible whole.
Apart from physical, there are curious ethnological divisions which mark off the continent into gigantic subnationalities. For though the whole is of course "American," there is always an underlying race, a subsidiary one so to speak, which allots the vast area into separate compartments. Thus on the eastern coast we have the mulatto, who gives place beyond Nebraska to the Indian, and he, beyond Nevada, to the Chinaman. After California comes the Mexican, and after him the negro, and so back to the East and the mulatto again.
Here in Arizona, at Tucson, the "Mexican" is in the ascendant, for such is the name which this wonderful mixture of nationalities prefers to be called by. He is really a kind of hash, made up of all sorts of brown-skinnned odds and ends, an olla podrida. But he calls himself "Mexican," and Tucson is his ancient and honourable pueblo. It is a wretched-looking place from the train, with its slouching hybrid men, and multitudinous pariah dogs. Indians go about with the possessive air of those who know themselves to be at home; and it is not easy to decide whether they, with their naked bodies and ropes of hair dangling to the waist, or the half-breed Mexican with their villainous slouch and ragged shabbiness, are the lower race of the two. And the dogs! they are legion; having no homes, they are at home everywhere. I am told there is a public garden, and some "elegant" buildings, but as usual they are on "the other side of the town." All that we can see on this side, are collections of squalid Arabic-looking huts and houses, made of mud, low-roofed and stockaded with ragged-looking fences. The heat is of course prodigious for eight months of the year, and the dust and the flies and the mosquitoes are each and all as Asiatic as the heat—or any other feature of this ancient and honourable It has its interest, however, as an American pueblo. It has its interests, however, as an American "antiquity;" while the river, the Santa Cruz, which flows past the town, is one of those Arethusa streams, which comes to the surface a few miles above the town and disappears again a few miles below it.
For the student of hybrid life, Tucson must have exceptional attractions; but for the ordinary traveller, it has positively none. Kawai Indians have not many points very different from Papajo Indians, and mud hovels are after all only mud hovels. But it is an ancient and honourable pueblo.
The only people who look cool are the Mexican soldiers in blue and white, and that other Mexican, a civilian, in a broad-brimmed, flimsy hat, spangled with a tinsel braid and fringe. Have these men ever got anything to do? and when they have, do they ever do it? It seems impossible they could undertake any work more arduous than lolling against a post, and smoking a yellow-papered cigarette. Yet only a few days ago these Mexicans, perhaps those very soldiers there, destroyed a tribe of Apaches, and then arrested a force of Arizona Rangers who had pursued the Indians on to Mexican ground! These Apaches had kept the State in a perpetual terror for a long time, but finding the Federal soldiers closing in upon them, they crossed the frontier line close to Tucson, and there fell in with the Mexicans, who must at any rate be given the credit for promptitude and efficiency in all their Indian conflicts. The Apaches were destroyed, and the force of Rangers who had followed them were caught by the Mexican general, and under an old agreement between the two Republics, they were made prisoners of war, disarmed, and told to find their way back two hundred and fifty miles into the States as best and as quickly as they could. Some thirty years ago a Mexican general, who captured some American filibusters in a similar way at the village of Cavorca, paraded his captives and shot them all down. So the Arizona men were glad enough to get away.
The cactus country continues, and the plants play the mountebank more audaciously than ever. There is no absurdity they will not commit, even to pretending that they are broken fishing rods, or bundles of riding whips. But the majority stand about in blunt, kerb-stone fashion, as if they thought they were marking out streets and squares for the cotton-tail rabbits that live amongst them. Under the hill on the left is the old mission church of "San'avere" (San Xavier); and over those mountains, the "Whetstones," lies the mining settlement of Tombstone, where the cowboys rejoice to run their race, and the value of life seldom rises to par in the market. Then we enter upon a plain of the mezcal all in full bloom, and a "lodge" of brown men, partly Indian, partly Mexican, waiting it may be for the plant to mature and the time to come round for distilling its fiery liquor. I tasted mezcal at El Paso for the first time in my life, and I think I may venture to say the last, so whether it was good of its kind or not, I cannot tell. I am no judge of mezcal. But I know that it was thick, of a dull sherry colour, with a nasty vegetable smell, and infinitely more fiery than anything I ever tasted before, not excepting the whisky which the natives in parts of Central India brew from rye, the brandy which the Boers of the Transvaal distil from rotten potatoes, or the "tarantula juice" which you are often offered by the hearty miners of Colorado. It is almost literally "fire-water;" but the red pepper, I suppose, has as much to do with the effect upon the tongue and palate as the juice of the mezcal.
On a sudden, in the midst of this desolate land, we come upon a ranche with cattle wading about among the rich blue grass; but in a minute it is gone, and lo! a Chinese village, smothered in a tangle of shrubs all overgrown with creeping gourds, with the coolies lying in the shade smoking long pipes of reed.
Have you ever smoked Chinese "tobacco"? If not, be careful how you do. A single pipe of it (and Chinese pipes hold very little) will upset even an old smoker. For myself, can hardly believe it is tobacco, for in the hand it feels of a silky texture, utterly unlike any tobacco I ever saw, while the smell of it, and the taste on the tongue, are as different to the buena yerba as possible. It is imported by the Chinese in America for their own consumption, and in spite of duties is exceedingly cheap. A single sniff of it, by the way, completely explains that heavy, stupefying odour which hangs about Chinese quarters and Chinese persons.