olate clay soils through which here and there are cut the deep channels of streamless streams, or arroyos. There are the dreary "tabosa" flats covered by the headlike bunches of a woody grass, abhorred by animals and useless to man, through which one may travel for days. The great white gypsum desert of the Tularosa Valley of New Mexico is one of the most wondrous of all the desert plains. To the eye it is a veritable sea of purest granular snow, marked with wind waves and ripples like the Tropic Ocean,with billows and troughs. In some places there are extensive lakes of crystalline salt which the desert inhabitant uses for herd and flock. Sometimes there are stretches of dreary brown sand hills, great billows gathered around the protecting roots of the thorny mesquite, the particles blowing with each breath of wind.

The half cannot be told of the many other aberrant features of the Great American Desert, like Death Valley; the great "medanos" or white sand dunes just south of El Paso, each as high as the national capitol, which creep from place to place over the desert plain; the vast plains of malpais in New Mexico with their burning, cutting, black, waterless surfaces of glava; the "flour dust" deserts of Jimenez and Arizona and Sonora, where the traveler is choked with clouds of chalk-white powder; the Crow Flat with its glare that blinds; the Jornado del Muerto, with its hundred whirlwinds; the saguara desert of Sonora, where for hundreds of miles grows no blade of grass.

The clouds are the most wonderful manifestations of the desert heavens. The forms of vaporous atmosphere are numerous. In the morning they fill the valleys with snow white vapor, which at midday rises and gathers into solitary fluffs sailing majestically along. Sometimes showers freshen the desert. These are occasionally of sufficient volume to dampen the earth and vegetation, and an awakening of life ensues which is most remarkable. Vegetation seems to awaken instantaneously, plants which before were dry and dust-covered unfold into broad areas of vivid green. Coriaceous ferns, ordinarily lying like dead leaves among the stones, unroll and wave their fronds in the freshened air. From the inconspicuous flowers of the many thorny shrubs of the acacia and yucca tribe the air is laden with perfume. It would seem paradoxical to speak of the desert in bloom, but the human senses of sight and smell can be regaled by no more pleasant experience than the delicate odors and sweeps of color that sometimes follow an unusual rainfall.

Like a dainty pencil line drawn across the sheet of desert, the trails may be seen for miles and miles. These, originally made by the wild Comanche and Apache, lead in long tangents from water-hole to water-hole, cutting paths of deep-worn ruts. Were it not for these trails connecting the various water places the désert probably would be impassable, for the priceless water is usually concealed in spots where least suspected. These water-holes were discovered by the aborigines long before the ranchman and settler came or the army wagons and cavalry troops deepened the impress of the trails. What stories of death and pain, thirst and starvation could be told by these old trails! We know that as early as 1528 many of them existed, for in that year Cabeza de Vaca and his

three shipwrecked survivors of the Narvaez expedition followed these paths from water-hole to water-hole across our southern border, and that modern commerce and migration still use these, the oldest and most stable monuments of the desert.

In the desert water is king. Without it priceless ore is but as dross, and fertile soils. are worthless. Upon the desert plains many men and cattle have died for the want of a drink of water.

Like the Sahara, the Great American Desert is superficially waterless. Its plains are usually barren of surface water save for an exceptional saline lagoon. A few brooks, streams or rivers arise within its larger mountain ranges, but no water ever runs off its surface to the sea. Even the great floods of water which sometimes burst from an erratic cloud with devastating effect are rapidly swallowed up by the sands or evaporated by sun and wind. It is true that there are two long rivers comparable to the Nile of the Sahara the Colorado and the Rio Grande- which rise in the higher forested mountainous border lands and flow into and across the deserts like great canals, without gathering contributory drainage from them, losing volume in fact from absorption and evaporation in the desert portions of their courses. These are rivers born of the mountains, however, and not of the deserts.

Upon the area of the Great American Desert the maximum rainfall is less than 15 inches per annum and does not average more than 10 inches. In places such as Death Valley and the Yuma Desert it is less than 5 inches. Deducting from this maximum of 15 inches 60 per cent of its effectiveness, due to loss through evaporation, the actual rain value is only 6 inches per annum, less than the amount falling in the two crop-growing months of May and June in the Eastern States, and less than onehalf the quantity that fell in September 1901 in a single 24 hours at Galveston, Tex. To this great natural fact the desert is resigned, that within its area the land with a few exceptions, not amounting to 3 per cent, is permanently and hopelessly dry, and even the most sanguine cannot refute this fact.

Before the railways came, the Great American Desert was a most primitive region. It was inhabited by a population about as dense as that of the Sahara now, but practically in the same state of culture; and the mission bells rang over the same civilization that existed in 1528. The inhabitants practised irrigation, agriculture and architecture very much like that of the Egyptians of to-day, and cohstructed dwellings of unburnt brick and stone. The aborigine found sustenance on the desert, but of a kind upon which the white man could not well exist. Maize was his staple of diet. This with the

tunas (fruit of the prickly pear) and the roots of various yuccaceous plants, supplemented by a few wild animals, provided an aboriginal diet pure and simple.

It was no great feat for the Spaniard who already possessed an Old-World knowledge of desert craft to amalgamate with the aborigines. He gave to them a few domestic animals (the goat and the burro, which can live where other animals starve). He also gave to them the Catholic religion and the Spanish language. For nearly 400 years the desert population made

no progress in industrial civilization beyond adopting the wooden plow and the cumbersome wheeled cart known as the carretta.

In Mexico the old desert cities and country estates were practically in the same status of civilization that existed in the 1st century after discovery. The cities had no commerce except by caravan; the estates were great feudal districts with their fortified haciendas, to which all the surrounding people were attached as fiefs. For 200 miles along either side of the international border in Mexico and our own desert country the unconquered Apache spread devas tation from the Pecos to the Colorado; and the only white men there were the soldiers at scattered and lonely outposts, or "bad men" endeavoring to hide from civilization, and hardly better than the Apaches in instincts or action. Here and there in the United States at the widely dispersed water-holes were a few nomadic ranchmen who owned cattle of primitive breed for which there were no purchasers, except the army and beef contractors. mines there were also, but these were merely those with easily reducible ores and limited in depth by the distance which a man could dig in solid rock without machines or powder, and from which burdens could be carried on the human back. In Utah alone had the white man attained a foothold.

Some

No

With the advent of the railroads the modern conquest of the desert began. It was first awakened from its centuries of lethargy by the whistle of the locomotive in the eighties. In the Great American Desert in the United States and Mexico there are now more than 9,000 miles of railway. But for the railroad the Great American Desert would to-day be as unproductive as the Sahara, and still populated, like the Sahara, by people who exist without division of labor, the use of mechanical appliances or extra-territorial commerce. The first railways to be constructed were designed merely as highways between the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards. thought of revenue from a desert itself was anticipated. Next came a great longitudinal line following the ancient trails of the Aztec from Mexico to Santa Fé. Mining and population soon followed these trunk lines, which are now extending out even into the utmost recesses of the desert. From the Pecos in Texas to California, a distance of 1,500 miles, the route of the Southern Pacific followed a belt of country devoid of water except occasionally in the Rio Grande. Not a herd of cattle, a modern house, a farm or a mine existed along this desert stretch. Nor would they exist to-day had it not been for the construction of this railway. Now its course is marked by many prosperous embryo cities and villages.

Notwithstanding the apparent scarcity of water, one of the most remarkable features of the American Desert is that water has been secured, often in apparently impossible places, and in quantities which have made possible the existence of cities and industries. Like the deserts of the Sahara and Asia, those of America have a supply of underground water; there is hardly a desert in which the experiment has been tried where waters have not been found within 2,000 feet of the surface. Though not often sufficient for agriculture, enough has usually been found to afford a supply for cattle, railroads and mines.

Underground water has usually first been found by the railway companies. When the track was first pushed across the desert, water was brought from the rear in tank cars; but when the track was completed water was bored for in the desert itself. The engineers have had at command a mechanical appliance second only in importance to the locomotive, and one which in the desert usually goes side by side with it. This is the mechanical drill. At great expense they bored in many places. The existence of underground water beneath any particular area having once been demonstrated by the railroad company, individuals, of course, usually repeated the experiment. Three notable triumphs of the mechanical drill over nature are the flowing wells of the Salton Desert, the flowing well at Benson and a supply of 700,000 gallons a day from the deep wells on the Mesa at El Paso. Each of these supplies of water was obtained from the localities which superficially were hopelessly dry.

Several of the largest mines in the desert depend almost entirely upon the water transported on cars. The Copper Queen runs its vast' smelters and machinery chiefly by water thus obtained, while the famous Sierra Mojada, of Coahuila, with its population of 5,000 people, has not a drop of water except that brought in tanks a distance of 125 miles. Yet these two mines annually return millions of profit.

But the sterile and hopeless-looking soil of the desert, when artificially watered, is apparently more fertile than where rainfall is abundant. There is no nobler spectacle than a dreary waste converted into an emerald oasis by water artificially applied, and in the desert may be seen some of the most profitable and skilful agriculture in the world. The wheat fields of Utah and Sonora, the great cotton farms of Coahuila, the alfalfa valleys of the Rio Grande and the orchards of California are all inspiring examples. The transformation made in the desert where irrigation has been possible is marvelous, and in one instance - in southern California- has resulted in the development of communities of great wealth and culture, where the ideals of perfect conditions for existence are as nearly attained as possible.

A word of caution must be written, however, against an overestimate of the agricultural capacities of the desert. It is necessary artificially to collect the precipitation over large areas, and to concentrate it upon smaller areas by impounds and canals. In this manner at least 25 acres must be set aside as unproductive catchment areas for every one that may be cultivated. All rain water that falls upon the desert or upon its neighboring mountain, if it could be protected and carefully preserved, would not irrigate 5 per cent of the great_desert area. The efficiency of the rain of the Great Desert region for agricultural purposes is still further diminished owing to the season in which it falls - June to October-too late for the growing crops, the planting and growing months of spring and early summer being dry. From a practical standpoint it is doubtful if even 1 per cent of the vast area can ever be profitably tilled by irrigation. The underground water supply, too, is entirely insufficient for extensive agricultural uses, even when it is free from injurious salts; and the desert people, after every possible experiment, have long since ceased to

anticipate any material supply for irrigation from that source.

From whatever point of view the problem is approached, the sober conclusions cannot be avoided that the desert as an agricultural country has its limitations. The only apparent way in which the area of irrigable lands can be seriously increased is by the construction of reservoirs to save the run-off of the forested mountains, especially that portion of the desert adjacent to the Californian, Utah and Mexican sierras. Even when this is accomplished there will still be left a vast area of desert. Hence the agricultural produce of the desert will never be large, and this product with the exception of the fruits of southern California will contribute but little for export, and will never be sufficient to supply the needs of its own population. The Great Desert is and will continue to be a profitable market for the consumption of the fresh and preserved food products and forage of the ocean seaboards and Middle West.

Notwithstanding the scarcity of water and forage the pastoral interests of the desert are considerable. Upon the stony foothills and in the mountain cañons the scant herbage and grass supply nutritious foods for many animals, and there are numerous cattle ranches, especially in the Chihuahua province, which are profitable and thriving. Statistics are wanting and hence exact figures cannot be given, but the livestock values of the desert amount to several million dollars, exceeding the agricultural products many fold.

So far as even the present agriculture in the desert is concerned, it would not exist were it not that its products were consumed at good prices by the people engaged in mining and transportation. One good mining camp, a few acres in extent and there are many of these gives employment and remuneration to more people than whole countries of arid farming lands. Previous to the introduction of the railway, mining in the desert was limited to simple processes and products. Without mechanical drills and hoists only moderate depths could be reached, and limited quantities of ore taken out and treated. Consequently the deeper, larger and richer ore bodies remained untouched. Silver and gold were alone considered, and the mines which now yield over $50,000,000 annually of copper could not be touched.

On the California trail near Pearce, Ariz., for 40 years the overland pioneers built their camp-fires against a ledge of quartz. Since the railway came these rocks are being crushed for the gold they contain at one of the most complete and profitable mills in America. The huge stamps and other machines were brought from New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Denver; the oil for fuel to run them, from California; the food for the village of over a thousand people living in homes built of Texas lumber is all brought in from the great canning, packing and fruit-growing sections of the country.

A dozen other places in the desert, each with its modern hoists, smelters, converters and electric appliances, are producing millions of mineral wealth per annum. Not only have new mines been opened and equipped, but many of the historic old mines of Mexico, abandoned because the limit of hand mining had been reached, have been reopened with the aid of the steam-hoist

and air-drill, and to-day are more productive than ever.

The Great American Desert yields annually over $100,000,000 worth of metals chiefly silver, copper and gold. This represents at 10 per cent a productive capital of $1,000,000,000. In addition to the paying mines, as large an investment is now being made in mine development and preparation for the coming of lines of railway which are everywhere reaching out to new mining fields. There is every possible reason to expect that the mineral output of the desert will be quadrupled the next decade. Mexico's production of gold and silver has increased steadily despite the political turmoil and anarchy of recent years. It produced in 1912 gold to the value of $24,343,482, and silver valued at $44,832,332; Arizona and New Mexico produced a mineral output in 1914 valued at $78,463,191. Silver, instead of being a dead metal, is being mined with renewed activity and improved appliances. The American Great Desert yields about $8,000,000 from the United States.

The smelting interests are not the least important adjuncts of the mining industry, and each smelter gives employment to many workingmen. The American Smelting and Refining Company, with its capital of $80,000,000, has great central plants in the desert at El Paso, Aguas Calientes and Monterey. Many of the mines like Boleo, the Copper Queen, the United Verde and Greene Consolidated have their own smelting works.

Many mineral districts of the desert still lie unproductive for want of transportation. This is especially true of the great copper, gold and coal fields of the Pacific States of Mexico, while the rugged western Sierra Madre contains veins of ore awaiting transportation facilities which will furnish many new and important mines.

The total population of the Great American Desert in 1910 was about 2,750,000 people. Of this total population in the United States, 500,000 are in southern California, leaving about one person to every two square miles in the remainder of the territory. Of the remaining people in the American portion of the desert, at least four-fifths are in cities, towns and mining camps. These people in their own picturesque language are by profession "prospectors,» "punchers," "nesters," "miners," "lungers,» "Mexicans" and "promoters." In plainer English, mineral seekers, cattle men, irrigator-farmers, miners, health-seeking consumptives, laboring Indians who have abandoned the "blanket» caste, and men who serve as intermediaries between the latent wealth of the desert and the ready cash of the East. As a whole they are an energetic lot. In the United States they consist chiefly of two classes, the Caucasian, whose ingenious brain conceives and develops industries, and the Mexican (Indian) peasant, who does most of the manual labor. Across the line in Mexico the same conditions exist, except t that the American finds a ready co-operator and companion in the higher caste of Mexican citizens. If any of our readers should still retain in his mind as a type of the desert citizen the bad man with the slouched hat, flowing mustaches and quick-acting revolver, he is at least ten years behind the times.

The aboriginal population of the Great American Desert was and is of quite a different type from that of the nomadic savage who lived

by the chase, in the forested mountains and upon the Great Plains. They were largely village dwellers, home builders and agriculturists who by the arts of pottery and weaving had risen to the cultured stage of barbarism as distinguished from savagery. It was their social arts and habits of industry which produced the highest aboriginal type in the ancient Aztec, and it is their blood (not the Spanish) which to-day constitutes the ruling spirit of Mexico. Upon the invasion of their environment, first by the Spanish and later by the Anglo-American civilization, they assumed at least a portion of these and to-day they are the people who constitute almost the sole laboring classes of the desert, being called Mexicans in the United States and peons or peasants in Mexico.

It is the intensity rather than the density of the desert population that appeals to the observer. Whatever is done is done better than elsewhere. This is a necessity of the desert condition. It will not pay in that region to trifle with inferior methods or products. In mining the best man and the best machine must be had; in farming with expensive water it is a waste to plant poor seed; if cattle are placed on the range they must be good cattle, and so on throughout the entire gamut of industry. The desert cities, if not as densely populous as those of some regions, are unique in their thrift and prosperity. They are all picturesque communities, presenting an interesting mixture of architectural, social and business conditions, busy with commerce and buoyant with hopes and prospects. Each desert city is thoroughly alive to municipal improvement and development. Electric lights and street cars, waterworks, schools, churches and public libraries abound, while many of the American towns have copied from their Mexican neighbors the picturesque plazas or ornate public parks within the central portions of the busy cities. In many of the Mexican desert cities may be seen the union of all the best of modern industrial improvement with the picturesque Spanish architectural features for which these places are noted. Steam and electricity have asserted their mastery, but have concealed their cold mechanism behind the prettily stuccoed and flowerentwined walls of the artistic Mexican type.

DESERT ANIMALS. Men are apt to think of the vast tracts of absolutely treeless arid sand as uninhabited, because they are void of the creatures known to the regions where humanity dwells. Yet these tracts are often teeming with life. On the shadowless expanse which affords no lurking-place, animals, adapting themselves to the exigencies of their life, often assume the pale tints of the sands whereon, by lying motionless, they may be overlooked by their enemies. They not only develop a protective coloring, but acquire certain other capabilities. They learn, for instance, to subsist on a minimum of water, or to store it within their bodies, some, indeed, developing an ability to live altogether without direct water-supply. Many desert animals are said to æstivate, that is, to sleep throughout the summer, as animals of cold climate hibernate by lying dormant through the winter season. The desert snail, in order to protect itself from dessication, builds up a wall of mucus, sometimes with two or three layers, across the opening of its shell to prevent evaporation of its

moisture during the extremest heats. Small desert animals, like plain-dwellers, are burrowers, not only because they can thus escape the fierce rays of the sun, but also because they are so protected against their enemies. Even some serpents burrow, and these are more virulently poisonous than corresponding species of a different habit. All the desert creatures, from the snakes and lizards to the camels, are provided muscularly with the ability to shut out from their nostrils and eyes the sand that is blown by the powerful winds; and most of the insects (except the locusts) are practically wingless, so that these strong desert currents do not carry them away.

The large desert animals are swift, and their feet are adapted for the hot rocks and sand by being cushioned beneath with callous skin. The swiftness of these animals is indispensable to their preservation; for they must generally escape their pursuers by flight, since their habitat affords no hiding-places; moreover, they have to travel long distances for both food and water. Examples of this may be found in the camel and ostrich (qq.v.).

The desert is undoubtedly the refuge of certain animals which have been driven by competition from the more desirable habitations, and which, having located in arid land, have adapted themselves to their unfavorable environment. That they are the unsuccessful and outcast representatives of species living under better conditions is substantiated by the fact that they are almost always closely related to the forms in the fauna of the green, fertile lands beyond the desert; the differences usually being only the changes necessitated by difference of habitat.

DESERT IGUANA, or keeled lizard (Dipsosaurus dorsalis), a stout-bodied iguanid lizard of the deserts of the Mexican border of the United States, distinguished by a single row of keeled scales along the spine. It is terrestrial, lives in burrows, runs swiftly and is largely herbivorous. See IGUANA,

SEDESERT LAND LAW. Under the group of acts known as the Desert Land Law, any citizen of the United States 21 years of age or more or any person of such age who has declared his intention of becoming a citizen and who is a bona-fide resident of the State or Territory in which the land to be entered is located, and who has not previously exercised the right of making desert land entry, may take not to exceed 320 acres of arid land which he proposes to reclaim by conducting water thereon within four years from the date of his application. He must acquire a clear right to the use of sufficient water to irrigate and reclaim the whole of the land entered or as much of it as is susceptible of irrigation. At the time of filing his application he must pay the sum of 25 cents per acre. Each year after entry for three years he must file proof of having expended not less than $1 per acre or a total of $3 for the necessary irrigation, reclamation and cultivation of the land, in permanent improvements thereon and in the purchase of water rights. Thereafter upon proving compliance with the law as to reclamation of oneeighth of the irrigable area and the payment of $1 per acre he will receive patent for the lands. Title may be acquired in less time if the showing required by the law is made.