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CHAPTER II.

CONDITIONS IN 1867 AND 1868 (Continued). GENERAL RUSLING'S DESCRIPTION CONTINUED SKULL VALLEY-BARRENNESS OF COUNTRYANCIENT RUINS AND ACEQUIAS POSSIBILI

TIES OF GILA AND SALT RIVER VALLEYS-
PRESCOTT-INDIANS THEFTS AND RAIDS BY
APACHES POINT OF ROCKS-FORT WHIPPLE
-WILLIAMSON VALLEY-HARDYVILLE-Mo-
HAVE, WALLAPAI, PAH-UTE AND OTHER HOS-
TILE INDIAN TRIBES INDIAN DEPARTMENT
BLUNDERS-FORT MOHAVE-W. H. HARDY-
GENERAL SUMMING UP-PETE KITCHEN'S
DESCRIPTION OF TRIP TO SONORA.

Our travellers passed from Wickenburg to Prescott, via Skull Valley, some eighty-four miles, without mishap. They made the distance in two and a half days and rolled into the capital, "just as the last rays of the setting sun were purpling the triple peaks of the distant San Francisco Mountains."

Skull Valley was a narrow vale of perhaps a thousand or two acres, but devoid of timber, and inaccessible in all directions, except over bad mountains. A few ranches had been started and a petty military post was there to protect them, but this post had been ordered away, the location was so faulty, and with its departure, Skull Valley, as a settlement, seemed likely to collapse.

Skull Valley and Wickenburg were the only settlements, indeed the only population, they

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found between Maricopa Wells and Prescott, a distance of nearly three hundred miles by the way they travelled. The narrative continues:

"The whole intervening country, as a rule, was barren and desolate, and absolutely without population, except at the points indicated, until you neared Prescott. There were not even such scattered ranches, or occasional stations, as we found in crossing the Colorado Desert, and ascending the Gila; but the whole district seemed given over, substantially, to the coyote and the Indian. The Apaches and Yavapais are the two main tribes there, and were said to infest the whole region, though we saw nothing of them. In the valley of the Hassayampa and across the Aztec Mountains, they certainly had an abundance of ugly looking places, that seem as if specially made for ambuscades and surprises. If they had attacked us in the canyon of the Hassayampa, while floundering through the quicksands there, they would have had things pretty much their own way-at least, at first, vigilant as we were. They had killed a wandering Mexican there, only a few days before; but we did not know it, until we reached Wickenburg, and came through ourselves unscathed. * * *

"As I have already said, we found the intervening country substantially unsettled, and much of it will never amount to anything for agricultural purposes. Its mineral resources may be great; but, as a rule, it lacks both wood and water, and much of it is a barren desert, given over forever to chemisal and greasewood. On the Agua Fria and Hassayampa, however, there are considerable bottoms, that might be success

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Ancient Canals and Ruins, of Gila and Salt River Valleys.

fully irrigated; and between the Gila and the Salt there is a wide district that deserves some further notice. As you come up out of the Gila bottoms, you pass through scattered mesquite trees, and at length enter on a broad mesa (Spanish for 'tableland,') ten or fifteen miles wide by thirty or forty long, which bears every evidence of having once been well cultivated, and densely populated. Instead of mesquite, you here find clumps of chemisal two or three feet high, and bits of broken pottery nearly everywhere. Farther on, some eight or ten miles from the Salt, you find immense ruins in various places, and soon strike a huge acequia winding up from the Salt, in comparison with which all the acequias we had yet seen in Utah or California were the veriest ditches. It must be, I should think, thirty feet wide by ten or twelve deep, and seems like a great canal of modern times. Just where the road to Fort McDowell crosses this, it subdivides into three or four lesser acequias, and these branch off over the mesa indefinitely. This great acequia heads just above where we crossed the Salt. The river has a considerable descent or 'rapids' there, and the ancient constructors of this gigantic watercourse, apparently, knew well how to take advantage of this. They have tapped the river there by three immense mouths, all leading into one common channel; and this they have coaxed along down the bottoms, and gently up the bluff, until at a distance of miles away it at last gained the level of the mesa, and there distributed abroad its fertilizing waters. So, there are other ancient acequias, furrowing the bottoms of the Salt on

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