The End of the Trail: The Far West from New Mexico to British Columbia
9781465644671
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“Isn’t this invigorating?” said a passenger on the Sunset Limited to a lounger on a station platform as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear air of New Mexico. “No, sir,” replied the man, who happened to be a native filled with civic pride; “this is Deming.” The story may be true, of course; but if it isn’t it ought to be, for it is wholly typical of the attitude of the citizens of the youngest-but-one of our national family. Indeed, I had not spent twenty-four hours within the borders of the State before I had discovered that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its inhabitants are their pride and faith in the land wherein they dwell. And this despite the fact that their neighbours across the line in Arizona refer to New Mexico slightingly—though not without some truth—as a State “where they dig for water and plough for wood.” Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in the United States, has changed so remarkably in the space of a single decade. Ten years ago the only things suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys, Hopi snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eating-houses. Five years ago Deming was as typical a cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos. Gin-palaces and gambling-hells were running twenty-four hours a day; cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned sombreros lounged under the shade of the wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine for cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows along the hitching rails which lined a street ankle-deep in dust. Those were the careless days of “chaps and taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as though made to their order, in every barroom, and groups of spurred and booted figures awaited the moving-picture man (who had not then come into his own) on every corner. All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at least they called themselves experts—to be a waterless and next-to-good-for-nothing waste. Government engineers had traversed the region and, without considering it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, had written it down in their reports as being a worthless desert; and the gentlemen who make the school geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting it a speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari. Real-estate operators, racing westward to earn a few speculative millions in California, glanced from the windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of sun-swept sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence had been so careless as to forget the water, settled back to their magazines and their cigars. So the cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among the straggling scrub, to get such a living as they could from the sparse desert grasses, were left in undisturbed possession, and if their uniform success in finding water wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested any agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep the thought to themselves.
