Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/498

 478 cation, where they can be quickly massed for mutual support. All the Arizona posts, such as Camp Lowell, with its grassy parade and fine avenue of cotton woods; Camp Grant, on its table-land; and Camp Apache, at the junction of two charming trout streams, in the White River Canon; and the others, have only this strategic importance, and no intrinsic strength. The barracks at Yuma consist of a series of comfortable, large, adobe houses, plastered, and painted green, around an oblong plaza. They have in front a peculiar screen-work of green blinds, which shuts out the glare arising from the yellow ground, and makes both a cool promenade and comfortable sleeping apartments for the summer.

The chief of the Yumas, on whose settlement the fort looks down, chooses his sub-chiefs, but is himself appointed by the military commandant. The last investiture was made as long ago as 1852, by General, then Major, Heintzelman. He conferred it upon the now wrinkled and decrepit Pasqual, described at the time as "a tall, fine-looking man, of an agreeable disposition."

Pasqual's people cultivate little patches of vegetables and hay in the river-bottom, fertilized by the annual verflow. Their principal sustenance, however, is the sweet bean of the mesquit-tree. This they pound, in mortars, into a kind of flour. Sometimes, when on the move, the Indians float their hay across the river on rafts, which they push before them, swimming. They propel the small children in the same way, placing them in their large, Egyptian-looking ollas, or water-jars.

The crop of mesquit beans was so large one year as to be beyond their unaided capacity to consume, and they hospitably invited in their friends, the Pimas, to aid them. Old Pasqual describes with graphic gestures how haggard and lank were these visitors on their arrival, and