Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/522

 502 mammoth sea-weed. The "grease-wood" is a large bush, said to burn just as well when green as dry. Most of this vegetation is leafless, or rather the plant seems a leaf itself, since coarse bark is lacking, and the green of chlorophyll and the tenderness of structure seem equally distributed throughout.

There are homely legends and superstitions about these plants of the desert. A certain one, for instance, poisons any white spot on a horse, but not one of any other color. Another, eaten by horses, makes them lazy and imbecile. The loco, or rattle-weed, on the other hand, drives them raving crazy, and they try to run themselves to death. I do not know whether this last be wholly a superstition, for I rode in California a horse whose eccentric proceedings could hardly be accounted for on any other basis.

Tucson, from a distance, in early morning or late afternoon, is level, low, square, and brown, with a mellow light upon it and the castellated mountains behind it. In the foreground you see lazy ox-wains, a prospector, perhaps, with his pots and kettles, and a mounted Mexican towing by a lariat a bull, which ducks its head in vain resistance. From a distance it is thoroughly foreign, and of attractive promise. There is something of the Dead Sea apple in the realization of this promise. If Ruskin be right in holding that a house should be of the general color of the soil on which it stands, Tucson may lay claim to great artistic merit. It is entirely of adobe brick of the natural mud-color. Violent rain-storms occur, to the detriment of paint and kalsomine, on such a friable surface, and their use becomes a serious question of economy.

Tucson has great antiquity as a mere corporate existence. It was founded by one of the early Spanish ex-