Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/526

 506 mining district, and has an eligible situation for future development. It has derived in its time considerable profit from furnishing supplies to the army, and from a smuggling trade with Mexico. The goods for this latter were taken out in teams, then "packed" over the mountain passes, on donkeys, to the objective points of Altar and Magdalena, in cactus-grown, arid Sonora.

The traders at Tucson, again, are largely Jewish. A certain kind of "life" prevails freely, as at Tombstone. Roulette, faro, and other games of chance are played in a large way in the leading saloons, while the poor Mexicans gamble for small stakes at fondas of their own, where some wretched lithograph of Hidalgo or Zaragoza looks down on them from the walls. There is lacking, however, the choleric and dangerous air of Tombstone. People make way for you to pass if you wish, and do not seem exclusively occupied with looking about for somebody to tread on the tails of their coats.

If Tucson be without historic remains of its own, it has one of the loveliest possible in its vicinity, the old mission church of San Xavier del Bac.

San Xavier is on the reservation of the Christianized Papago Indians, in the Santa Cruz Valley, ten miles to the southward. It is a new sensation even for one from Mexico who may have flattered himself that he knew the style completely. This ancient landmark of a frontier civilization which, since its destruction, has not been even faintly approached in its kind, is not surpassed either in Mexico or out of it for the quaintness, the qualities of form and color, and the gentle sentiment of melancholy that appeal to the artistic sense. Old Father Time has trodden with heavy step on green wooden balconies in its front, broken out their floors, and left parts of them dangling free. The original sweet-toned bronze bells