Page:Mexico in 1827 Vol 2.djvu/618

598 (a town of 3,000 inhabitants, now the residence of the Commandant of the State,) and the mining district of Năcŏsārĭ.

The whole of this country is rich in every variety of agricultural produce, for besides wheat, maize, and barley, the sugar-cane grows in the valleys, with figs, pomegranates, peaches, grapes, and numberless other fruits; horned cattle, mules, and horses abound throughout the province, and may be purchased in any number, at about one-fifth of the price usually paid for them in other parts of the Republic; and to these advantages are added a most delightful climate, and the facility of a communication by water with the port of Guaymas, from which the towns of Babiacora and Oposura are only distant between seventy and eighty leagues.

Such a combination of favourable circumstances induced General Victoria, (himself a native of the North,) Don Pedro Escalante, (the Representative of the State of Sonora in the Senate,) and several other Mexicans connected with the Northern Provinces, to entertain the idea of bringing into activity, by the formation of a Company, some of the mining districts near Ōpŏsūră and Ărīzpĕ, formerly celebrated for their wealth, but abandoned during the great Apache war, in the latter half of the last century; when the Indian tribes upon the frontier, irritated by the hostilities of the Spanish presidial troops, made so general an attack upon the Northern Provinces, that all the isolated establishments were