Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/264

 of Arizona and New Mexico: the railroad companies have been derelict in presenting their attractions to the travelling public, else I am sure that numbers of tourists would long since have made explorations and written narratives of the wonders to be seen.

General Crook did not limit his attentions to the improvement of the Indians alone. There was a wide field of usefulness open to him in other directions, and he occupied it and made it his own. He broke up every one of the old sickly posts, which had been hotbeds of fever and pestilence, and transferred the garrisons to elevated situations like Camp Grant, whose beautiful situation has been alluded to in a previous chapter. He connected every post in the department with every other post by first-class roads over which wagons and ambulances of all kinds could journey without being dashed to pieces. In several cases, roads were already in existence, but he devoted so much care to reducing the length and to perfecting the carriage-way that they became entirely new pathways, as in the case of the new road between Camps Whipple and Verde. The quarters occupied by officers and men were made habitable by repairs or replaced by new and convenient houses. The best possible attention was given to the important matter of providing good, pure, cool water at every camp. The military telegraph line was built from San Diego, California, to Fort Yuma, California, thence to Maricopa Wells, Arizona, where it bifurcated, one line going on to Prescott and Fort Whipple, the other continuing eastward to Tucson, and thence to San Carlos and Camp Apache, or rather to the crossing of the Gila River, fifteen miles from San Carlos.

For this work, the most important ever undertaken in Arizona up to that time, Congress appropriated something like the sum of fifty-seven thousand dollars, upon motion of Hon. Richard C. McCormick, then Delegate; the work of construction was superintended by General James J. Dana, Chief Quartermaster of the Department of Arizona, who managed the matter with such care and economy that the cost was some ten or eleven thousand dollars less than the appropriation. The citizens of Arizona living nearest the line supplied all the poles required at the lowest possible charge. When it is understood that the total length of wire stretched was over seven hundred miles, the price paid (less than forty-seven thousand dollars) will show that there was very