Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/87

 always easy to procure, but there was no lack of bacon, chicken, mutton, and kid meat. Potatoes ranked as luxuries of the first class, and never sold for less than ten cents a pound, and often could not be had for love or money. The soil of Arizona south of the Gila did not seem to suit their growth, but now that the Apaches have for nearly twenty years been docile in northern Arizona, and left its people free from terror and anxiety, they have succeeded in raising the finest "Murphies" in the world in the damp lava soil of the swales upon the summit of the great Mogollon Plateau.

There was plenty of "jerked" beef, savory and palatable enough in stews and hashes; eggs, and the sweet, toothsome black "frijoles" of Mexico; tomatoes equal to those of any part of our country, and lettuce always crisp, dainty, and delicious. For fresh fruit, our main reliance was upon the "burro" trains coming up from the charming oasis of Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora—a veritable garden of the Hesperides, in which Nature was most lavish with her gifts of honey-juiced oranges, sweet limes, lemons, edible quinces, and luscious apricots; but the apple, the plum, and the cherry were unknown to us, and the strawberry only occasionally seen.

Very frequently the presence of Apaches along the road would cause a panic in trains coming up from the south, and then there would be a fruit famine, during which our sole reliance would be upon the mainstay of boarding-house prosperity—stewed peaches and prunes. There were two other articles of food which could be relied upon with reasonable certainty—the red beet, which in the "alkali" lands attains a great size, and the black fig of Mexico, which, packed in ceroons of cow's hide, often was carried about for sale.

Chile Colorado entered into the composition of every dish, and great, velvety-skinned, delicately flavored onions as large as dinner plates ended the list—that is to say, the regular list. On some special occasion there would be honey brought in from the Tia Juana Ranch in Lower California, three or four hundred miles westward, and dried shrimps from the harbor of Guaymas. In the harbor of Guaymas there are oysters, too, and they are not bad, although small and a trifle coppery to the taste of those who try them for the first time. Why we never had any of them was, I suppose, on account of the difficulty of getting them through