Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/91

 Greenwich. The valley of the Santa Cruz, although not much over a mile and a half wide, is wonderfully fertile, and will yield bountifully of all cereals, as well as of the fruits of the south temperate or north tropical climes, and could easily have supported a much larger population, but on account of the bitter and unrelenting hostilities waged by the Apaches, not more than 3,200 souls could be claimed, although enthusiasts often deluded themselves into a belief in much higher figures, owing to the almost constant presence of trains of wagons hauled by patient oxen or quick-moving mules, or "carretas" drawn by the philosophical donkey or "burro " from Sonora. The great prairie-schooners all the way from the Missouri River made a very imposing appearance, as, linked two, and even three, together, they rolled along with their heavy burdens, to unload at the warehouses of the great merchants, Lord & Williams, Tully, Ochoa & De Long, the Zeckendorfs, Fish & Collingwood, Leopoldo Carrillo, or other of the men of those days whose transactions ran each year into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Streets and pavements there were none; lamps were unheard of; drainage was not deemed necessary, and water, when not bought from the old Mexican who hauled it in barrels in a dilapidated cart from the cool spring on the bishop's farm, was obtained from wells, which were good and sweet in the first months of their career, but generally became so impregnated with "alkali" that they had to be abandoned; and as lumber was worth twenty-five cents a foot, and therefore too costly to be used in covering them, they were left to dry up of their own accord, and remain a menace to the lives and limbs of belated pedestrians. There was no hint in history or tradition of a sweeping of the streets, which were every bit as filthy as those of New York.

The age of the garbage piles was distinctly defined by geological strata. In the lowest portion of all one could often find arrowheads and stone axes, indicative of a pre-Columbian origin; super-imposed conformably over these, as the geologists used to say, were skins of chile Colorado, great pieces of rusty spurs, and other reliquiæ of the "Conquistadores," while high above all, stray cards, tomato cans, beer bottles, and similar evidences of a higher and nobler civilization told just how long the Anglo-Saxon had called the territory his own.

This filthy condition of the streets gave rise to a weird system