Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/616

608 hiding everything from sight, even the bases of the jasper hills which lie beyond the lake, among the trees on the border of which nestles a fortified hacienda with whitened walls. It belongs, with all the land lying along the track for nearly eighty miles, to Don Enrique Müller, an enterprising German resident of Chihuahua, and Don Luis Terrasus, the Governor of the State. It may be a profitable property, with its 70,000 head of cattle, when the Apaches are exterminated; but it has been repeatedly raided, and so late as September of 1883 a large number of valuable horses and cattle were driven off to the hills. Their shepherds and rancheros have been killed almost as fast as their places could be supplied; yet the proprietors bear their losses philosophically, as the supply of laborers is practically inexhaustible. A dozen miles from Encinillas is the adobe hamlet of Sauz, or Willow Dale, the only village on the road, where there are about a hundred willows, or cottonwoods, and springs, and streams.

Sacramento, where Colonel Doniphan, on his celebrated march in the early stage of the Mexican war, fought a decisive battle, lies eighteen miles beyond Sauz. The victory gained by the brave Doniphan opened to the United States troops the capital city of Chihuahua, less than twenty miles farther on, and which may be seen at a distance of nearly ten miles, as it stands upon an elevated plain without any intervening vegetation, and is thrown into strong relief against a barrier of mountains. The train rolls over its solid road-bed at a steady jog of twenty miles an hour, down over the dry and treeless plain; and just where the hills come together from either side and seem to forbid farther progress, there lies Chihuahua, its great church towers rising above its stone and adobe houses, with its chapel of Guadalupe at one end and the convent of San Francisco at the other. For a few miles before we reach the city, a band of green borders the eastern hills,—a tree-fringed river, which divides and runs around it, and then disappears amongst the hills.

The city of Chihuahua is built upon a bleak and barren plain, surrounded by bare and rocky mountains, at a height above the sea, 4,600 feet, that gives it a climate far famed for its salubrity.