Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/665

Rh by the representations of some shopkeepers of Guaymas, who wished to reduce the goods in their overstocked stores.

Mulegé is situated southwest of Guaymas, across the Gulf, and could only be reached by sailing-vessels, which were overcrowded and poorly provisioned. Arrived on the eastern shore of Lower California, those who started for the mining region were obliged to cross a waterless desert, only to find the gold district a fraud and disappointment. Their sufferings, of which they had a foretaste on shipboard, were intense, from want and thirst, and nearly all returned to Sonora in rags and poverty.

At no time has Lower California been the rich country that tradition makes it to be, although some of the first religious missions were established here, and have formed the nuclei for settlements which exist at the present day. Near Mulegé itself, surrounded by desert and far remote from civilization, is a conventual structure that is most impressive in its ruin and decay. It stands there, abandoned to Indians and wild beasts, a type of the mission building of the distant past, when every church was also a fort, and every religious edifice a veritable castle.

Gold and silver, pearls and precious stones, have been the alluring phantoms that have beckoned the fortune-hunter on to the Gulf of California for centuries past. Pearls, indeed, have been found here in great abundance. Fifty years ago, it is said, even the common people wore them; but of late the fisheries have languished, as their seeking requires great endurance in the divers, and the efforts to introduce diving-bells have not met with success.

It was here at Guaymas, on the shore of the great Gulf, whose unknown waters were sailed by Cortés and his hardy crew three centuries and a half before, that I turned about for the United States, travelling northward and eastward, and finally reaching home after a roundabout journey of ten thousand miles by rail.

In bringing my travels to so peaceful a conclusion I feel that I shall incur the displeasure of my reader, who will doubtless frown upon a book on Mexico without a robber or a bandit in