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There is very little of interest to engage the traveler's attention on the route of the Mexican Central Railroad between Chihuahua and Juarez, formerly known as Paso del Norte. The country is quite sterile, varied by occasional long, tedious reaches of cactus and mesquite bushes, or a few cottonwood-trees wherever a water-course is found. The mesquite grows to the height of ten or twelve feet.
Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas for common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the tulares. It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts are some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra.
Each of these ending like the first, the Indians thereafter contented themselves with shooting all the horses, which had been tied up to some scraggy little cottonwood-trees, and then proceeded to lay siege to the party. The first man struck was Forsyth himself. He was hit three times in all twice in one leg, both serious wounds, and once on the head, a slight abrasion of the scalp.
The hair is fine, and scarce inferior to wool. "We observed wood fit for every use. There were the most beautiful cedars in the world. There was one kind of tree which shed an abundance of gum, as pleasant to burn as the best French pastilles. We also saw fine hemlocks and other large trees with white bark. The cottonwood-trees were very large.
The canyon made many leisurely turns, and its size, if it enlarged at all, was not perceptible to him yet. The rims above him were perhaps fifty feet high. Cottonwood-trees began to appear along the brook, and blossoming buck-brush in the corners of wall. He had traveled perhaps a mile when Nas Ta Bega, appearing to come out of the thicket, confronted him. "Hello!" called Shefford.
About it, shaded by three or four big cottonwood-trees, was an inclosed space of perhaps two acres of ground, beaten perfectly smooth by hundreds of trampling little feet, a hard, bare earthen floor, so entirely subdued to its fate that even in the long summer vacation no spear of grass could penetrate its crust to remind it that it was made of common stuff with fields and meadows.
The house, a long, low, log hut, was fenced with antlers of the elk, adorned with morning-glory vines, and shaded by lofty cottonwood-trees, and its green grass-plat after the sun-smit hills of the long morning's ride was very grateful to the Eastern man's eyes.
Still, by cutting down cottonwood-trees, and letting the animals browse on the small soft branches, we managed to keep them up till, finally even this wretched food beginning to grow scarce, I had all except a few of the strongest sent to Fort Arbuckle, near which place we had been able, fortunately, to purchase some fields of corn from the half-civilized Chickasaws and Choctaws.
Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas for common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the tulares. It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts are some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra.
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