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Updated: July 12, 2025
Between that high cliff and the cleft red butte flowed the Salagua, squirming through its tortuous cañon, and beyond them lay Hidden Water, the unknown, whither a single man was sent to turn back the tide of sheep. In the silence the tinkle of bells came softly from up the cañon and through the dusk Hardy saw a herd of goats, led by a long-horned ram, trailing slowly down from the mesa.
Worn and haggard from his night's riding, Rufus Hardy rode along with Judge Ware and the ladies, explaining the situation to them. The sheep had come in from the far east, crossing where sheep had never crossed before, at the junction of Hell's Hip Pocket Creek and the drought-shrunk Salagua.
The season had been a bad one for his sheep, windy and cold, with sand storms which buried the desert in a pall and drove many flocks to the hills; and as the feed became shorter and shorter vagrant bands began to drift in along the Salagua.
"Well, that's the only thing in God's world that wasn't made to order for these sheepmen; the old Salagua cuts right square across the country east and west without consultin' nobody, not even Jim Swope, and the sheep move north and south. "How'd you like to have the job of crossing a hundred thousand borregos and half of 'em with lambs, when the rio was on a bender?
A broken row of cottonwoods and sycamores stretched along the farther side, following the broad, twisting bed of the sand wash where the last flood had ripped its way to the Salagua; and on the opposite side, close up against the base of the cliff, a flash of white walls and the shadow of a ramada showed where man had built his puny dwelling high in order to escape its fury.
To the west in a long fringe of green loomed the cottonwoods of Moroni, where the hard-working Mormons had turned the Salagua from its course and irrigated the fertile plain, and there on their barren reservation dwelt the remnant of those warlike Pimas, the unrequited friends of the white men, now held by them as of no account.
On the opposite side of the river in bands of two and three thousand the cohorts of the sheep gathered to make the crossing gathered and waited, for the Salagua was still high.
"I am convinced that in setting aside the Salagua watershed as a National Forest Reserve, our President has added to the record of his good deeds an act of such consummate statesmanship that it will be remembered long after his detractors are forgotten.
The word crept back to Washington, stripped to the bare facts three thousand sheep and their herder killed by cattlemen on the proposed Salagua Reserve and once more the question rose, Why was not that Salagua Reserve proclaimed? No one answered. There was another sheep and cattle war going on up in Wyoming, and the same question was being asked about other proposed reserves.
The judge had been on to Washington and was possessed of all the material facts, but nobody was interested any more in the Salagua Forest Reserve; he had consulted with the Chief Forester and even with the President himself, laying before them the imminence of the danger, and they had assured him that everything possible would be done to relieve the situation.
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