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Updated: June 27, 2025
John Tuttle and Henry Wooster descried a group, like a sculpture in whitened stone endowed with life, creep strangely out from the blizzard of alkali. A blinded horse, with head bent low, bearing on its back a motionless man, and led by a stumbling, blinded girl, against whose shoulder the helpless rider leaned, came with ghostlike slowness and silence toward them.
You can go and have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you have made yourself a present of five cents' worth of postage-stamps into the bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for this discovery. From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko.
On all sides the grass crept over the brink of the encircling hills, dusty green on the crests, then fading into ashy brown, and so to a deadly white, this last color forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope. And then? Nothing. Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and barren.
The town extends along the west bank of the river some three miles, and back from it about one mile. The Rio Grande water is passable for drinking purposes, and good for general use, though it is somewhat impregnated with alkali. Juarez possesses many fine old trees and much attractive verdure.
Looking down from the Sierra Blanco, one sees a pathway traced out across the desert, which winds away and is lost in the extreme distance. It is rutted with wheels and trodden down by the feet of many adventurers. Here and there there are scattered white objects which glisten in the sun, and stand out against the dull deposit of alkali. Approach, and examine them!
No wonder the trooper hated to leave the foothills of the mountains, with the cold, clear trout streams and the bracing air, to take to long days' marching over dull waste and treeless prairie, covered only by sage brush, rent and torn by dry ravines, shadeless, springless, almost waterless, save where in unwholesome hollows dull pools of stagnant water still held out against the sun, or, further still southeast among the "breaks" of the many forks of the South Cheyenne, on the sandy flats men dug for water for their suffering horses, yet shrank from drinking it themselves lest their lips should crack and bleed through the shriveling touch of the alkali.
"Now, Miller, the foreman, didn't have any sympathy for them; in fact he delighted to see them in that condition. He hadn't any use for a man who wasn't dead tough under any condition. I've known him to camp his outfit on alkali water, so the men would get out in the morning, and every rascal beg leave to ride on the outside circle on the morning roundup.
Cacta’s my oldest daughter, and I named her after the flowers that blooms all over the desert spite of everything, heat, cold, an’ rain an’ alkali dust—the cactus blooms right through it all. Even its own thorns don’t seem to fret it none.
"Talk about the heroes o' cold in the North," he said. "'Tis easy! Y'r cold buoys a man up! This stews the life out before ye have a fightin' chance! Y' could light a match on these saddle buckles." "I think I see sand hills ahead. If there's any shade, we'll rest till twilight." The lava rocks rolled to a trough of sand; and the light lay a shimmering lake in the alkali sink.
That lovely alkali dust has worked clear into my bearings so I'm liable to have a hot box just as we get the line open ninety miles ahead." At dinner and afterwards the new West and the old aligned themselves into hostile camps, as of yore.
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