262 ON THE EBONTIES, 



An egg quickly cooks in the sand, and even the salamander 

 lizards seek the shade. It is the heat absorbed during the 

 daytime by the rocky walls of the upper bottoms and the 

 sandy soil, that, by radiation, keeps up the temperature of 

 the air during the night ; early morning being always the 

 coolest time of the twenty-four hours. A Dutch recruit once 

 remarked : " Dis blace ist but von littel half mile, unt you 

 bees in das hollesche feure." 



I know of one natural product of its soil, waiting there 

 for the brain of enterprise and hand of industry. Large 

 areas in the bottoms are covered with a gum-bearing 

 acacia, which in the proper season exudes plentifully a 

 sap that, hardening on exposure, becomes masses of excel- 

 lent gum. Once, many years ago, on leaving Fort Mojave 

 for San Francisco, I got some Mojave Indians to collect a 

 quantity of this gum ; and, taking it with me, submitted 

 portions to different wholesale importing chemists in that 

 city for their opinion. They were, one and all, very inqui- 

 sitive to know where, or from whom, I had obtained it. I 

 did not tell them. Each assured me it was fully equal 

 to the best oriental gum-arabic, and offered to take any 

 quantity at the full market price of that article. A title to 

 the tracts of land on which these growths are could have 

 been readily obtained, by going properly to work, at an 

 almost nominal sum per acre, but the labour difficulty was 

 then insurmountable. 



The upper bottoms of the Colorado river are the land of 

 the Mojaves an Indian race which, inhabiting a continuous 

 strip of river valley, enclosed with mountain walls up which 

 they never venture, are practically isolated, and conse- 



