176 A CALIFORNIA TRAMP. 



At noon on the 14th we reached the Bitter Springs, the 

 water of which was bitter enough indeed. We found a party 

 of traders encamped here, who were en route for Salt Lake 

 with merchandise from San Francisco. As we had now a 

 waterless stretch of forty-five miles to cross, we filled our 

 casks at the " Springs," and, passing over a dreary waste of 

 yielding sand, encamped at sunset long enough to cook our 

 scanty suppers, when we drove on. Another long march 

 through the darkness, and we arrived, a little before day- 

 break, on the shores of the Rio Mojave — the Rio de los 

 Animas of the old Spaniards. Here we refreshed ourselves 

 with quaffs of excellent water, which was in delightful con- 

 trast with the revolting liquids we had been obliged to use 

 for the last one hundred and forty miles of our journey. 



The Mojave, which takes its rise among the snow-capped 

 peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains, flows through a 

 sandy valley of various widths, beneath whose surface it 

 occasionally sinks for miles. For the most of its course it 

 is fringed with a belt of timber, coixfposed of cotton-wood 

 and willow, amongst which are thickets of thorny under- 

 brush, whose verdant foliage contrasts pleasantly with the 

 barren waste of sand and gravel which extends, on either 

 hand, as far as the eye can reach. The river emerges from 

 its subterranean channel a short distance below where it is 

 crossed by the Spanish trail. Fifty miles lower down the 

 Mojave runs plump against a rocky bluff, which tells it in 

 unmistakable terms, " Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." 

 The Santa Fe trail once followed the river to its sink ; but the 

 route we traveled is now preferred, it being the most direct. 



Near our camp we found the head and cleanly picked bones 

 of a horse, which had been killed and eaten by a party of des- 

 titute travelers who had left here the day before our arrival. 

 We had not yet come to horse-beef ourselves, but we were in 

 a fair (or rather gloomy) way for it, as we were beginning to 



