The Old Yuma Trail 



141 



from populous activity to utter desert so 

 complete as that of the zone trodden by 

 padre Kino and five generations of fol- 

 lowers — -and the lapse seems the greater 

 because so uncharacteristic of occidental 

 progress. 



There was reason enough for the 

 abandonment of the old route as a line 

 of travel and traffic ; the increasing safety 

 of shipping first invaded its claims, the 

 partition of Mexico next curtailed its 

 functions, and the railways spanning 

 the continent finally tapped its reser- 

 voirs at both termini ; yet the factors 

 leading to the abandonment of the route 

 only partially explain the desertion of 

 its purlieus, and serve rather to fix at- 

 tention on the fact that the entire zone 

 traversed by the trail was gradually 

 impoverished by the long-continued — 

 and short-sighted — overtaxing of its 

 meager resources. When the earliest 

 Caucasian pioneers came, they found the 

 province peopled sparsely with semi-mi- 

 gratory Papago Indians, who wandered 

 afar in search of water, located fields and 

 villages even by the temporar}' wettings 

 of chance storms, and erected shrines 

 about the more permanent springs and 

 tinajas — Tinajas Altas among others. 

 They also found a fauna of deer and 

 antelope and bighorn with their car- 

 niverous consociates, as well as birds, 

 rodents, reptiles, and insects in wide 

 variety and moderate abundance ; and 

 as the basis of the motile life they found 

 a varied flora delicately balanced be- 

 tween hard habitat and dependent fauna 

 through eons of adjustment. True, the 

 aggregate vitality was but a fraction of 

 that characteristic of humid lands ; yet 

 the deficiency was partly made up by a 

 longer individual life and a closer vital 

 econom)^ growing out of the exception- 

 ally perfect solidarity characteristic of 

 the living things of arid regions, so that 

 the sum of living resources was suffi- 

 cient for reasonable demands. Two or 

 three generations of Caucasians drew on 

 these resources in the easy way of rest- 



ful latitudes without serious detriment ; 

 the missionaries and couriers followed 

 tribesmen's trails to tribal domiciles, 

 and shared water and food with or with- 

 out material exchange ; their animals 

 found forage in grassy and shrubby 

 spots, while they were able to take 

 game or gather cactus fruits in season 

 with little effort ; and so long as they 

 were few, the vital balance established 

 through eons of earth-making was little 

 disturbed. With the third or fourth 

 generation and the gradually increasing 

 numbers of Caucasian travelers, the re- 

 sources began to suffer ; the forage grew 

 scant, the wantonly harried cacti with- 

 drew from the nearer borders, the big 

 game became wary and betook to other 

 ranges ; with the decimation of plants 

 and the trampling of stock the soil grew 

 less retentive of the scant moisture, in 

 a ratio probably higher than that follow- 

 ing deforestation of humid lands, so that 

 the meager ground- water disappeared, 

 the -smaller springs went dry, and the 

 chance tempest brought bane rather than 

 the boon of the olden time ; and with 

 each decade of vital degradation the 

 Papago tribesmen withdrew to remoter 

 haunts, or else degenerated into a para- 

 sitical dependence on the wells and 

 wastage of the whites. Still the nat- 

 ural balance was not utterly destroyed 

 until the Anglo-Saxon came with that 

 intense energy which balks at no obsta- 

 cle, brooks no delay ; he deepened old 

 wells and dug new to catch the last drops 

 of dwindling ground- water ; he not only 

 drove herds to devastate the enfeebled 

 flora along the wa^^, but stocked the ad- 

 jacent ranges with cattle and sheep to 

 supply the needs of multiplying travel ; 

 and he stopped only at the fortunate 

 conjunction of railway-making on more 

 northerl}^ lines with the utter eradica- 

 tion of the grasses and other forage 

 plants along the old route, and the con- 

 sequent extinction of the useful fauna 

 and destruction of the minor waters. 

 The American desert stands apart from 



