336 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



I arrived he was just closing up town to go over to 

 Blythe for the evening. Thus the twilight hour was 

 my own, to wander and muse. Iwish I had skill to 

 do justice to this Deserted Village of the West. Bret 

 Harte would have drawn it to the life. As I prowled, 

 an owl flapped from the gate-post of the old corral, 

 and a bevy of quail, in the act of going to roost in 

 the mesquits that had invaded the main street, 

 scurried back with reproachful murmurs into the 

 arrowweed thicket by the river. One handsome date- 

 palm waved in melancholy grace over a little enclo- 

 sure rank with weeds. The schoolhouse, to be known 

 by a fragment of blackboard on the wall of its single 

 room, is said to have housed the second school es- 

 tablished in the old Territory. The confessions of 

 early passion which certain young Felipes and Jose- 

 fas, Enriques and Marias, were impelled to publish 

 on the walls of their Alma Mater are still in evidence 

 against them. 



In days when flat-bottomed steamers came up 

 from Yuma with freight for the hustling frontier 

 towns and mining-camps of Arizona, Ehrenberg was 

 a port of size. The rate for hauling goods from here 

 to Prescott is said to have been eight cents per 

 pound, or in the case of breakable or perishable 

 stuff, twenty-five cents per pound. A small army of 

 freighters and an imposing one of mules were con- 

 tinually on the road to and from the camps of the 

 Harquahalas, the Hualpais, and the Agua Fria. One 

 man alone owned fifteen teams, of eighteen mules to 

 the team. Those were spacious days in the West, 

 when no smaller coin passed than the contemptible 



