182 East and West 
MacDowell which lay at the foot of the Four 
Peaks. With the travel-worn troops was an 
army waggon drawn by four mustangs—at 
the beginning of their journey across the 
desert, unbroken, though doubtless by this 
time sufficiently subdued—which had come 
from San Pedro, six weeks over the desert in 
August and September, while the Apaches were 
on the warpath. On the floor of that rough 
army waggon which lumbered over the broken 
lava as the troopers lashed the horses up 
MacDowell cafion, sat a slender girlish woman 
of nineteen with a small boy. That girl was 
my mother—and that was my introduction 
to Arizona and to the desert. 
In a brief record of that journey, as the 
girl of nineteen saw it from her jolting waggon 
under the brazen skies of summer she says: 
The sun came up, fierce and unclouded, into the 
dazzling sky and burned over our heads and grew 
hotter and hotter and the alkali sand scorched our 
eyes and choked us until we gasped for breath while 
the heat from the ground seemed greater even than the 
heat from the sun. Thirst! Ah, one does not know 
what thirst means until one has toiled on under such 
a sun and without water for hours together. There 
were very few springs or creeks from one station to 
another, generally none where the water was drink- 
able; and you can fancy what it is to come on a 
