DESERT SCENES IN ZACATECAS 435 



DESEET SCENES IN ZACATECAS 



By Professor J. E.' KIRKWOOD 



UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA 



ABOUT 400,000 square miles of desert lie south and west of the 

 Eio Grande. Much of this vast area occupies the great table- 

 land, bounded east and west by long mountain ranges and reaching 

 southward several hundred miles, where it becomes broken by more 

 fertile areas; all this being, in fact, a continuation of the great south- 

 western desert region of the United States which prevails from Texas 

 to California. The aspects of its southern extension vary with local 

 conditions within certain limits, and with its lowering latitude new 

 elements enter into its composition, but on the other hand many of the 

 features characteristic of a Texas or an Arizona landscape are con- 

 spicuous in its geological formations, its fauna and its flora. This 

 region has, however, certain significant peculiarities which give the 

 central Mexican plateau a character of its own. 



Typically representative of the conditions on much of this great 

 plateau is the northern part of the state of Zacatecas. Traversed by 

 fragmentary mountain ranges with a general trend from northwest to 

 southeast, only in a few places do its plains stretch level to the horizon. 

 On every hand the skyline is formed by the heaving back of some ridge 

 or group of mountains whose summits rise from 1,000 to 4,000 feet 

 above the plain. The plain itself is 6,000 feet elevation, more or 

 less, and the mountains appear as if almost submerged in it. Here 

 and there are lower ranges whose heads are scarcely lifted above the 

 plain and whose softly rounded outlines show that leveling forces have 

 long been at work upon them, or that their softer materials have more 

 readily yielded to eroding forces. Other peaks rise higher and a few 

 of these are rugged and sharp with steep declivities, but for the most 

 part the evenly rounded outline prevails. 



The more or less isolated ranges, the Sierras of the Potrero, the 

 Zuloaga, Zapoca, Guadaloupe, Oratorio, Eamirez, Chivo, Caballos, etc., 

 are all on an area some sixty by seventy miles in extent, which consti- 

 tutes the Hacienda de Cedros, a corner of which the Mexican Central 

 Eailroad crosses southeast of Torreon between Eivas and Carlos. This 

 Hacienda, which lies mostly to the east of the sun-baked village of 

 Camacho, extends also to the west fully twenty miles. An interesting 

 estate and sufficiently large from an American standpoint it is, but one 

 of many of its kind in Mexico, managed in a feudal way. It is to this 

 particular region that the accompanying discussion pertains. 



Looking westward, far across the broad Camacho plain, standing 



