The Delta of the Rio Colorado. 3 
fresh water. Then followed a march across a veritable “Jornada del 
Muerto” not attempted successfully before or since by white or Indian, 
which was won out by an intimate knowledge of the ways of the des- 
ert and by sheer capacity for endurance. Half of the distance was 
made by reliance upon oysters gathered from the desolate shore, and 
the water from hot salty springs searched out by following the con- 
verging trails of coyotes, the same animal figuring on a bill of fare 
not too ornate ; days of cruel plodding in the fierce heat of a tropical 
sun across a plain of yielding flaky saline deposit, then through all but 
impassable mud flats, and tule swamps of the delta to a hunter’s 
camp found with a nicety that showed a marvellous blend of instinct 
with cool calculation. 
The only parallel to this desert journey is to be found in the record 
of the Pattie party in 1828. Having been despoiled at the mouth of 
the Gila River by the Yuma Indians, they descended the river in dug- 
out canoes rigged in pairs as catamarans, in search of settlements of 
whites. Encountering the tides and bores in the estuary, the return 
upstream was attempted only to be checked by a February flood, and 
the boats were abandoned. Under guidance of the Indians, a 
march was made across the desert to the snow-covered mountains to 
the southwestward, during two days of which the party was entirely 
without water. Crossing a plain ankle deep in sand, the exhausted 
travellers with difficulty threaded their way through the thickets of 
cacti to a small stream issuing from a cajfion at the base of the moun- 
tains, and from here made their way to the now extinct mission of 
Santa Catalina and to other adventures. Neither has this journey 
yet been duplicated by white men. ; 
The main channel of the river was mapped by Derby and Heintz- 
elman in 1852, and by Ives in 1857, but its course as traced by these 
earlier voyagers coincides as little with the stream of the present day 
as with the tracings made three centuries ago by Spanish priests and 
soldiers. During all this period, however, the river has been cutting 
away at the edge of the Sonora desert at two or three points. It 
makes a long reach to the westward directly away from the mesa at 
Yuma, then a slight curve to the northward,after which it leads away 
to the south, passing into many involved convolutions, one of which 
strikes the mesa at a point marked “ Sandy Bluff” but a few miles 
below the international boundary. A short distance down stream 
(eight or ten miles) the current swings back against the gravel bluffs, 
and then leaves the mesa to touch it again only at the gravel or sand 
bluffs near the head of tidal action usually known as the “Colony — 
Mesa.” The cutting action of the current is rapid and continuous at 
