ALONG OUR SIDE OF THE MEXICAN BORDER 73 



son was kept and whence Don Juan Bau- gun-runners, and the wary, tireless line- 



tista de Anza set out in 1774 to build a riders who hunt them really know much 



highway to California. It was this same of this arid, empty waste. 



Don Tuan who chose the site for San 



Francisco on the Golden Gate. A $600,000 subsidy for a stage-coach 



Today near Tubac an American rubber WNE 



company has bought thousands of acres After this Gadsden Purchase survey, 



of Santa Cruz Valley land and is farm- Congress in 1853 granted money for ex- 



ing guayule on a big scale for the manu- ploring a railway route from the Missis- 



facture of rubber. Nurseries for propa- sippi to California; but trains did not 



gation of young plants are set up and a run till 31 years later. In 1857, however, 



model town of cement houses and shady mail and passenger stages were started, 



streets for the employees is already built, under a government subsidy of $600,000 



Nogales, 3,800 feet above the sea, en- a y ear . This line used 100 Concord 



joys a singularly prosperous trade for a stages, 1,000 horses, 500 mules, and about 



town of its size. The declared exports 150 drivers. The fare from St. Louis to 



from Mexico run as much as twenty mil- San Francisco via this border route was 



lions a year. As at other important $100. Official orders defined the border 



border towns, adequate military forces route in part as "from Preston, Texas, 



are stationed here, with permanent bar- to the best point of crossing on the Rio 



racks, hospitals, recreation halls, and Grande, and not far from Fort Fillmore ; 



stables. Some 12,000 people live on the thence along the new road being opened 



American side of the line, and a some- and constructed, under the direction of 



what lesser number in the Mexican town, the Secretary of the Interior, to Fort 



For police purposes, a high barbed Yuma ; thence through the best passes 



wire fence is strung along the boundary and along the best valleys for safe and 



line here, dividing the twin cities. expeditious staging to San Francisco." 



Nogales has foundries, bonded ware- But that part of the trail from Tubac. 



houses, strong banks, daily papers, and Arizona, to California was worn and old 



clubs, and is surrounded by rich mines long before the lumbering Concord stages, 



and profitable cattle ranches. making a hundred miles a day, began to 



Nothing along the whole border is use it. 

 more chastely beautiful than the old Mis- Rafael Amador, an official courier with 



sion of San Xavier del Bac, just south messages from Santa Ana to the Gov- 



of Tucson, on the Nogales highway. It ernor of California, rode from Mexico City 



is pure white, visible for miles across the to Monterey in some 40 days. Though 



desert, and is built in the form of a stripped and robbed by the Yumas and 



cross. It is really one of the great his- nearly dead of thirst and hunger, yet he 



toric memorials of the United States, made it. 



Nowadays the peaceful Pimas work their The coming of General Kearny, with 



little farms and come devoutly to mass his "Army of the West," to attack the 



in this old church, where years ago other Mexicans in California, in 1847, ^ rst 



Pimas slew the priests and tried to de- mapped out this border trail and made it 



stroy the building. the main traveled route for the forty- 



A short ride west of Nogales the due- niners. Fully 8,000 passed this way, 



west trend of the line is broken, and it many dying of thirst. Once in a while 



veers northwest by west, straight to the prospectors out of Yuma still come upon 



Colorado River, striking that stream a rusting parts of schooners or whitened 



few miles below Yuma. bones of men and mules. 



This part of the boundary was first Kit Carson, too, made a memorable 



explored and run by one John Bartlett, dash across this desert in '47, with a 



after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo young army officer named Beale. carry- 



and the Gadsden Purchase. No section ing dispatches from the Fremont party 



of the whole boundary line is so wild, to Washington. (This same Beale later 



dry, uninhabited, and little known as this introduced camels into the desert traffic, 



which stretches from Sasabe to the Yuma See footnote, page 65.) 

 desert. Only a few smugglers, Yaqui Significant of changing things, scores 



