98 
NOTES FROM THE TRAVELLER. 
Early in the month of April, C. R. Orcutt started on a trip 
through Old Mexico, and the following notes received from him 
were by an oversight on the part of the printer omitted from last 
issue. Fortunately, however, they are as true and interesting 
as when first written. 
Deming, New Mexico, proves the most presentable town I 
have seen since leaving California.: It consists mostly of well- 
built houses, an indication of a good character of people, who are 
showing much enterprise. Mr. R. P. Smith, president of the 
Deming Land and Water Co., showed me their water system, 
just being put in operation. . The well is sixty feet deep, and the 
pump (which took a premium at the Chicago Exposition) is able 
to pump a stream twelve by eighteen inches. The reservoir 
covers an area of ten’ acres, but has not yet been filled. The 
company expects to colonize and irrigate some 5,000 acres of 
land around the town. Fuel used here is mostly mesquite roots, 
the mesquite here forming only a shrub a few feet high instead 
of the tree of the Colorado Desert regions in California, but de- 
velops enormous roots, which can be obtained for only $2 per 
cord, and two cords are said to equal a ton of coal. 
Mr. Alaire, the principal owner and manager of the canaigre 
extract works, kindly gave me much information about that in- 
dustry. 
The canaigre root is collected here where it grows wild at a 
_ cost of about $6 per ton, dried, leeched out and the product of 
_. the leeching is then boiled down to a hard resin which is packed 
in boxes and barrels. One ton of the extract is equal to three 
tons of the dried roots or nine tons of the fresh green roots, and 
is delivered in the London market at 5% cents per pound. About 
one hundred tanners in the United States have or are now using 
the extract, and the product of its use is said to be a very soft, 
pliable, light-colored leather of unusually tough fibre. 
n cultivation it has never yet been tried on a commercial scale, 
but it is readily propagated from roots, yielding a crop of fifteen 
to twenty tons per acre in two years from planting. The seed 
