= 
792 Botanizing on the Colorado Desert. [ November, 
and terminates in a spike a foot long of bright-scarlet, trumpet- _ 
shaped flowers. This splendid oddity flourishes in great abun- 
dance in many places. 
The stems are not so thickly armed with thorns but that a man 
may handle them if he will seize them circumspectly with his fin- 
gers, and being very hard and durable, as well as of a convenient 
size, they are much employed for fencing purposes about the stage 
stations and upon the ranches adjoining the desert. Give a skillful 
Mexican ocotilla poles and plenty of raw hide thongs, and he re- 
quires neither nail nor hammer to construct a line of fence which 
for combined strength, neatness and durability fairly rivals the best 
work of that kind done in our land of saw mills and nail factories. 
As a tree or shrub of strange peculiar beauty, the cultivators 
will vainly desire to add this to their list of varieties, unless their 
art can reproduce the parched and sterile gravel heaps and the 
_ dry, withering atmosphere which it finds congenial. Those who 
have ever experienced anything of a naturalist’s enthusiasm will 
readily believe that the writer, in passing amid these and other 
unmentioned objects of thrilling interest, hardly felt the intensity 
- of the mid-day heat, nor realized how much he was suffering from 
thirst until, at two o’clock, almost before he had thought of 
such a place or wished it near, he found himself but a few rods 
away from the station of Coyote Wells. This is the westernmost 
stopping place on the desert, only twelve miles out from the base _ 
of the mountains. The place derives its name from the fact that 
here the Coyotes, long before ever white men had passed this 
way, smelled water near the surface, and pawed in the sands until 
_ they reached it. These wells of the Coyotes having been suitably 
-o excavated and curbed up, supply the best water that has been 
found on all the breadth of the desert; the other wells being more 
or less strongly impregnated with offensive salts or alkalies. 
Having reached the shade of an adobe wall, I gladly took refuge 
from the heat, and for something less than an hour, did little but 
drink water. Dinner was then announced, after which I sought 
again the shade outside, rested, and studied for another hour the 
rugged outline of a mountain range which broke the level of the 
plain some ten miles to the northward. The station keeper was 
_ going to remove thither some day to settle and dig gold; plenty 
-of the precious metal there ; no doubt about it. Only a few 
years ago a white man and a negro had gone there to dwell to- 
