Sept., 1919 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 179 
The naturalists and the geologists were assigned to one party or another, 
according to the opportunities for work offered by the several lines of travel. 
Thus each party was made up of from five to ten or more individuals according 
to circumstances. Though every effort was made to strip the personal belong- 
ings and camp equipage down to actual necessities, the impedimenta were not 
small, and necessitated for each party a mule train of from six to fifteen or 
twenty animals. 
THE PACKERS 
Most of the packers were roustabouts picked up here and there more or 
less at random, for in those days men skilled in that kind of work were rare 
and hard to find. Among them were not a few of the typical ‘‘bad men of the 
west’’ who have more recently been introduced into polite society through the 
medium of the novel and the movie. Bad some of them certainly were, but as 
a rule I found them very communicative and entertaining as comrades of the 
trail, and daily communication with them soon taught me that, however bad 
they were, each and all of them had not a few redeeming traits. J irst and 
last I received many kindnesses at their hands. Theirs was the laborious task 
each morning of rounding up the mule herd—not always an easy matter, espe- 
cially when, owing to lack of grass or water, the herd had taken a notion to 
retrace its steps to the last camp, often fifteen or twenty miles away. Their 
duty, too, it was to assemble and tie into bundles the camp impedimenta, and 
then by means of the famed ‘‘diamond hitch’’ fasten the boxes and bundles to 
the aparejos (large padded saddles), which had been securely cinched on the 
unwilling mules. As many of the packages weighed upwards of a hundred 
pounds apiece, the job of lifting them into place and securing them there re- 
quired no mean degree of strength, skill, and patience. Three hundred pounds 
was not an uncommon load for a stout mule, and for a limited time on good 
roads a mule may carry as much as four hundred pounds. The packers tray- 
elled constantly with the train, not only to protect it, but to adjust and tighten 
the packs from time to time as needed. In rough country or rainy weather, 
this was not seldom, and not infrequently a pack animal was upset, or crowded 
off a mountain trail, to roll down a hundred feet or so into the stream below, 
when the packers had to plunge into the water, rescue the drowning animal 
and its pack, and replace the load. Polished manners and scholarly attain- 
ments were foreign to the packer’s calling, and usually they lacked the gift of 
eloquent speech, but when things went wrong with the train, and stubborn 
inules needed rebuke, their outbursts of profane imaginings amounted to real 
eloquence. 
THE AMERICAN MULE 
This part of my theme would be incomplete did I not add a word on the 
subject of the American Mule—an animal, which, to my mind, has never re- 
ceived full justice. Overlooking the bar sinister which attaches to his birth, 
and Judging him in a friendly and not a hostile spirit, his native virtues are 
many, his faults few, and those chiefly due to bad treatment. Stripes and 
blows he never forgets and rarely forgives, and, as he has a good memory, he 
sometimes waits long for an opportunity to retaliate. That he is stubborn can- 
not be denied, but he is also patient and long suffering, and such is his endur- 
ance that he survives and even prospers under circumstances, such as lack of 
food and water, which would quickly prove fatal to his nobler(?) and more 
