8S0 
t April 29, 1905. 
The Rosy Sierras of Chihuahua, 
■ BY CARYL D. HASKINS. 
Eight years and more have passed, each with an 
autumn all too short, since I sent my first bull moose 
to his knees, in the low lying black timber of the 
Tobique region. For years before, and ever since that 
day, through many a joyful moment of success and 
many more of failure, St. Hubert has claimed me for 
his own. The sunshine and the rain, the black forest, 
the hardwood uplands and the open barren of the 
great North woods have been, mine for a few weeks 
year by year, with an. enchantment which could not be 
denied. 
Now and again the "wanderlust" has been mine, and 
I have strayed from the place of the spruce, the fir 
and the maple, into other latitudes and longitudes. It 
has been mine to tread the great evergreen forests of 
Scandinavia, the almost unexplored pine barrens and 
hammock lands of Northwest Florida, the thickets of 
Louisiana, and the rolling smoke-crowned mountain 
country of the Carolinas and Tennessee. 
But now the Southwest, the wonderland, has claimed 
me for its own. The land of the barren pink-gray 
mountain ranges, piled peak on peakj the land of the 
"mesquite," of the cactus and of sand; barren, hard-, 
featured, yet beautiful. To me it is a world of wonder. 
Reluctantly, and with many doubtings, I turned my 
back this year on the old familiar country of the North- 
east, determined to strike out a hew path, to see new 
sights, live through new experiences, and perhaps to 
use my rifle just enough, but not too much, in gather- 
ing new trophies, heretofore beyond my reach. 
So wonderful has been my autumn hunt, in con- 
trast to those many hunts which have gone before, that 
my brothers of St. Hubert must share it with me. 
It was early May when the plan of a hunt in 
Northwest Mexico first crossed my mind. At first 
I turned my back upon it resolutely, imagining many 
fearsome, unknown hardships, not the least of which 
was that of thirst. But no undertaking fascinates us 
of the brotherhood, which is easy of accomplishment; 
so by July the venture had been decided upon. There 
then began that long struggle with railway folders, 
atlases and hopelessly uninforming books of generality, 
which most of us have lived through and know so 
well. 
By the end of August my country, my route, my out- 
fit and my ways and means had all been determined 
upon, and the die was cast. The Sierra Madres on 
the taorderland between Chihuahua and Sonora was 
my promised land, El Paso my starting point. 
Wonders of modern travel! How one may put the 
miles behind one in a few short hours, if one but will! 
There is, I think, but one path for the northern man to 
follow into this new promised land of big game. There 
are other ways, many of them, all of them I have sifted 
and thought out well, but there is but one path, and that 
path I took. 
Get you to Chicago as you will, it is but twenty short 
hours, or thirty long ones from any of us, however 
eastern we may be. From Chicago the path is blazed 
wide and clear; there is none other that I care to take. 
HABITATIONS OF A VANISHED RACE. 
From Chicago to El Paso is close on 1,500 miles, half 
of them miles through wonderland. The Rock Island 
Railroad was my route. I left Chicago, cold, damp and 
smoky, on a Sunday night. On Tuesday night I was in 
El Paso. One may do it even in twelve hours' less 
time if one cares to take the Pacific Coast Flyer of the 
winter schedule, but for me the slower fast train was 
quite fast enough. 
By the afternoon of the first day out, one is rolling 
mile upon mile through the boundless grain fields of 
Kansas, watching and taking imaginary quartering shots 
at galloping jack rabbits, eating the best possible rail- 
road dinner, with none of the iron-clad, copper-riveted 
viands of the East, at Herington, and finally turning into 
one's Pullman berth at night in a new world. 
The next day it is wonderland indeed. A bare, 
rolling, ^ sun-kissed country stretches league upon 
Jeague in all directions, bringing to one's mind Renj^ 
ington pictures, and tales of Ap che raids, made the 
more vivid by the gradual shutting in of the snow- 
capped mountains on either side, as one rolls further 
southward. One crosses the Canadian River, famed Itl 
Indian warfare, and so along down the edge of the 
San Andreas Mountains, beyond whose silver pinnacles, 
in a valley of their own, the great remnant of the 
"good" Apaches find their enforced home. 
By the time one comes to Alamogordo one is sat- 
urated with wild, bizarre and wondrous tales of the 
great unruly Southwest of yesterday. Out of the window 
coyotes have from time to time during the afternoon 
been seen galloping away from the train, scuttling to 
cover, and innumerable prairie dog villages have swal- 
lowed up, as the train came booming on, their multi- 
tude of little citizens under one's very eyes, and so at 
nightfall of the second day one rolls into El Paso, the 
last outlying vidette of the civilization which one seeks 
each year to leave behind. 
I lingered one day at El Paso, and was guided by 
kind friends over the river into old Mexico; a more 
foreign land than I have seen in my European wander- 
ings. Good friends, and a generous introduction. 
HOW WE LIVED. 
brought me close to the head of our customs service 
at El Paso, a gentleman and a sportsman, from whom 
I received ready sympathy and much wholesome advice. 
Through his kindness I made the acquaintance of the 
chief of the Mexican customs service at Ciudad Juarez, 
just across the river, a true Castilian type of gentle- 
man of the sort we have all read about; and the next 
day this good brother of the gun — for he, too, was 
one of us — made things very smooth and easy for me at 
the Mexican customs house, without diverging one 
iota from his official duty. 
You may take almost anything in the way of camp 
outfit into Mexico without paying duty. Guns and 
rifles must be registered by number, that one may prove, 
on, coming out, that they have not been left m the 
country. Revolvers do not count, they are wearing 
apparel, like one's boots, down there. A small duty 
must be paid on ammunition when it is in excess of one 
hundred rounds per gun; but what does a man want 
with more than a hundred rounds? I fired but three 
rifle shots in the North Woods in the year which I look 
back upon as my best. 
There is a new railroad stretching down southwest- 
ward from El Paso, across the State of Chihuahua. It 
has crept across the face of the country, mile by mile, 
until it ends some 150 miles southwest of Ciudad 
Juarez and El Paso. It is going further, perhaps to 
the Pacific Coast, some day, and in anticipation of this 
ultimate achievement, its owners have christened it the 
Rio Grande-Sierra Madre and Pacific. A train runs 
out one day to the end of the present line, and it runs 
back the next. 
We left Ciudad Juarez in the early morning, rumbled 
out from among the adobe huts surrounding the little 
Mexican city, leaving the bull ring (to which do not 
go. Oh! my brother, lest you rise in righteous wrath 
and kill a picador) upon our right, and so out on to 
the plains of Mexico. I cannot tell you of the 
wonders of this country, because sufficient gift of 
language is not mine. The air is wine, and the tem- 
perature of the late autumn spells a blue flannel shirt 
with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and comfort. 
The plains country is thick with blossoms in Novem- 
ber, blossoms which I do not know by name, but which 
linger in my memory with a scent as sweet as violets; 
new found friends, which T could not forget if I would, 
and which I mean to see again right soon. 
The train trundled down between the two great lakes, 
shallow and far flowing, of Northwest Chihuahua. At 
noontime we stopped on the border of one of these 
lakes (Lake Guzman), and in the little railway station 
Chinamen, all of a pattern, adminstered to us a lunch- 
eon which was not too bad, but which principally of- 
fered .oysters, "Far, far from home," and at the end 
left with me sundry dollars of lead, which I carefully 
saved and delivered once more to these same Chinamen 
on the way homeward. _ 
At the railroad station, Lake Guzman is almost at 
one's feet, and Oh, shades of Chesapeake hunters ! 
Were there ever so many ducks in the world 
before? They rose in rafts from the ditch beside the 
track; they drove in armies across the quiet surface of 
the purple water; they dotted the little bays and inlets 
with an innumerable host. It seemed that one could 
shoot ducks without end, with a rifle even, if blind- 
folded. I shot none there; there was not time, and 
they were very, very happy ducks, and, judging from 
what I saw, for them guns were not. 
I had visions of an i8ft. canoe, a two-weeks' outfit, 
and a trip along the shores of this very same lake. 
Ihey told me down yonder, that in the foothills around 
the southeast border of the eastern lake (Santa Maria) 
blacktail still linger in numbers to make it worth while, 
and sheep, too, they said are there ; but the sheep I 
doubt. Antelope there are, for friends who came home 
with me had the heads in the baggage car. Of this 
hunting, however, I cannot speak of my own knowledge. 
The conductor of this little train in Mexico was out 
of my own land, an ex-Adirondack guide, learned in 
the ways of game, and full willing to tell thereof at 
length and in detail. From the train- window he pointed 
out to us a rolling hill a mile or so to the westward 
of the track, where he and a friend had brought to 
earth some six or eight antelope a year or two before, 
as they "milled" around and around the summit. 
Late in the afternoon of Thursday (I had been in 
Chicago on Sunday night, and had lingered one whole 
day and two nights in El Paso) I reached the end of the 
railway at the little Mexican village of Casas Grandes, 
and here my two guides met me. These two fellows 
were the hopeless wonder of the trip. Eastern men 
both; they had the knack of writing good letters and 
making one believe they knew things. If a trip, in 
such a wonderland could have been spoiled, they would 
have spoiled it. Incompetent, lazy, untruthful, lack- 
ing in all the qualities of sportsmanship, and in most 
other attributes, except the negative ones; they were 
the worst examples of guides and guiding that man 
ever saw, but of that more presently. They did not 
spoil my trip, for they could not, and they served their 
purpose, for they were the instruments through which 
I reached my promised land, which is to know me many 
a time hereafter. 
Nuevas Casas Grandes, the village at the end of the 
railroad, is some four miles from old Casas Grandes, 
old beyond the history of man. Here one may wander 
for hours through the well-preserved ruins of one of 
the greatest, if not the very greatest of Montezumas' 
palaces, conjuring, without great imagination, mental 
pictures of the Aztec's days of glory. 
It is between twenty and thirty miles from Casas 
Grandes over the plains to the point where the ter- 
raced Sierras break in sharp shelves and pinnacles up- 
ward from the table land. At Casas Grandes we were 
between 4,000, and S,ooo feet above sea level, our des- 
tination in the mountains between 2,000 and 3,000 more. 
We had planned to pull out from the railroad with 
our duffle and the wagon shortly after sunrise the next 
morning, that we might be sure to make the mountains 
in good time to camp, but Oh, my brothers! The 
wheels grcaned the next morning at our first moving 
'4' 
HOMES OF THE CLIFF DWELLERS. 
at something after ten. One of our guides had lost 
his horse and stayed to ,find it. It was the custom of 
our guides tO' lose from one to three horses each 
night, a custom which I strove vainly _for a few days 
to break up, and then accepted as inevitable. 
It was a wondrous ride that first day over the plains 
of Chihuahua. For the first three hours we followed 
along a little watercourse, lately swollen by the autumn 
rains, as the cottonwoods along its deep trench at- 
tested by their load of brush, wood and debris, but now 
shrunken, in a short three weeks, to a shallow run, 
promising soon to vanish altogether. By early after- 
noon we were amid the cone-shaped hills which gave 
token of approaching mountains, and behind them we 
could see the towering outlines of the real Sierras. 
The plains, wide sweeping, mile on mile, were dotted 
sparsely, here and there, with grazing cattle; once, al- 
most at high noon, a coyote sprang from the brush, al- 
