226 
FOREST AND STREAM 
|[Sept. i6, 1905. 
The Colorado Desert. 
“When God finished the world He had left a double 
handful of material. This He gathered up and tossed 
away; where it fell there lies the desert of the Colo- 
rado,” runs the legend; the poet says, “God made thee 
in His anger and forgot.” 
A strip of country lying immediately west of the 
Colorado River, probably 250 miles long and from 
100 to 150 miles wide; from Death Valley on the north 
to the Mexican boundary on the south, and from the 
Sierra Madre Mountains on the west to the Colorado 
River on the east. That is, geographically speaking, 
the Desert of Colorado; if one wants more desert one 
has only to continue north into western Nevada and 
south on the Peninsula of Baja, or Lower California, 
500 or 600 or 700 miles further. But northward the 
desert takes other names — the Mojave, Death Valley 
and the Humboldt. South is the desert of the Cocopahs 
in Mexico, and beyond that — well, just more desert. 
Just east of the Colorado River is the Arizona desert 
and the desert of the Gila; practically the same arid 
country with some slight differences in vegetation and 
reptiles; there are no Gila monsters in the Desert of 
the Colorado. The Chemihueva, Apache and Coahuila 
Indians that roam the Desert of the Colorado will trade 
one fresh meat for flour, coffee, sugar and bacon, while 
the Cocopahs on the peninsula of California will take 
it if one or two prospectors happen to be alone; a tribe 
that yet clings to their long bows and cloth yard ar- 
rows that can knock a silver quarter from a cleft stick 
at fifty yards. However, there is nothing to attract 
one to the Desert of Cocopah, except the natural phe- 
nomena; prospectors have so far decided that the 
Cocopah range is not worth the danger incurred and 
generally have given it a wide berth. If they gO' in 
there, it is generally in parties of not less than three, 
but four is better, and each should carry a rifle. 
The Desert of the Colorado lies almost wholly within 
three counties in Southeastern California; the eastern 
edge of the counties of San Bernardino, Riverside and 
San Diego. A territory 250 miles long, with an average 
width of 125 miles seems rather large to be only a 
strip along the line of three counties, but it must be 
remembered that I am writing of California, the land 
of big things, and the three counties named are larger 
than many single eastern States and almost as large as 
the entire State of New York. 
Unfortunately for the tourist the railroads cross the 
desert in its most unattractive parts. The_ railroad to 
the south crosses a dead flat, sandy plain, and the 
Salton; basin and old sea bed 250 feet below the present 
level of the sea. The road to the north, nearly 200 
miles away, crosses the northern tip of the Desert of 
Colorado arid then plunges into the dreary, sandy, 
gravelly wastes of the Desert of Mojave; between these 
twO' lines of road lies the most attractive part of the 
desert. I say “attractive” advisedly, for I know the 
desert and was schooled in it by my partner, J. S. 
Crawford, a Texan, who has lived on it for fifteen 
years and knows its every mood, for it has its moods 
both pleasing and terrible. The readers of Forest 
AND Stream have already made the acquaintance of 
Crawford, honest as the day is long, “as steady as the 
sun” and not afraid of anything that talks, walks, bawls, 
bleats or crawls. Together we have prospected over 
a good part of the desert, and that part of it I have 
not visited he has. We were out there when there 
was not another white man within fifty miles of us in 
any direction. He is out there now, this July, and 
writes that he is alone, for the dozen or more miners 
and prospectors have gone “inside,” to the coast, for 
the summer. 
The term “desert” implies a flat, sandy plain; not so 
with the Desert of the Colorado. The country of which 
I write is diversified by mountain ranges from 2,500 
to 6,000 feet high, and some isolated peaks are even 
higher. These ranges are, generally, from six to eight 
or ten miles apart, mostly barren, rocky, precipitous 
ridges with occasional spots, of decomposed granite 
soil on which grow stunted shrubs and bunch, or giata, 
grass. From a distance the mesas and valleys seem to 
be remarkably fertile so covered are they with desert 
growth, greasewood, sage, cactus, chemisal; in fact, 
many different kinds of vegetation; that, I believe, have 
not yet been classified. As yet the interior of the 
desert is a little too far off the route of Pullman cars 
to be visited by scientists. The timber consists princi- 
pally of stunted mesquite, ironwood, palo verde and a 
thorny white wood that grows in the form of short 
poles, which, for a better term, we have designated as 
needlewood, from the needle-like thorns; it is remark- 
ably light when dry. Ironwood is so. dense and heavy 
that it will sink in water; it is a species of the mahog- 
any family, only heavier and harder, makes excellent 
charcoal, and ton for ton is a better fuel than, coal. 
The medicinal herbs on the desert are seemingly 
without limit. As Crawford says; “It seems like God 
didn’t put anything here that would hurt a man with- 
out putting a cure right alongside of it.” There is the 
rattlesnake plant, a tiny little vine growing flat on the 
sand, having a small blue flower, which the Indians use 
for rattlesnake bites. They pound up the tops for a 
poultice and bind it on the bite and make a tea of the 
roots. Then there is mandrake in: plenty; the tops of 
a peculiar species, of sage. When boiled and the body 
bathed with the decoction, it will cure sciatica or other 
rheumatism. Then there is a peculiar woody shrub 
that has no leaves, only short, stem-like rushes; these 
boiled for ten minutes taste almost like store tea, the 
difference can hardly be detected, and for kidney remedy 
it has no equal; it beats turpentine a city block. Grease- 
wood tops boiled down and mixed with lard, cottolene 
or tallow make an excellent healing salve. Then there 
is another small shrub that has a small oval, smooth- 
edged, pulpy leaf; we do not know its name, but we 
designate it as “deer ears,” that proves an excellent 
remedy for bowel complaints. The desert is almost 
entirely a granite country, but there are frequent 
changes in; the water ; one may be strongly alkaline, the 
next similar to Glauber salts, while the next may be 
impregnated with some other mineral. To a tender- 
foot this frequently proves very annoying, and at times 
causes a serious dysentery. In that event all one has to do 
is to chew a little handful of “deer ear” leaves and 
swallow the juice. This and some of the other remedies 
I have tried; in fact, I know of no ailment to which 
flesh may be heir to, except a broken bone, in that 
locality, that has not the remedy at hand. As an illus- 
tration of the efficacy of the “deer ears” I may be 
permitted to cite the case of a newcomer to the desert. 
He had developed a tolerably bad case of dysentery 
owing to the change of water. One evening Crawford 
and I returned to camp and found him drinking from 
a can containing a thick, brown-colored liquid. 
“What is that you are drinking?” Crawford asked. 
“Tea made out of them deer ears.” 
“Holy smoke, man, stop it; don’t you know what you 
are doing?” 
“Bet your life I do; but you do not know how sick 
I am.”_ 
In his case we were obliged to resort to powerful 
cathartics or the remedy would have been more dis- 
astrous than the malady. He had been told to chew 
only a few leaves at a time and to swallow the pulp. 
Some day an herbalist, botanist, or whoever does that 
kind of work, will go to the desert and analyze and 
classify those plants and herbs for the benefit of 
humanity at large; there are many plants there that I 
have never seen elsewhere. 
There are what is termed two rainy seasons on the 
desert, one in the middle of winter and the other in the 
latter part of July and along in August, though I have 
seen several season; pass without sufficient water falling 
to lay the dust. 
In the spring after the light rains of winter, if any, 
the desert presents a scene, a landscape, that no painter 
has yet put on canvas, nor can he hope to equal. I 
have seen the mesas stretching away for miles and 
miles, dotted with magnificent rugs, acres in extent, of 
the most beautiful flowers. All the primal colors and 
their varying shades in the most vivid colors, from the 
great ochotilla cactus with its cluster of poles fifteen 
or twenty feet high without branch or twig, but covered 
thickly with great scarlet or deep red blossoms as large 
as a tea plate, down to tiny little star-shaped blossoms 
as humble as the daisy, and growing close to the 
ground. Acres and acres, miles and miles of them, but 
the greatest peculiarity is that almost without exception 
they are without odor. These last for only a short time, 
a week or two of the hot sun and they are dried, 
whipped out of the sand by the wind and scattered 
broadcast. A broad valley between the northern spur 
of the. Chuckawalla Mountains and the southern spur 
of the Eagle range is known as the Meadows. The 
wash of ages has carried to the center of this valley a 
rich and very fertile soil, a strip two or three miles 
long and about a mile and a half wide. After the light 
summer rains a rich and nutritious grass springs up 
and matures in from four to five weeks. I have seen 
nothing like it elsewhere, but it resembles the old “red- 
top” of back East. It m;akes an excellent hay as demon- 
strated by one camp that had two teams of mules and 
brought out a mower to mow and put it up. Hay 
delivered at the camp costs about $45 a ton, so the 
desert grass was like finding money. But the rattle- 
snakes; how they would flock to that spot. The desert 
rats, ground birds, quail and other small fry would 
congregate there; and there came the rattlesnakes in 
great numbers and the mower wheels and sickle bar 
crushed and cut many of them. Thick boots took the 
place of the customary brogans in that meadow. If 
water could be brought to the country it would make a 
remarkably fertile territory, and reclaim a vast amount 
of arid land; but the rainfall is so slight that catch- 
ment basins are out of the question, and the country 
lies so high above the Colorado River that it does not 
seem possible to irrigate it from that source, so it will 
probaly remain for ages as it has in the past — for- 
gotten. 
The desert has never been fully surveyed nor mapped. 
There are correct maps of the country, but they are 
seared on the brains of a few hardy prospectors. 
Look on the published maps and you will see a few 
zigzag lines that in any other country would denote 
water courses ; for the desert they stand for nothing 
but dry canons; they mean nothing, their locality is not 
correct, for there are thousands of canons, one just be- 
yond each “hogback” or sawtoothed ridge, and why they 
were puf op the m?ip I do not know, unless it was to 
fill up a blank space. Through the heart of the_ Colo- 
rado Desert, from the river tO' Dos Palmas, a distance 
of over 100 miles, there is no running water_ and only 
two places at which one may be certain of finding water, 
one at Chuckawalla Wells and the other at Canon 
Springs, the first about thirty miles from the river and 
the other about ninety. Between Chuckawalla Wells 
and the river water may sometimes be found at Mule 
Spring, and between the Wells and Canon Springs 
water may generally be found at Coyote Holes, but they 
have been known to go dry. No man on the desert 
leaves one water hole without a sufficient supply of 
water to do him to the next water and back; to do 
otherwise would be inviting a lingering and horrible 
death. 
That which most impresses the tenderfoot on the 
desert is its vastness and its absolute and overpowering 
silence. There is no song of birds, no rustling of 
branches by the wind, no rippling of water. Miles 
and miles as far as the eye can carry there is no sign 
of life nor motion, nothing but a grewsome, fearful, 
horrible silence, which, if alone, one, fears to break. 
It is there in that vast solitude that one feels what 
an insignificant atom he is in the scheme of the uni- 
verse. If alone one must busy himself, concentrate his 
mind on something other than his condition. To be 
alone out there is not good for one with nerves, if he 
permits his mind to dwell on his loneliness. 
The hottest place on the surface of the entire earth 
is said to be at Mammoth Tank, a station on the rail- 
road, fifty or sixty miles west of Yuma, Ariz., and practi- 
cally in the middle of the Colorado Desert. A number of 
years ago the Government sent out expeditions to test 
the temperatures at several widely separated points; 
I have forgotten where all were, but one was on the 
Equator in South America, the other was some point 
on the Persian Gulf and another was at Mammoth 
Tank. The temperature reached the highest point at 
the latter station, 120, I believe, and it was two degrees 
hotter than the next hottest place, that on the Persian 
Gulf. Salton was not on the map then, a station about 
fifty miles further west than Mammoth Tank. It is 
located in Salton Basin and is 265 feet below the present 
level of the sea, also, I believe, the lowest natural point 
on the earth’s surface. There in the heat of summer, 
day after day, I have seen the thermometer register 125 
and 130 degrees, and sometimes higher, in the coolest 
place we could find in the shade. At the same time 
the thermometer would register from 120 tO' 125 degrees at 
an altitude of from 1,000 to 2,000 feet. The burning 
rays of the sun so infused the bare granite mountains 
that they did not become cool at night, and after the 
going down of the sun the temperature still remained 
high, often 112 at midnight. 
With the thermometer registering 125 in a cool spot 
in the shade, what must it be in the glare of the sun; 
I will not tell you, for you would not believe it. I have 
plodded all day day across the burning sand and among 
the blistering hot mountains, on foot with our pack 
mules. Heavy, hob-nailed brogans are the only service- 
able articles of footwear on the desert. Boots are too 
hot, and the ordinary light calf-skin shoe and sole would 
be cut to pieces in one day by the sharp rocks and 
gravel. 
The word “tenderfoot” probably had its origin in the 
desert, for if ever a man becomes “tenderfooted” it is 
there, and the term is applied to newcomers. Even 
in cool weather the stiff, heavy shoes, or brogans, rub 
and blister their feet; and in summer the hot sands and 
rocks heat the big-headed nails in the soles until the 
bottom of their feet are fairly blistered. Until such 
time as their feet become calloused and impervious to 
such little inconveniences they are known as “tender- 
feet.” _ 
I will not enlarge on the horrors of thirst at such a 
time — mid-summer — or at any other time, for that mat- 
ter, although I believe I am qualified to write on the 
subject, having once been for twenty-two hours with- 
out water on the Mojave Desert in July. That was 
sixteen years ago this month, but I have not forgotten 
it, and there is nothing pleasant in the remembrance. 
My partner and I have picked up men on the desert 
suffering and nearly dead from thirst, and have seen 
others whom the coyotes and the buzzards had found 
—ugh! One man we picked up was well known to both 
of us, but he was so burned by the sun and his features ' 
were so distorted that we did not recognize him until 
we got him to camp and somewhat reduced the swelling 
and his sufferings. He had become partially demented 
from his thirst and imagined he was being pursued by 
Apaches. The first thing we did after getting him to 
camp was to hide our weapons. Our six-shooters we 
hid in our clothes bags and our rifles we hid in our 
mine. We nursed him all that day, Sunday, and the 
next morning he appeared somewhat rational; in fact, 
so far on the road to recovery that we went to work on 
our claim about half a mile away. When we returned 
at noon for dinner he was not to be found. We made a 
search for him and eventually found him hidden away 
under a bunk and atmed with the ax, the only weapon 
he could find, 
“Sh — sh, st — St, ssst,” was his warning. “Apaches 
all around us, the rocks are full of ’em.” 
We were some time in coaxing him out, and after 
that we did not leave him alone. He stayed a week, 
