TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNIA S. 
is the land, that he has to make long days’ journeys with 
scarcely a blade of food or a drop of w r ater for their suste¬ 
nance. Between Santa Fe and Rio San Juan, one of the main 
branches of the Colorado of the West, a distance of 150 miles, 
the traveller and his animals are sure to fare well; for most 
of the mountain sides and valleys abound in excellent pastur¬ 
age and pure ice-cold water, trickling down from the heights 
where the melting snows feed the springs till late in the sum¬ 
mer. After crossing the San Juan, in about Lat. 38° N., and 
approaching the valleys of the Sheetskadee and Grand -the 
great mountain tributaries of the Colorado,—the country be¬ 
comes generally sterile, and broken in every direction by deep 
ravines with perpendicular banks, opposing almost insur¬ 
mountable obstacles to the traveller’s progress; compelling 
him to search many days before he can find a feasible passage 
across.” 
The worthy Doctor thus describes the travelling down the 
banks of the Colorado : “ The water in nearly every instance 
after leaving the crossing of the Colorado in Latitude 38°N., 
down to the Californian Mountains, a distance of seven or 
eight hundred miles, is either very brackish and slimy, or so 
excessively saline, as to have in many instances a fatal effect 
on animals and men. In some few instances, indeed, good 
waters are found ; but like visits from the world above, they 
are 4 few and far between.’ Sometimes, too, the traveller 
crosses vast barren plains utterly destitute of water, and upon 
which vegetation is so scarce that there will hardly be a 
blade of grass to a square mile of surface ! Occasionally wild 
sage (salvia officinalis) is met with, but almost destitute of 
foliage. This, and the bare stems of other equally naked 
bushes, constitute the only food of wayfaring animals on these 
wastes. There are a few spots in this forsaken region where 
nature has attempted to chequer its desolation with green¬ 
ness. I found an occasional dry river bed, moistened only 
by the spring rains and the melting snows on the far distant 
mountains, which produced a few 4 canes,’ a diminutive 
