
          Frontera June 28th 1851

My Dear Dr.

I lead my letter with a place with which
you may not be familiar. So I had better explain. Frontera is
a single adobe house some two hundred feet by one hundred 
in dimensions including the court or open inclosure so common
I may say universal in oriental architecture. It is situated about 
eight miles above El Paso, belongs to a Mr. White and is
rented by the Boundary Commission as a kind of camp store
house, observatory, etc. I wrote to you from our camp in
the great bend of the San Pedro about a month ago (I think).

We marched on from there with considerable rapidity resting
but two or three days on our journey, hither and traveling a
good deal in the nights. This I should have very much regretted
if the flora nearly all the way had not been parched
entirely up by a drought of many months. On the [?]
which before furnished me with so many plants that I hardly
had any rest day or night. I now formed a very scanty number
of species in season and most of the vegetation was entirely dead.
At the head of the stream I found a very pretty Epilobium a
blue-flowered [?] some grasses & other plants. From that camp
onward I collected but few. In this neighborhood no rain has
fallen for a year - so you may judge. The propect for making
collections is very dull. I have a very pretty cariety of
Cactaceae to which I shall make some addition here and send
all I have collected back by the returning train. I am confident 
that I have passed over some Mammillaria allied to
M. applanata which I observed on the [?] and which
had been burnt over & injured. The whole region of this creek to the
summit of the mountains had recently been swept over by fire
        