DOWN IN THE 
I hadn’t been in Las Vegas an 
hour before a reporter had his sema- 
| phore against me and wanted to 
| know what I thought of the city. 
| I suppose he knew I was a strang- 
© er because I wore a black hat and 
smoked white cigarettes. I told 
him it was the best town I had seen 
since Trinidad. He didn’t seem 
pleased, and I asked where I left 
the trail. But I had said it too soon 
and there was no use trying to 
‘square it. The hotel clerk told me 
what the bad break was. He said 
between Trinidad and Las Vegas was 
‘a few sand towns, Wagon Mound, 
Shoemaker and Arriba, and the com- 
parison was not flattering. One 
‘must have an open season mind 
readers’ license to please these rival 
town patriots. 
I took a street car as far as it 
went, then jumped into a Mexican 
‘ated and rode several miles into the 
country. And when I had climb- 
ed a sand butte overlooking Las 
Vegas, I found another traveler had 
beat me to it. He was an old Ger- 
man from Iowa. We watched a 
gang of Mexicans and a dredge cut- 
ting irrigation ditch down from the 
mountains, and the old fellow re- 
marked: 
_ “Up in Iowa we pay big money 
for ditches to carry the water away; 
down here they spend millions for 
ditches to bring it in”’. 
_ he people are land crazy and 
water crazy. There are irrigating 
companies, land companies, develop- 
- ment companies, co-operative com- 
_ panies—all kinds of companies ; 
some on the square to develop and 
reclaim the land, others to separate 
a man from his money. 
Jt seems to me that nature was 
more wise than man where years 
ago this part of the country was 
heaved up to cool off, and wait for 
land agents and Missourians. From 
Pueblo south for hundreds of miles 
there lay millions of acres, as level 
as a floor and fair to the eye— 
waiting for a time when crowding 
men shall devise a means to make 
them produce. And there these 
acres lay, wanting but water to 
make the deep, rich soil produce 
anything’ and everything. And 
- when our elbows begin to touch and 
necessity demands more room and 
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NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
SOUTHWEST. 
First of a Series of Letters from the Odd Places of New 
a Mexico. 
(By M. J. Brown, Eprror Lirmiz Vauiey, N. Y., Hus) 
more produce, then will the means 
be forthcoming. ‘ 
‘All this country needs is water”’, 
is the observation you will hear ev- 
erywhere, and coming from the east 
end of this dump of awountry, where 
the rain falls on just and unjust 
every ten days, 1 can’t help but 
come back at them with the old re- 
tort that that is all hell needs. 
Men come here in hundreds from 
the east and middle west attracted 
by the cheap lands and the Santa 
Fe’s pictorial folders. They come 
here with a little money to try ‘‘dry 
farming’’ and they go back with a 
prairie schooner and sad experience. 
For over three hundred days in the 
year the sun beats down, with never 
a cloud, with never a drop of rain- 
fall. 
But I didn’t come here to write 
you of land values and rainfall sta- 
tistics. 
I left the train here to get the 
cramps out of a pair of eastern legs 
and get away from Harvey eating 
houses for twenty-four hours—a day 
off to get my appreciation to work- 
ing for the wonders and ruins of the 
wierd old places that “1 will soon 
visit. 
But odd spots and strange people 
may be found anywhere in New 
Mexico and Arizona. 
Last winter, from the mountain 
Mexican hamlets south of Toas, I 
wrote an article of the Penitenties, 
‘ strange band of self-scorging Flag- 
gellants of whom we Americans 
know so little. For days I was snow 
bound in the canyons, and | saw 
them at their pagan rites—and | 
drank the poison that was intended 
to stop my investigations. 
I had supposed and learned that 
only in the remote mountain ham- 
lets were these Mexicans allowed to 
practice their wonderful fanaticism 
-—the most wonderful and awful in 
the civilized world—but I find that 
right here in Las Vegas, almost in 
sight of the brick blocks of Ameri- 
ean capitalists, this relic of barbar- 
ism of the Middle Ages is still prac- 
ticed, and men who are American 
citizens, men who serve as jurors 
and try white men, men who will 
soon be recognized under a new 
Continued to page 23 
7 
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