As already intimated, we found the Gila very high and still rising. In several places, it had just washed the banks away, destroying the road, and we had to pick our way across the bottoms, through the chemisal and mesquite, to the connecting part, the best we could. In this way, it seems, its channel is constantly shifting, and this was said to be one of the chief drawbacks to constructing acequias, and cultivating its fine bottom lands by irrigation. The head of an acequia to-day, tapping the river well, a month hence may be three feet or more out of water, and then all the work of excavating ditches, damming the river, etc., has to be done over again. The bed of the Gila itself, in the main, seems to be pure quicksand. At one point, a station-keeper showed us where a year before piles had been driven down fifty feet, in making a wing-dam to divert a portion of the river into an acequia; but at the first freshet, the cross currents had underbored everything, and left the head of the acequia high and dry. No doubt the river-bottoms are all exceedingly fertile, and would produce well, if irrigated; but not otherwise. Of these, there is a considerable breadth, at many points along the Gila, and, here and there, there had been some attempts at cultivation, but scarcely any worth mentioning. These bottoms nearly everywhere abound with bunch-grass and mesquite-timber--the one the delight of horses and cattle, the other invaluable in that treeless region. The mesquite has but little height; but its trunk is often two and three feet in diameter, though only about as many high, from which point it throws out great, sturdy, black, gnarled limbs for a distance of thirty or forty feet all around. We saw many of them, that I think could not have been more than five or six feet in height, the bend of the branches included; nevertheless, with their crooked and gnarled limbs, they sprawled over the ground for a diameter of fully seventy-five or one hundred feet. At first they strike you as dwarfs, puny in aspect and purpose; but afterwards, as stunted giants, massive in strength and power, writhing in very anguish, because unable to tower higher. For lumber purposes, the mesquite amounts to but little; but for fuel, it is invaluable, and the future settlers on the Gila will prize it highly. It occurs pretty much all through Arizona, on the best river-bottoms, and everywhere seems a providential institution. It makes a fire-wood scarcely inferior to oak or hickory, and bears a bean besides, which constitutes a large part of the subsistence of the Mexicans and the Indians there. These mesquite beans make a very sweet and palatable dish, and horses, mules, cattle, etc. are especially fond of them. The Mexicans we met _en route_ to California, were subsisting upon them almost entirely, and subsequently in wandering through a Pimo village, we found them in every storehouse. A Pimo belle, for a bundle of cigarritos,