regions, the only safe rule is the rule of our western Borderers, to wit: "Never unbuckle your six-shooter, and never venture from your camp or train without your Spencer or Henry!" As I have already said, we found the intervening country substantially unsettled, and much of it will never amount to anything for agricultural purposes. Its mineral resources may be great; but, as a rule, it lacks both wood and water, and much of it is a barren desert, given over forever to chemisal and grease-wood. On the Agua Frio and Hassayampa, however, there are considerable bottoms, that might be successfully irrigated; and between the Gila and the Salado there is a wide district, that deserves some further notice. As you come up out of the Gila bottoms, you pass through scattered mesquite trees, and at length enter on a broad _mèsa_ (Spanish for "table-land"), ten or fifteen miles wide by thirty or forty long, which bears every evidence of having once been well cultivated, and densely populated. Instead of mesquite, you here find clumps of chemisal two or three feet high, and bits of broken pottery nearly everywhere. Farther on, some eight or ten miles from the Salado, you find immense ruins in various places, and soon strike a huge _acequia_ winding up from the Salado, in comparison with which all the _acequias_ we had yet seen in Utah or California were the veriest ditches. It must be, I should think, thirty feet wide by ten or twelve deep, and seems like a great canal of modern times. Just where the road to Fort McDowell crosses this, it subdivides into three or four lesser _acequias_, and these branch off over the _mèsa_ indefinitely. This great _acequia_ heads just above where we crossed the Salado. The river has a considerable descent or "rapids" there, and the ancient constructors of this gigantic water-course, apparently, knew well how to take advantage of this. They have tapped the river there by three immense mouths, all leading into one common channel; and this they have coaxed along down the bottoms, and gently up the bluff, until at a distance of miles away it at last gained the level of the _mèsa_, and there distributed abroad its fertilizing waters. So, there are other ancient _acequias_, furrowing the bottoms of the Salado on either side, though we observed none so large as this.