The men who, for whatever reasons, had made their way to this distant frontier, were nearly all men of character; not all of good character, certainly, but of positive, assertive individual character, with strong personality and self-reliance. (The weaklings remained at home.) Many of them were well bred and of more than ordinary intelligence, and maintaining the manners of gentlemen. Even the worst of these men are not to be classed with the professional “toughs” and “thugs” who came later with the railroads. They were neither assassins nor thieves nor robbers. Vices? Plenty; but they were not of the concealed or most degrading kinds. Violence? Yes, but such acts were usually the result of sudden anger or of a feeling that under the conditions then existing each man must right his own wrongs or they would never be righted. Their ideas of right and wrong were peculiar, but they _had_ such ideas nevertheless. I knew a young man who was well liked and had good prospects, who violated confidence and attempted to betray his benefactor. The facts became known. Now, if he had shot a man because he did not like him much, anyhow, or if he had run away with his neighbor’s wife, his conduct might have been overlooked. But treachery? Ingratitude? Never! He became the most despised man in the community. The merchants and business men were certainly an exceptional class. Honorable, highly intelligent, charitable and gentlemanly. I could name a dozen gentlemen who were here even as far back as the “sixties,” from which list I believe any President might have selected an able cabinet. Not all of these were of my own race; and yet, even these did not hold themselves entirely aloof from the other classes. The times did not favor or permit such exclusiveness. Common trials and dangers united the two races as one family, and the fact that one man was a Mexican and another an American was seldom mentioned, and I believe as seldom thought about. Each man was esteemed at his real worth, and I think our estimates of each other’s characters were generally more correct than in more artificial societies. Spanish was the language of the country, but many of our Mexican friends spoke English well, and often conversations, and even sentences, were amusingly and expressively made up of a blending of words or phrases of both languages. To the traveler, who had spent weeks crossing the dry and desert plains, this valley, with the grateful humidity of the atmosphere, the refreshing verdure, the perfume of the flowering shrubs, the rustling of the leaves of the cottonwood trees, and their cool shade, and in the spring or summer, the bloom of the many fruit trees, or the waving of grain fields, were all like a sight or breath of the Promised Land!