Approaching the hacienda we passed immense droves of horses and cattle grazing on the rich bottom lands. Corralitos has a very pretty, an almost poetical name, but it loses much of its romantic character when it is known that it is named for some old, dilapidated sheep pens that once existed here, corralitos being little pens or little corrals. It is a hacienda, some eighty or ninety years old, with an extremely interesting history, that would make a book more thrilling than any fiction. The main building is a great square inclosure with very thick walls, having many loopholes for guns, and high turrets or towers at the corners. To enter the building are massive gates, while inside are a number of courts with other gates leading to other inclosures, and making the interior building appear like a small town. Here during the fierce Apache raids the whole population was gathered for protection, and the crack of Apache rifles has often been heard around the thick walls. Dons of Spanish blood have extracted fortunes from the mountain sides near by in mines that have been worked since shortly after the Conquest. It is a hacienda of about a million acres in extent, and one of the most beautiful in the whole State of Chihuahua, the Casas Grandes River running for some thirty miles through the estate. The true hacienda, of which we hear so much in Mexican narration, is really a definite area of twenty-two thousand acres, but the name is now used so as to mean almost any estate, whether large or small, under one management. With the advance of railways haciendas are slowly disappearing, and will soon exist only in poetry or fiction. The views from the hacienda are beautiful in the extreme. To the east lies a range of mountains filled with seams of silver, the Corralitos Company working some thirty to forty mines; while one hundred and fifty to two hundred "prospects" await development. These mines have been known and worked since the Spaniards entered this part of Mexico. To the west of the hacienda flows the Casas Grandes River, flanked on either side by enormous old cottonwood trees; while for a background rise the immense peaks of the Sierra Madres, covered with snow, and breaking into all sorts of fantastic shapes as they extend down toward the river. The Corralitos Company is owned mainly in the United States, New York capitalists being the principal stockholders.