I shall try and give my readers some slight idea of the wealth of this portion of a country so famous in early Spanish conquest. In those great, broken barrancas, leading out to the westward from the heart of the Central Sierra Madres, I found myself in the richest mineral district of America, and probably the richest in the world. The fact that this is not generally known (and, to tell the truth, but very little has ever been published in the English language about so rich a district, and that little is very old) would make it easy to write a book on this region alone, and still leave a great deal unsaid. One of the late cyclopedias says of Mexican mines, "Almost one-half of the total yield [of silver] is derived from the three great mining districts in Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Catorce." Like most cyclopedias, this one was a little late in its information when printed, although it had an inkling of the truth in saying: "The State of Sinaloa is said to be literally covered with silver mines. Scientific explorers who visited the Sinaloa mines in 1872 reported that those on the Pacific slope would be the great source of the supply of silver for the next century." The fact is that the center of the greatest source of supply has moved even north of Sinaloa, to about the boundary line between the States of Chihuahua and Sonora, and about one-third of the way from its southern end. Taking either Batopilas or Urique as a base, and with a radius of 180 or 200 miles, that is, a diameter of 400 miles on them as a center, there is no doubt that the resulting circle will include the richest mining district in America, and probably in the world, both in a present and prospective sense. From within that circle comes a little over one-fourth the bullion of the whole of Mexico, although this area is insignificant compared with all the territory of that celebrated republic.