An emigrant passing over our route will meet or be overtaken by a mail party four times every month, while from our mail conductors he can always obtain the reliable information as to road, wood, water, grass, camping places, with directions where to find safe valleys in which to feed his stock for a few weeks, and transmit messages, letters, or any desired intelligence from friends before or behind him. I have received many expressions of satisfaction from emigrants I met on the road, and, also, from others in California, who, last season, on the trip, realized, in a small way, the advantages of the mail, in these respects to overland emigration. When camping, after a drive of about ten miles, we unharness in the middle of the road, and from one end of our route to the other, from San Antonio to San Diego, the road can almost be measured by the ashes of our camp fires. From Fort Hudson, in Texas, to Tazotal, on the Gila, a distance of 1,200 miles, nearly the whole of our route is over an elevated, dry country. When but a small amount of labor was requisite at first to make a road suited to staging, only a portion of this has ever had any labor bestowed on it beyond that of passing trains. From San Antonio to El Paso, a distance of 651 miles, the road was opened in the year 1849, by a government train of several hundred wagons, _en route_ to El Paso; since that time, the continual passage of government and freighting trains, as also of the Santa Fé and San Antonio mail coaches, had beaten down an excellent road, before the labors of the El Paso and Fort Yuma wagon road expedition commenced. That portion of our route situated between El Paso and the Pimos villages has never had even a government train to open it. Col. Leach’s labors will be of great service in straitening it, finding new watering places, enlarging others, and in constructing tanks, if the appropriation will admit of such an expenditure. A consultation of the items of my own journey, where I have put down each day’s advance, will tend to show the excellent condition of our roads, for we used a coach all the way from San Antonio to San Diego, sometimes drawn by six, never by less than four mules.