At this same point huge mountains are seen to lift themselves up bodily
and squat down again in the highway. Near these buttes, which are known
as the Evil Ones, away back in the sixties a small force of cavalry was
making its way from Fort Yuma to Fort Whipple. Owing to the extreme heat
during the day, and as a further precaution against the hostile Indians,
they were obliged to march at night, finding shelter in some mountain
cañon during the day.
Shortly after daybreak, as they were preparing to go into camp, a whole
legion of painted devils appeared on their front and hardly a quarter of
a mile distant. The troops were thrown into confusion, and an order was
immediately given to break ranks, and every man concealed himself behind
the rocks, awaiting the attack which all felt must necessarily end in
massacre.
For some minutes the Indians were seen to parley and gesticulate with
each other, but they gave no signs of having noticed their hereditary
foe. The unhappy troopers, however, were not kept in suspense long. As
the great red disk of the day began to mount slowly up over the
adjoining mountains, the redskins vanished as noiselessly and as
suddenly as they had appeared.
Used as they were to treachery, and fearing some uncanny trick, the
soldiers maintained their position throughout the long hot day, nor did
they attempt to move until late in the night. Some weeks later it was
learned from captives that on that very morning a band of nearly one
thousand Chinhuevas and Wallapais were lying in wait for this same
command but ninety miles up the river, expecting the soldiers by that
route.
The most remarkable of all the mirages which have been witnessed in
Arizona, at least by white man's eyes, was seen some years ago by an
entire train-load of passengers on the Southern Pacific Railroad, near
the small eating station of Maricopa, thirty-five miles below Phoenix.
The train was due at the eating station at 6.30 A. M.
At 6.15 o'clock it stopped at a small water-tank a few miles east.
During this stop the trainmen and such of the passengers as were awake
were amazed to see spring out of the ground on the sky a magnificent
city. The buildings were of the old Spanish and Morisco architecture,
and were mostly adobe. Spacious court-yards lay before the astonished
lookers-on, filled with all varieties of tropical fruits and vegetation.
Men and women clothed in the picturesque garbs of Old Spain were seen
hurrying along the narrow, irregular streets to the principal edifice,
which had the appearance of a church. Had the astonished spectators been
picked up bodily and landed in one of the provincial towns of Seville or
Andalusia, they would not have seen a more dazzling array of stately
senoras and laughing black-eyed _muchachas_ of the land of forever
_manana_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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