SEE, stretching yonder o'er that low divide Which parts the falling rain,--the eastern slope Sends down its waters to the southern sea Through Double Mountain's winding length of stream; The western side spreads out into a plain, Which sinks away o'er tawny, rolling leagues At last into the rushing Rio Grande,-- See, faintly showing on that distant ridge, The deep-cut pathways through the shelving crest, Sage-matted now and rimmed with chaparral, The dim reminders of the olden times, The life of stir, of blood, of Indian raid, The hunt of buffalo and antelope; The camp, the wagon train, the sea of steers; The cowboy's lonely vigil through the night; The stampede and the wild ride through the storm; The call of California's golden flood; The impulse of the Saxon's "Westward Ho" Which set our fathers' faces from the east, To spread resistless o'er the barren wastes, To people all the regions 'neath the sun-- Those vikings of the old Mackenzie Trail. It winds--this old forgotten cattle trail-- Through valleys still and silent even now, Save when the yellow-breasted desert lark Cries shrill and lonely from a dead mesquite, In quivering notes set in a minor key; The endless round of sunny days, of starry nights, The desert's blank immutability. The coyote's howl is heard at dark from some Low-lying hill; companioned by the loafer wolf They yelp in concert to the far off stars, Or gnaw the bleached bones in savage rage That lie unburied by the grass-grown paths. The prairie dogs play sentinel by day And backward slips the badger to his den; The whir, the fatal strike of rattlesnake, A staring buzzard floating in the blue, And, now and then, the curlew's eerie call,-- Lost, always lost, and seeking evermore. All else is mute and dormant; vacantly The sun looks down, the days run idly on, The breezes whirl the dust, which eddying falls Smothering the records of the westward caravans, Where silent heaps of wreck and nameless graves Make milestones for the old Mackenzie Trail.