This particular country is the back-yard of the world. It is to the rest of the West what the ash-covered lots near High Bridge are to New York. It is the country which led General Sheridan to say that if he owned both places, he would rent Texas and live in hell. It is the strip of country over which we actually went to war with Mexico, and which gave General Sherman the opportunity of making the epigramme, which no one who has not seen the utter desolateness of the land can justly value, that we should go to war with Mexico again, and force her to take it back. It is a country where there are no roses, but where everything that grows has a thorn. Where the cattle die of starvation, and where the troops had to hold up the solitary train that passes over it once a day, in true road-agent fashion, to take the water from its boilers that their horses might not drop for lack of it. It is a country where the sun blinds and scorches at noon, and where the dew falls like a cold rain at night, and where one shivers in an overcoat at breakfast, and rides without coat or waistcoat and panting with the heat the same afternoon. Where there are no trees, nor running streams, nor rocks nor hills, but just an ocean of gray chaparral and white, chalky cañons or red, dusty trails. If you leave this trail for fifty yards, you may wander for twenty miles before you come to water or a ranch or another trail, and by that time the chaparral and cactus will have robbed you of your clothing, and left in its place a covering of needles, which break when one attempts to draw them out, and remain in the flesh to fester and swell the skin, and leave it raw and tender for a week. This country, it is almost a pleasure to say, is America’s only in its possession. No white men, or so few that they are not as common as century-plants, live in it. It is Mexican in its people, its language, and its mode of life. The few who inhabit its wilderness are ranch-owners, and their shepherds and cowboys; and a ranch, which means a store and six or seven thatched adobe houses around it, is at the nearest three miles from the next ranch, and on an average twenty miles. As a rule, they move farther away the longer you ride towards them. [Illustration: WATER]