The desert still maintains its fastnesses in the West. There are some spots better entitled to the name than others, but each year these fastnesses are shrinking before the advance of human enterprise, as the water might rise over the land, leaving the high and difficult places to the last. So these islands are scattered through several States and Territories, mostly in Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah and Oregon, in the great valley lying between the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains, on the east, and the Cascades, Sierra Nevada, and the Coast Range on the west. Chief among them are the Mohave Desert, in southeastern California, a territory as large as Switzerland; the Colorado and Gila deserts of southwestern Arizona and Southern California; the marvelous Painted Desert of northeastern Arizona; and the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. Opening northward from the Mohave Desert lies Death Valley, perhaps the most desolate and forbidding spot in America, though comparatively small in extent. Yet there are few places even in these desert strongholds that are wholly without life of one sort or another, and a large proportion of them could be reclaimed, if water were available. Even as it is, not one can bar human activity; railroads have been built directly across three of the worst of them; mines are being opened, and oil-wells driven; land is being reclaimed by irrigation; and even in the fastnesses of Death Valley there are many mining-camps and an extensive borax industry. In all the West, look as you will, you will find no desert more pitifully forlorn, more deserted, more irreclaimable, and more worthless than the man-made deserts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan, where fire has followed the heedless lumberman and spread a black and littered waste thousands of square miles in extent, where once grew a splendid green forest of pine. One is beautiful with the perfected grandeur into which nature molds even the most unpromising material; the other is hideous, grotesque, pitiful, a reminder of the reckless wastefulness of man. The natural desert, indeed, abounds in a strange and beguiling beauty of its own that lays hold upon a man's spirit, perhaps rudely at first, yet with a growing fascination that, once deeply felt, forever calls and calls the wanderer home again. In the spell that it weaves over a man, it is like the sea: the love of the sailor for his life is not more faithful than that of those bronzed, silent riders of the desert for the long hot stretches of their open land.