I don't know what reason there is for it, neither do the Indians of the Southwest know; but Casa Grande, the Great House, or the Place of the Morning Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their race traditions; the scene of their mythical "golden age," when there were no Apaches raiding the crops, nor white men stealing land away; when life was a perpetual Happy Hunting Ground, only the hunters didn't kill, and all animals could talk, and the Desert was an antelope plain knee-deep in pasturage and flowers, and the springs were all full of running water. Casa Grande is undoubtedly the oldest of all the prehistoric ruins in the United States. It lies some eighteen to twenty-five miles, according to the road you follow, south of the station called by that name on the Southern Pacific Railroad. It isn't supposed to rain in the desert after the two summer months, nor to blow dust storms after March; but it was blowing a dust storm to knock you off your feet when I reached Casa Grande early in October; and a day later the rain was falling in floods. The drive can be made with ease in an afternoon; but better give yourself two days, and stay out for a night at the tents of Mr. Pinkey, the Government Custodian of the ruins. The ruin itself has been set aside as a perpetual monument. You drive out over a low mesa of rolling mesquite and greasewood and cactus, where the giant suaharo stands like a columned ghost of centuries of bygone ages. "How old are they?" I asked my driver, as we passed a huge cactus high as a house and twisted in contortions as if in pain. From tip to root, the great trunk was literally pitted with the holes pecked through by little desert birds for water. "Oh, centuries and centuries old," he said; "and the queer part is that in this section of the mesa water is sixty feet below the surface. Their roots don't go down sixty feet. Where do they get the water? I guess the bark acts as cement or rubber preventing evaporation. The spines keep the desert animals off, and during the rainy season the cactus drinks up all the water he's going to need for the year, and stores it up in that big tank reservoir of his. But his time is up round these parts; settlers have homesteaded all round here for twenty-five miles, and next time you come back we'll have orange groves and pecan orchards."