This whole Southwest, or rather Northwest from a Mexican standpoint, is a country of deceptive appearances. Hundreds of my readers have probably traveled over the Santa Fé Railway as it courses through the Rio Grande valley, and, recalling the grassy, pleasant-looking country in the East, have wondered how this cheerless area of sand and sagebrush could ever be utilized. Yet in this valley is a farm of twenty-two acres for which sixty thousand dollars has been flatly refused, although not one cent of its value is due to its proximity to any important point (as the fact is with the valuable little farms around our Eastern cities), but solely to what it will produce. Verily the desolation of the land is deceptive, and, like beauty, is but skin deep.
NORTHWESTERN CHIHUAHUA (CONTINUED)--MEXICAN MORMON COLONIES--FROM LA ASCENSION TO CORRALITOS--SOME RUINS ALONG THE TAPASITA--A TOLTEC BABYLON.
It is sixty to sixty-five miles from Las Palomas to La Ascension, and not a settlement or a sign of life except jack rabbits, coyotes, and customhouse officers is to be seen throughout the whole length of this unusually rich country, so effectually did the Apaches enforce their restrictive tariff but a few years ago. At rare intervals great haciendas are found in these rich valleys, the main industry of which is cattle raising. We passed a herd of about a thousand head just before reaching La Ascension, all in magnificent condition, and attended by some eight or ten _vaqueros_, who were driving them to market. With the usual Mexican politeness they took particular pains to give us the road; and to do so drove the whole herd over a high hill, around the base of which the road ran.
Just before reaching La Ascension we came to the Mormon colony of Diaz (named by them in honor of the present President of the Mexican Republic), numbering about fifty families. A discussion of their religious tenets is clearly and fortunately out of my province, not only from its heavy, dreary character, but for the reason that everything wise and otherwise about Mormonism has already been put before those who care to read it. But entirely aside from the subject of polygamy, which has so completely obscured every other point about these people, they have one characteristic which is seldom heard of in connection with them and their wanderings in the Western wilderness. I refer to their building up of new countries. They have no peer in pioneering among the Caucasian races. They are so far ahead of the Gentiles in organized and discriminating, businesslike colonization, that the latter are not close enough to them to permit a comparison that would show their inferiority. Of course they (the Mormons) see in their belief an ample explanation for this excellence; it is far more probable, however, as I look at it from my Gentile point of view, that it is due to the peculiar organization of their Church, which so fits them for the work of making the wilderness blossom as the rose.