What is generally known as the Southwest may be said to comprise all of Arizona and New Mexico, the greater portion of Texas, perhaps best described as arid Texas, southern California east of the Coast Range, and the western half of Oklahoma, including the "Strip." Eastern Texas, with its plentiful rainfall, its forests, and its fine plantations of cotton and corn, is quite a different country from western Texas, and must be classed with the South. In extent of territory the Southwest is an empire more than twice as large as Germany, and greater in area than the thirteen original States of the American Union. Its population is sparse and occupied almost exclusively in cattle-and sheep-raising, mining, and irrigation-farming, with a limited amount of lumbering. All its vast territory contains only a little more than half as many inhabitants as the city of Chicago. Its largest city, on the extreme eastern edge of the arid land, is San Antonio, Texas. All of its other cities are much smaller. It is traversed east and west by two, in Texas three, great railroads, running generally parallel, having many branches, and connected by several cross-cuts running north and south.
It is a land of amazing contrasts. It is both the oldest and the newest part of the United States--oldest in history and newest in Anglo-Saxon enterprise. Long before the Cavaliers set foot in Virginia or the first Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, even before St. Augustine in Florida was founded, the Spaniards had explored a considerable proportion of New Mexico and Arizona, and the settlements made soon afterward at Santa Fé and near Tucson were among the earliest on the American continent. Indeed, for many years the region was better known to white men than New England. Yet to-day there is no part of the United States so little explored, many places, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, being wholly unsurveyed. Probably the least-known spot in the country is the mysterious wilderness, nearly as large as Switzerland, which lies in the northwestern corner of Arizona beyond the Colorado River. It is bounded on the south and east by the stupendous and almost impassable chasm of the Grand Cañon, and on its other sides by difficult mountains and little-explored deserts. Here, in this long-known land, if anywhere on the continent, can be found the primeval wilderness of nature.