The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1889-10-13

The pastures OF the far west are famous
because they are 50 big. When the rage"
set in for ranching it was complacently cal
culated that lying Just east OF the Rocky
mountains was range some 800 miles from
north to south and 80 from east 10 west;
4ej 900 square miles, 2G0, 100000 acres i'll round
numbers, which would fatten-well, l don't
know how many cattle. A few years later
an interested public was astounded to learn
that the range was overstOcked. How many
million sheep and cattle died during the hard
winters in which this information was ac-
quired no one knows, but they do say that
Latham, of Laramie, one of the most elo-
queut upholders of the "living, -out-all-win-
ter" theory, gathered his sad eyed and diSap-
pointed sheep round him and kept them alive
through the sleet storms by reading aloud his
glowing articles in eastern papers. A poem
was written about this touching feet, which
had quite a run, but as the author was one
of those whose sheep had succumbed, said
poem was somewhat in the minor key.
But this is q depression. l started to give
an account of a little ride Of 900 miles | once
took across that part of the "area Of CORFU
CATION. " as Mai Powell calls it. which lies be-
tween the thirty-fifth and thirty-eighth par
allels The scheme was to see what sort of
country the then proposed thirty-fifth parallel
road was to run through and report the same
impartially TO my employers, and if my horse
had not died, and my sight become impaired
by the alkali dust, and my gizzard been revo-
lutionized by the sandy and mineralized
water, should have eventually have COM
pleted the survey, for my heart was in the
job. But there are things of which a good
bite is as convincing as a full meal-Iudian
turnip, for iDStance-and so l found it on the
desert
From Vinita, !. T., then the terminus of
the road, to tue eastern base OF the noun
tains the country is that so often described
as 1.-THE plains flanked most of it by going
around through Colorado. From Las Vegas
to Santa Fe there are the usual plateaus
canyons and mountain passes, and from
Santa Fe 10 Fort Wingate there was good
military road on which one could find drink
able water at least twice in days ride The
Mexicans west of the Rio Grande are very
much mixed, at least two-thirds Indian, l
should say, and one-third Spanish, and the
names they give TO springs, peaks and other
prominent objects are a fair index Of the
woful want of harmony between their de-
scription and the fact
Ell Rio C'the river'1, is ankle deep in June,
and FL Idto c'little rlver'), Is, perhaps, navi-
gable for shingles in a wet season. big
springs are so called because they send off
little rill which does not disappear in the
sand for half a mile or SO, and FL Bosque del
Santo Trinidad 1.-THE Grove of the Holy
Trinity, consists of dozen scrubby little
trees with puddle in the center, said puddle
diversified around the edges by the tracks of
Navajo goats and fringed by the skeletons of
dead mules. Tho some system runs through
all their nomenclature at Albuquerque /
was waited on 10y Jesus" they pronounce it
Haysoos, and lodged in ''palacio" of adobes
that is, dried mud. The full English of the
name ,{ their capital city is "Holy Faith of
st. Francis" and dirty little alkalied brook
is called the ''River of Souls" By the same
process the Yankee John Boggs, after locat-
ing in New Mexico and buying rancho, be-
comes Senior Juan de Palos, and Tim Muir
ply, who married wealthy Mexican lady,
signs his bank checks as Timotheus MurfandO.
It isn't English, you know, but it is charac-
teristically Mexican
To Fort Wingate, nearly 200 miles west Of
Santa Fe, and TO Defiance, forty miles be-
yond. the journey was comparatively easy.