The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-10-14
HOTTEST AMERICAN TOWN.
It is Yuma, Ariz and it Holds the Rec-
 ord

ord.
 The people who flee to the mountains and seashore these summer days as if before a pestilence, when what they know as the heated term is on, can have no idea what hot weather really is until they have spent few days in this old town on the Colorado river in south western Arizona. The people who tell ag- onizing tales of their suffering in the periods of temperature among the nine ties in the great cities ought to come out here these summer days to know better what Old Sol can do in the way of matchmaking when he gets really down to business. What would you say to living in a spot where not a blade of grass may be seen, where there is nothing green gut a few trees shim- mering in the dusty shunshin, where the earth everywhere is so hot that one cannot stand upon it with bare feet, and where from June to early October the temperature is seldom below ninety degrees, and more generally about the 10th degree mark-once in while run ming up to 123 and 125 degrees? What would you think of a temperature for a full month not less than 97 degrees, of two weeks at a time verying from 10S to 115 degrees. and even week at a time over 112 degrees in the shade? That is what the residents of this quaint old town of Yuma have regularly each summer So far this season the Yu- mans have had two spells of wealth CT when the mercury climbed up to 117 degrees In the shade every morning for a few successive days, and descended to 96 and 100 degrees in the night From June 10 to814 the daily temperature ranged from 1o7 to 115 degrees From June IS to June 21 inclusive the temper ature on each afternoon went as high as IF degrees in the shade.
 Yuma has been the banner town of America for forty or fifty years. That ancient, palsied and weather-beaten story about the soldier who lived and died in the garrison at Yuma, and whose ghost came back one night for his army blankets for use down in chill ly, frosty he'll has gone far and wide throughout the world (even Dr. Depew recently told 1t to a group of reporters who welcomed him home in New Fork from his tour of the Pacific coast) and has given a certain characteristic to the fame of the town. In the forties and flfties the army garrison at Yuma was famous among Uncle Sam's sol- diers as the most dreaded post on the | frontier and the letters and diaries of such military men as Generals Albert ] Sidney Johnston, Edward r. Beale and Kearney, who served their military | apprenticeship there, are plentiful with comments on the terrific hot weather l of Fort Yuma in the summer months while they served there.
 | All conditions seem to unite in mak- ing Yuma the hot summer spot it is.
 It is located in low, basin-like locali- | ty on the edge of the lazy, muddy Col l orado river, as it meanders through l desert sands and adobe soil down to 1 the Gulf of California Away to the | west, across the river, and to the south 1 stretches the Colorado desert, several | thousand square miles in area. It is 1 so merciless, ghastly and fierce a des-
 ert waste that no one dares cross it by
 wagon or on foot in the summer months, and never in winter or early | spring, unless accompanied by a com l panion or two, and fitted out with an | abundance of drinking water and food. | Every summer there are venturesome | miners who lay down their lives in try l ing to cross those deserts because they are overtaken by a sandstorm, or are | weakened unto death by the dreadful heat
 Rain falls in Yuma and the region roundabout but four or five times in a year, and then only in the early win l ter months. There are, however, some very heavy floods here in the months of February and March, when the wa | ter in the Colorado river rises and