The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-12-24

the desert, often in a single night. If this watering could be kept up in the same bOuntiful way in which nature administers it, enough could be grown. on the fields of the Great American des- ert to feed the whole American people white, black and brown. Even now, plants which can supply themselves by sending tap root down to water, like the mesquite. or by holding water with in their body, as does the barrel cactus, are able to grow to great size during the dryest years; those who have seen the alfalfa grown at Manse, just over the Nevada line. or at Imperial, down in the lower portion of the California desert, have no doubt of the future of a region that can produce such as these. Of course, as Is true even in the most fertile and best watered sections of the entire state, there are parts of hesert that would not produce the commonest weeds under the best Of care and irri- gation. Such basins as that immediate ly surrounding Salton Sea-" Owens Lake and Death Valley are unredeem- able for agriculture. but they, in their turn, may in the future prove more val- uable for their mineral wealth than all the rest of the desert for it's farming lands; in every acre of the desert there is something of value. something that will return an immense interest or the capital invested if it be properly devel- oped.
 To the stranger for the first time pen- etrating beyonG the borders of the des- ert one of the most peculiar of all the features of the great, dried-outsea bot tom is its typical town. Towns such as Imperial and others which have sprung up under similar conditions of settle- ment are in no way representative of the real desert town, for they are vil- lages of real homes, set up by tillers of the soil who intend to remain perma- nent settlers of the region they have in Vaded. The genuine town of this sec ton is mining camp, and it's inhabi- tants form the most cosmopolitan pop ulation to be found in any settlement, be it crossroads Village or teeming city, in the world. Here are gath cred the riffraff of the last frontier the United States will ever krow, while mingled with them are sturdy miners drafted from the four corners of the world all lured by the hope of a last lucky strike, and some of them make it; but the great majority move on to some other newly discovered ledge which gives better promise of wealth than the one on whih they passed the last year or two. In a town like Randsburg, past the experimental stage and now supported by such a paying mine as thes Yellow Aster, whose payroll is. of curse, the back bone of it's life, almost every one has some settled occupation. With some this is the successful manipulation of the faro bank or the separating of the miners from their money by some less hazardous method-the keeping Of a general merchandise store, for example; but with the great majority It IS min ing, either as the hired men of some proved property or else as free lance miners, each working precarious ex- istence out of some hole in a side hill near one of the mines already on pay ing basis. Then there are the teams ters, without whom no desert town could long exist, for their relative scar city or abundance testifies pretty accu- rately to the degree of business life there is in the settlement. As a rule they are hard swearing, hard drink Ing, hard fighting crowd yet they know the desert as few city men know the street in which they live, and l, for one, would want no better friend, in trouble or out of it, than some of the men who handle the twenty mule teams of the California desert.
 From what I have already said it may be easily gathered that the desert town is not very permanent sort of a place; nor is it. As may be seen from the photo, all the houses are of the fiimsiest construction; some of the peo- pie living iii tents in the heart of win ter, which in the vicinity of Bands burg, at least, is decidedly cold and stormy. Tn the earlier days, at the time Tacopah and some other now abandoned mining camps were built, the only material at hand was adobe, and almost all the houses, except those belonging to the leading mining compa ny, were made of that material It has not stood the wear of the elements well, and one might easily believe he had landed in the midst of some ruined pu .ebla of the Zuni were it not for the va rious black bottles scattered round about through the empty streets. A deserted village that once sheltered two thousand or three thousand souls, now buried in the heart of the Great Basin, is a lonely place, and one soon learns to prefer his camp out on the mesa, where the hawling coyotes lull him to sleep, to spending the night in such place. Ivanpah is another promising town of this region, as is also Borate, not to speak of Beaumont, i'll Riverside county.
 The climate of the California desert in midwinter is the finest to be found in the world, bar none. The air is balmy, the days warm, the nights cool enough for comfortable sleep. Mosqui- toes, f1eas and other insect pests are unknown (save by the Indians and half breeds whose society it is not ne cessary to cultivate, while flies are ab- solutely minus quantity on the desert. No one can complain of lack of air to breathe or of delicate appetite, in this