The progressive farmer and the cotton plant., 1905-07-04

Spanish missions OF which we nave peen speaA-
ing:
"Bell of the ancient years, whose solemn music
Still fills the wide expanse,
Tingeing the sober twilight OF the Present
With color of romance:
"Borne on the swell of your long waves recedng,
1t touch the farther Past
I see the dying olow of Spanish glory,
The sunset dream and lost?
The Country God Forgot.
Most of Texas is fertile, but a dozen Rhode
Islands could be made out of her barren wastes
almost uninhabited country, poorly watered, tree
less, and with only the scrawniest of vegetation.
It is out in New Mexico and Arizona, however,
that you find the desert proper-the desolatlon
of desolations, the country God forgot. Here we
went hundreds and hundreds and hundreds OF
miles, barren following barren, waste following
waste; no trees, no grass, no water; no farms, no
towns, no houses-except a few disreputable adobe
shanties at the widely-separated stations which
the railway maintains; no Indians or cowboys or
cattle, not even a jack rabbit to be seen. Quilted,
CALLED and SCARED, the ill-favored earth as far as
the eye could reach lay b~listering beneath a pitt
less sun, with only the dusty cactus and sage
brush still maintaining the hard struggle for ex-
istence. All day long the train rushed through
at terrific speed, for there were practically no
stations to delay us:-morning, noon, afternoon
and night, and still the desert, sick, furnishing,
fever-stricken, offered up to Nature it's piteous
cry for water; still the desert lay around us
boundless, monotonous, with dreariness unspeak-
abl-intolerable indeed, but for the ever-visible
range of far-away mountains wrapped in a pecu-
liar purplish blue haze such as I have noticed no
where east of the Mississippi. 1t was behind this
range of mountains that the sun set, gliding them
with a glory such as I shall not soon forget; and
then the full moon rose large in the east and
Nights cooler air relieved the ~parching earth.
But the memory of the desert stayed with us, and
that all-expressive phrase-"the country God for
| got"-lingered in our minds. You must see the
country to know it: it cannot be described. From
Texas to California there are not a half dozen
places of enough Importance to justify a second
class railway in stopping. Through a considera-
BILE area the land is even below sea level, and here
the heat ordinarily is almost prostrating. AT
times even the sage brush and cactus disappear
and the vast, sea-like stretch of "bad lands"
scared and cracked, hopeless and lfeless, a veri-
table nightmare of Nature, has never a speck of
even dusty green to cheer the weary eye. And
the mountains, I neglected to say, are only gigan-
tic sun-baked clods-clods such as one of the elder
gods might have turned up in blowing some Tt
tanlc furrow across the bosom of the earth.
Yuma, on the boundary between California and
Arizona we pass-said to be the hottest place on
earth. A citizen who hadn't lived right died here
so the story goes, and was consigned to the re-
gions internal. But the climate there alas was
too cool for a Yuma-bred sinner, and he had to
send back for blankets!
L know now what an oasis is. Anybody knows
who has been all day on the desert and come Of
~nightfall to Indio, California. Here. as is emf