The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-12-10
From the New York World.

From the New York world
 rYHE Mexican is despised and rejected
 save as a railway or ranch hand
 l but his marks are visible over Lower California in the architecture and the hats the superior gringos wear. The Atchison has pushed its Mexican track gangs almost to Chicago.
 Nothing could be more sterile or unin- viting in appearance than the lands where the lemon and the orange grow-oe1ore the trees are planted and water turned on from the irrigating plants The vegeta- ton is of the rustiest where there IS any with an underlying cactus growth, and the soil looks thin and poor. But 1t IS only thirsty and pays grateful return to those who are brave and dnlgeht enough to moisten it's parched surface.
 Three hours away from Los Angeles on the Santa Fe end the orchards and the palms, the flowers and the green reaches of alfalfa, and there comes the region or scrub and sand, dotted with peaked hills showing here and there streak or stone. It is the. Mohave desert, region Into which Saul could have gone forth and wandered to his hearts content, where W
 the waters are bitter and man is without friend!
 If would seem as If countless centuries of sage-brush and greasewood should have decayed and made top-soil, but these grim samples of vegetation appar- ently neither grow nor die! But if earth is unlkind the sky smiles as nowhere ex- cept. over the desert. The atmosphere Is without a cloud and the color Is some thing less than blue, but crystalline and ambient beyond the words devoted to de- scription. The sun Is master here, for behind the coast range the rains do not Intrude and the sea winds are robbed Of their moisture on the fertile intervening plains.
 The first station after the coast range Is passed in sea of sunburned sand is Hes peria. No golden apples were growing there.
 The trains run through the desert with curtains drawn and fans a-blowing. Dust, which once added to the terror of the trip, is now well laid by the oil pumped up from the regions below to be sprinkled so the restless sand cannot rise.
 The santa re -lOilOWS 'tilc WdlciiCoS course of the Mohave river until 1t loses even the guise of a bed in the desert sand. Between it's rise in the San Ber- nardino mountains and Barstow, the junction with the railroad to the oil dis trict at Bakersfield, there are glimmers of wetness and lines of cottonwoods, with here and there a ragged ranch living off the few drops the desert spares.
 There is gold in the pointed hills of the desert and some mines flourish The cattle folks, too, fatten their fiocks in deep-bored artesian well flows enough to feed acres of alfalfa and apple orchards which produce amazing fruit. So the des- ert is being overcome by a slow, persist ent invasion that may be hurried little now that the oil workers are prospecting along the river and between the hills. The heat gets up easily to no at Bar stow, and 116 is not uncommon. It was so warm that the feet of the numerous flies carried by the Santa Fe felt cold as they frolicked over one's visage. Un- daunted by this the Santa Fe Is building a fine hotel and depot in the hot sand to accommodate folks connecting with its | line to San Francisco via Bakersfield, and T. G. Nicklin, a veteran at the craft, has
 hung out the sign of the Barstow Printer and issues that publication weekly. He
 says San Bernardino county is the biggest one in the world and ought to be cut in two and named after Ryan. the Death
 Valley explorer. with Barstow as eoun-
 ty seat. Conventions of both parties, he complains. ignored the desert. "The plat