Rio Grande

“ The Rio Grande makes a long bend where the boys left it, and almost returns upon itself after winding in and out for many miles. The land is swampy in places as the river approaches Painted Cave, but mountains show, too, and the country is without any population to speak of. Its general features are rugged.
As the lads alternated between rocky soil and swamp, they had little leisure for conversation. It took about all their strength and agility to make their way, leaping, now, over pools of water, now climbing over rocky elevations. ”

“ It stands at the head of a beautiful valley, on the Rio Catarina, one of the tributaries of the Rio Grande. It is entirely shut in by mountains whose strange shapes give to the scenery a peculiar character which cannot be lost when the tide of travel shall sweep away many other landmarks. ”

“ It was a small village and military post, seven leagues from the city, having a great stone arch and gateway commanding the road. Another relay, and an hour's gallop brought the spires and towers of the goodly town in sight—standing in the midst of an immense plain, and watered by a branch of the Rio Grande. Passing through a town, with a noble church and convent, we crossed the river by a substantial stone bridge, where stood statues of Santa Anna and other patriots, with their noses knocked off, and faces otherwise scarified. ”

“ Lilac and blue mountains ring the valley on both sides, and from them emerald fields of alfalfa, sparkling in the sun, slope down to the old, winding stream. Because its silt is so fertile, one race has succeeded another here—cliff-dwellers, Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and American—and a remnant of each, save the earliest, has clung where living is easy. So we came all along the Rio Grande for a hundred miles to little groups of towns, each allotted to a different race keeping itself to itself, Mexican, American, and Indian.
It was under the deep-blue night sky that we saw our first pueblo town. ”

“ As a background to this bright, sunlit picture, and one that throws it into strong relief, rise range upon range of the dark hills with their shaven summits, starting up abruptly in the first instance from the confines of the town itself, and fading away gradually into the misty distance of the province of Rio Grande. Skirting the base of the hill to the east is a short avenue devoid of buildings that serves as the frontier line, and marks with no little emphasis where one town ends and the other begins. ”

“ Rio Grande (known also as Rio Bravo del Norte) , an important river of North America, rises in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado; flows SE., dividing Texas from Mexico, and enters the Gulf of Mexico after a course of 1800 m.; is navigable for steamboats some 500 m.; chief tributary, Rio Pecos; also the name given to the head-stream of the river Paraná in Brazil and Argentina.
Rio Grande do Norte (310) , a maritime State in the NE. corner of Brazil, called after the Rio Grande, which flows NE. and enters the Atlantic at Natal, the capital of the State. ”

“ There these sixty thousand persons reside. In the mountains on the right and left are streams which, obeying the natural tendency as tributaries, should flow into the Rio Grande, and which, in certain seasons, when rains are abundant, do, some of them, actually reach the Rio Grande; while the greater part always, and all for the greater part of the year, never reach an outlet to the sea, but are absorbed in the sands and desert plains of the country. ”

“ One corps, spreading out in broad battalions, marches across the great prairies and winding through the gorges of the Rocky mountains, encamps on the shore of Peaceful sea: another, skirting the waves of the gulfs and fording the wide rivers of the South, plants its outposts on the Rio Grande; a third cuts its way through the trackless forests on the northern border till it strikes the lakes, and then crossing these inland seas or passing round them, pauses and breathes for a season in that great expanse known as the country of the Red River of the North. ”

“ The complexity of the region’s geology, scenery, and terrain is matched by an equally complex history.
The history is a mosaic of many hues, some harsh and stark like its dry desert mountains, some inviting like the shade and coolness of its timbered canyons and mountain springs. First were the many diverse and sometimes hostile Indian cultures. There were peaceful pueblo peoples tilling their lands, using the Rio Grande’s flowing water to produce abundance. ”

“ Off to Del Norte and Wagon Wheel Gap! That meant a long run. We might have gone afoot across the Cunningham Pass and down the Alpine fastness of the Rio Grande’s birthplace almost as speedily as the train would take us, back to Durango, over the heights and glories of Toltec, down the mazy labyrinth of the Whiplash, and across the sheep pastures of San Luis. ”

“ The coast is one great sand beach, broken only at one point—that of the outlet of the two lakes, called the Rio Grande, which affords an entrance to navigable inland waters and several ports. There are two distinct river systems in Rio Grande do Sul—that of the, eastern slope draining to the tide-water lakes, and that of the La Plata basin draining westward to the Uruguay. ”

“ For the governor of Rio Grande, of whom I have already spoken, assured us that in the neighbourhood of this island there were considerable rivers which were found to be extremely rich, and that this was the reason that a garrison, a military governor, and a new colony was settled there. And as the harbour at this island is by much the securest and the most capacious of any on the coast, it is not improbable, if the riches of the neighbourhood answer their expectation, but it may become in time the principal settlement in Brazil, and the most considerable port in all South America. ”

“ And yet there lives just such a people at our very doors; just across the Rio Grande, in that strange land of romance and fiction, where the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries go hand-in-hand and never unite; where the variation in temperature is less than at any other place on the globe; where an ancient race live among the ruined temples and pyramids of a race they know not of; where the traveler finds mouldering ruins of hewn stone engraved with figures and animals that have no likeness anywhere else, except amid the ruins of Egypt; it is here you find the Land Without Chimneys. ”

“ Around it spreads an arid plain, sloping slightly where it approaches the Rio Grande, and bordered by mountains which toward the south are of moderate height, while toward the north they rise into fine peaks, glorious with eternal snow. ”

“ Nobody can stay long in Santa Fé, without becoming aware of the Rio Grande’s influence on the dwellers in its valley. It furnishes not only their livelihood, but little daily happenings, “So and So’s car got stuck crossing at Espanola, and had to stay in the river two days,”—“The river rose and tore down the bridge at Buckman, and they say there will be two more bridges down by night.”—“You can’t get out at Pojoaque, this week.” But to see the river in its magnificence, one should drive over [Pg 186] the canyon of the Rio Grande, following along the precipitous road to Taos. ”

“ The city is built on a low sandy peninsula, barely 5 ft. above sea-level, formed by two arms of the Rio Grande projecting westward from the main channel, the peninsula being part of a large sandy plain extending southward. along the coast to Lagôa Mirim. The level of the plain is broken by ranges of sand dunes, some of which rise not far from the city on the south and south-east. The openness of the surrounding country and the proximity of the sea give to Rio Grande unusually healthy conditions, which, however, are largely counteracted by defective sanitary arrangements. ”

“ Down this old winding trail into the greatest valley of all the world, and beyond that valley out into the Spanish country, moved steadily the adventurers whose fathers had but recently crossed the Appalachians. One of the strongest thrusts of the American civilization thus entered the cattle-range at its lower end, between the Rio Grande and the Red River.
In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting, soldiering, riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for what might come, there was ever a trading back and forth between home-staying men and adventuring men. ”

“ This will revolutionize this port and make Rio Grande do Sul a port of call for European and American steamers. It will not only give an easy outlet to Southern Brazil, but a much shorter [155] one for Northern Uruguay and a part of Argentina.
Rio Grande do Sul of to-day is a thrifty little city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, with pretty parks and narrow streets, but nothing outside of its shipping to attract much attention to itself. There are schools, colleges and churches, charitable institutions and a library, all of which are excellent in themselves. ”

“ The course of the Rio Grande is certainly the most tortuous that I have seen; the Mississippi compared to it is a straight line. By observing only the direction, one will often be at a loss whether he ascends or descends the river. I remembered one place particularly, where it runs directly south; after having made some five miles, it returns due north so nearly to the same place from which it started, that it is only separated from it by a small strip of sand bank. ”

“ The vicinity of Rio Grande is extremely populous; in a circuit of twenty leagues, the inhabitants, including the troops, are estimated at 100,000. Their principal occupations are, the breeding of cattle, for which the immense tract of pastureland is so well calculated; the drying and preparing of hides, and the making of charque, or what [444] is called, in the river Plata, jug-beef. ”

“ In coming back to the United States me and Andy stubbed our toes against a little town in Texas on the bank of the Rio Grande. The name of it was Bird City; but it wasn’t. The town had about 2,000 inhabitants, mostly men. I figured out that their principal means of existence was in living close to tall chaparral. Some of ’em were stockmen and some gamblers and some horse peculators and plenty were in the smuggling line. Me and Andy put up at a hotel that was built like something between a roof garden and a sectional bookcase. ”

“ There are several remedies; one calls for a liberal fomentation with hot goat's milk, and in the other, a young man appears to marry the girl. Often when women were bathing in the waters of the Rio Grande itself, or in some of the great "acequias," mischievous boys would yell "Axolotl!" ”

“ A great many rivers run into Rio Grande, which has more the appearance of a vast lake or inland sea than a river. On the banks of these rivers [450] we find many settlers enjoying most beautiful situations, and lands to a great extent. Here may be said to be the finest situations for growing wheat; falls of water for mills, and excellent water conveyance to ships wanting cargoes, who might with the greatest facility load and transport it all over Brazil, the Cape, Isle of France, &c. ”

“ El Paso was the scene of great activity a year ago, when the Rio Grande was the dividing line between the United States and Mexico. Streets were crowded with men in uniform, and restaurants and saloons contributed their full quota to the general confusion.
The city, however, was quieter now, and the boys had no difficulty in finding their way about. Troops still guarded the Mexican line, but they were inconspicuous.
Clay had, in a measure, recovered, though he was still weak. He was able to sit on deck and watch the moving panorama which is to be seen in all frontier cities. ”

“ The pine forests of Paraná and Santa Catharina with their flowery carpets were a series of fine pictures, while the wide-spread sunny pastures of southern Rio Grande, a perfect cattle country with a cool climate, are waiting 142for more white immigrants. Herds stray on the sides of gentle grassy slopes and in the valleys where a cluster of green marks the bed of a little river, fields are marked out and a red-tiled house nestles—but these are all too few. ”

“ I found, in a description of the river bank of the Rio Grande below Laredo, that 41 entire hills are to be seen, composed almost wholly of what appears to be a collection of large sea oyster-shells." I presume, therefore, that the same cretaceous formation extends in this direction higher up on the Rio Grande. ”

“ Captain Baylor at once ordered me to take seven men and five days' rations and scout up the Rio Grande to the line of New Mexico for the bandits' trail, and, if I found it, to follow it up. I worked up the river but found no trail. Neither could I learn anything about any strange men driving stock through the country. My time was nearly up and I concluded to return to camp through a gap in the Franklin Mountains, some thirty or forty miles north of El Paso. We left the Rio Grande late in the evening, passed out through the gap and made a dry camp on the plains east of the mountains. ”

“ In 1845 Texas was admitted to the Union. The western boundary of the Rio Grande, claimed by the new state under her constitution of 1836, led directly to the war with Mexico, and by that war to the great additional cession at Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The southern boundary was finally completed by the Gadsden purchase of 1853. Coming now to the study of our internal geography, we find ourselves in contact with what is practically a distinct subject. ”