Sonoran Desert

“ Deserts of the Southwest are not desolate expanses of sand as many persons believe. This photograph, showing vegetation in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona, is a typical illustration of the variety and density of plant growth in the Sonoran desert area of northwestern Mexico and southwestern Arizona. ”

“ Some or all of these measures may be taken in Saguaro, in order that future generations will know a piece of the Sonoran Desert as it was in Coronado’s time.
The realization of this goal, however diligently we work toward it, seems almost each day to become more difficult of attainment. These desert and mountain environments—which once seemed secure, needing only the continued protection afforded by their status as a national monument—are increasingly imperiled by the works of man. ”

“ The distinctive characteristics of desert plants and animals have evolved through millions of years, in a trial-and-error process in which only the better-fitted forms have survived. It would be enlightening to know how many of the species and varieties of plants that developed during the past 60 million years or so have failed to adapt to Sonoran Desert conditions. ”

“ The monument is the junction of two physiographic ecoregions: the Mojave Desert and the Colorado Plateau. Individually, these regions contain ecosystems extreme to each other, ranging from stark, arid desert to complex, dramatic higher elevation plateaus, tributaries, and rims of the Grand Canyon. The western margin of the Shivwits Plateau marks the boundary between the Sonoran/Mojave/Great Basin floristic provinces to the west and south, and the Colorado Plateau province to the northeast. ”

“ Belding asked the Yaqui where the raiders would head for in the Sonora Desert. For answer the Indian followed the trail across the stream of sand, through willows and mesquite, up to the level of rock and cactus. At this point he halted. A sand-filled, almost obliterated trail led off to the left, and evidently went round to the east of No Name Mountains. To the right stretched the road toward Papago Well and the Sonoyta Oasis. The trail of the raiders took a southeasterly course over untrodden desert. The Yaqui spoke in his own tongue, then in Spanish. ”

“ Over many wide regions of the south-western desert country of Arizona and New Mexico lies an eternal spell of silence and mystery. Across the sand-ridges come many foreign things, both animate and inanimate, which are engulfed in its immensity, which frequently disappear for all time from the sight of men, blotted out like a bird which flies free from a lighted room into the outside darkness. As though in compensation for that which it has taken, the desert from time to time allows new marvels, riven from its vitals, to emerge. ”

“ Lakes rippling in the wind and breaking on the shore, cattle big as elephants or small as rabbits, distances that did not exist and forests that never were, beds of lava along the hills swearing to a cloud shadow, while the sky was polished like a precious stone—these, and many other beautiful and marvellous but empty shows the great desert displayed lavishly, with the glitter and inconsequence of a dream. Senor Johnson sat on his horse in the hot sun, his chin in his band, his elbow on the pommel, watching it all with grave, unshifting eyes. ”

“ At such times the country assumes a really desolate aspect beneath the cloudless sky, which seems an immense plate of red-hot iron. The birds suddenly cease their songs, and languidly hide themselves beneath the thick foliage of the trees, which bow their proud crests towards the ground. Men and domestic animals hasten to seek shelter in the houses, raising in their hurried progress a white, impalpable, and calcined dust, which enters mouth and nostrils. For some hours Sonora is converted into a vast desert from which every appearance of life and movement has disappeared. ”

“ Numerous brooks unite to form two rivers, one running down the green slope among ranches and gardens into the blooming valley of San Bernardino, the other pouring eastward, shrinking as it flows out upon the hot sands, till, in a few miles, the unslakable desert has drunk it dry.
There are but few points in America where such extremes of physical condition meet. What contrasts, what opposed sentiments, the two views awakened! Spread out below us lay the desert, stark and glaring, its rigid hill-chains lying in disordered grouping, in attitudes of the dead. ”

“ On either side of the San Gorgonio stood its two guardian peaks, San Bernardino and San Jacinto, capped with rosy snow, and the pass itself, warm with western light, opened hopefully before us. For a moment the sun rested upon the Sierra crest, and then, slowly sinking, suffered eclipse by its ragged, black profile. Through the slow hours of darkening twilight a strange, ashy gloom overspread the desert. The forms of the distant mountain chains behind us, and the old shore line upon the Sierra base, stared at us with a strange, weird distinctness. ”

“ For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the palm between the cracks and canyons of the Sierra and the softer vales of the Coast Range, where the hot sun is tempered by the cool Pacific breeze, and thunder and lightning are unknown. To one coming from the wilds of the Carson Desert and of Mirage Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells has for the eye the relief that travelers from the coast must seek in the loftier heights and precipices of the Yosémite. ”

“ The lure of a desert with its drifting sands, its scattered oases, and its broad extent has ever been great. Today in the Southwest, cut off from the moist ocean breezes of the west by the lofty Sierra Nevadas and further isolated by the Rocky Mountains to the east, is America’s great desert region. Here the winds and the rains are constantly at work tearing down and sculpturing the great land masses, while in places the wind is piling up the sand and debris to form dunes and new lands. ”

“ Jake’s glance wandered over the desert that laid off its shining distances to the horizon. Here and there flat-topped mesas uplifted their chrome and vermilion façades from the dead flat. Very far away, one huge fellow raised phantom battlements from the ghostly waters of a mirage. It was altogether unlike their own Sonora desert. In place of the familiar seas of sage, cactus and spiky yucca were thinly strewn over a land whose unmitigated drought was accentuated by the parched windings of waterless streams. Gold! gold! ”

“ The high plateaus of New Mexico and Arizona have everything that the rainy wilderness [Pg 175] lacks—sunshine, heaven's own air, immense breadth of horizon, color and infinite beauty of outline, and a warm soil with unlimited possibilities when moistened. All that these deserts need is water. A fatal want? No. That is simply saying that science can do for this region what it cannot do for the high wilderness of frost—by the transportation of water transform it into gardens of bloom and fields of fruitfulness. The wilderness shall be made to feed the desert. ”

“ Here we struck the southern California or great Colorado Desert, and thence on to Yuma—one hundred and fifty miles—we might as well have been adrift on the Great Sahara itself. Until we reached this point, the country consisted chiefly of arid plains, it is true; but broken, more or less, into ravines and valleys, with some semblance of life, or at least capacity for supporting life hereafter, should sufficient intelligence and labor ever drift that way. But as we approached the Desert, all this ceased, and the very genius of desolation seemed to brood over the landscape. ”

“ Except while still in the Reservation where we passed occasional Navajos we saw no living person or thing the rest of the day. Sometimes we went over rolling, stubbled prairie, fringed again with cedars and pines; next through a veritable desert of desolation with nothing but rocks and sand. Sometimes the road wound tranquilly through timbered glades; again came a straight, monotonous stretch of sandy trail. ”

“ THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.
Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil. ”

“ Flocks of pelicans, high against the sky, floated in slow, wheeling flight, reflecting the sun from white wings, and, turning, were lost in the blue to gleam out again like flakes of snow.
The eye ranges over strange, forbidding hill-forms and leagues of desert, from which no familiarity can ever banish suggestions of death. Traced along boundary hills, straight terraces of an ancient beach indicate former water-levels, and afar in the Sierra, great, empty gorges, glacier-burnished and moraine-flanked, lead up to amphitheatres of rock once white with névé. ”

“ The last scene of our tale lies in the pueblita of Santa Gertrudes; a mining village chiefly supported by the minera bearing the same name, whose works, with the specialities of crushing-sheds, smelting-houses, and tall chimneys, are seen just outside its suburbs.
All have a modern look, as well they may. On the ground where they stand, but three years before grew a thick chapparal of mezquite, cactus, yucca, and other plants characteristic of desert vegetation. For Santa Gertrudes is in the very heart of the Sonora desert, remote from any other civilised settlement. ”

“ The whole extent of country, except on the margin of streams, is destitute of forest trees. The Apaches, a very numerous race, and the Navajoes, are the chief occupants, but there are many minor bands, who, unlike the Apaches and Navajoes, are not nomadic, but have fixed habitations. Amongst the most remarkable of these are the Soones, most of whom are said to be Albinoes. The latter cultivate the soil, and live in peace with their more numerous and savage neighbours. Departing from the ford of the Colorado in the direction of Sonora, there is a fearful desert to encounter. ”

“ The region they live in, named the Province of Tusayan by the Spanish conquistadores, three hundred and fifty years ago, is a region of color. The rocks of which the mesas are built, the sand of the desert, the peculiarly carved buttes which abound on every hand, are all strikingly colored, with such a variety of hues and tints that one does not wonder at the name—the Painted Desert—which is applied to the country through which we must travel to reach Hopiland. ”

“ This region, which resembles one of the immeasurable steppes of Asia, has not inaptly been termed 'The Great American Desert.' It spreads forth into undulating and trackless plains and desolate sandy wastes, wearisome to the eye from their extent and monotony, and which are supposed by geologists to have formed the ancient floor of the ocean, countless ages since, when its primeval waves beat against the granite bases of the Rocky Mountains.
"It is a land where no man permanently abides; for, in certain seasons of the year, there is no food, either for the hunter or his steed. ”

“ Others, standing as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars crowned with magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look boldly abroad over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests ever seen or dreamed of. _Cereus giganteus_, the grim chief of the desert tribe, is often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona. ”

“ These dunes finally sank down to a black floor as hard as flint with tongues of lava to the left, and to the right the slow descent into the cactus plain. Yaqui was now traveling due west. It was Gale's idea that the Indian was skirting the first sharp-toothed slope of a vast volcanic plateau which formed the western half of the Sonora Desert and extended to the Gulf of California. ”

“ This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests. In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two belts. ”

“ You scouts know quite well what sort of outfit to carry on this tour of the southwest; because it will be the same as that which you brought last summer for the camping in the Rockies. There will be just as cold nights, and the peaks just as high as those we had last summer. Because we speak of a desert in Arizona, one must not think that it will be the broiling heat of the Sahara, though I will say that our western deserts can produce a pretty good imitation of the Far East patented and copyrighted article. ”

“ In the United States the deserts lie almost wholly between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountain ranges, which keep out any moisture that might come from either the west or the east. Beginning on the north with the sagebrush plateau of southern Washington, the desert expands to a width of seven hundred miles in the gray, sage-covered basins of Nevada and Utah. In southern California and Arizona the sagebrush gives place to smaller forms like the salt-bush, and the desert assumes a sterner aspect. Next comes the cactus desert extending from Arizona far south into Mexico. ”