In the desert water is king. Without it priceless ore is but as dross, and fertile soils are worthless. Upon the desert plains many men and cattle have died for the want of a drink of water.
Like the Sahara, the Great American Des ert is superficially waterless. Its plains are usually barren of surface water save for an exceptional saline lagoon. A few brooks, streams or rivers arise within its larger moun tain ranges, but no water ever runs off its sur face to the sea. Even the great floods of water which sometimes burst from an erratic cloud with devastating effect are rapidly swallowed up by the sands or evaporated by sun and wind. It is true that there are two long rivers com parable to the Nile of the Sahara — the Colo rado and the Rio Grande — which rise in the higher forested mountainous border lands and flow into and across the deserts like great canals, without gathering contributory drainage from them, losing volume in fact from absorp tion and evaporation in the desert portions of their courses. These are rivers born of the mountains, however, and not of the deserts.
Upon the area of the Great American Desert the maximum rainfall is less than 15 inches per annum and does not average more than 10 inches. In places such as Death Valley and the Yuma Desert it is less than 5 inches. Deduct ing from this maximum of 15 inches 60 per cent of its effectiveness, due to loss through evaporation, the actual rain value is only 6 inches per annum, less than the amount falling in the two crop-growing months of May and June in the Eastern States, and less than one half the quantity that fell in September 1901 in a single 24 hours at Galveston, Tex. To this great natural fact the desert is resigned, that within its area the land with a' few excep tions, not amounting to 3 per cent, is per manently and hopelessly dry, and even the most sanguine cannot refute this fact.
Before the railways came, the Great Ameri can Desert was a most primitive region. It was inhabited by a population about as dense as that of the Sahara now, but practically in the same state of culture; and the mission bells rang over the same civilization that existed in 1528. The inhabitants practised irrigation, agri culture and architecture very much like that of the Egyptians of to-day, and constructed dwell ings of unburnt brick and stone. The aborigine
found sustenance on the desert, but of a kind upon which the white man could not well exist. Maize was his staple of diet. This with the tunas (fruit of the prickly pear) and the roots of various yuccaceous plants, supplemented by a few wild animals, provided an aboriginal diet pure and simple.
It was no great feat for the Spaniard who already possessed an Old-World knowledge of desert craft to amalgamate with the aborigines. He gave to them a few domestic animals (the goat and the burro, which can live where other animals starve). He also gave to them the Catholic religion and the Spanish language. For nearly 400 years the desert population made no progress in industrial civilization beyond adopting the wooden plow and the cumbersome wheeled cart known as the carretta.
In Mexico the old desert cities and country estates were 'practically in the same status of civilization that existed in the 1st century after discovery. The cities had no commerce except by caravan; the estates were great feudal dis tricts with their fortified haciendas, to which all the surrounding people were attached as fiefs. For 200 miles along either side of the inter national border in Mexico and our own desert country the unconquered Apache spread devas tation from the Pecos to the Colorado; and the only white men there were the soldiers at scat tered and lonely outposts, or Thad men" en deavoring to hide from civilization, and hardly better than the Apaches in instincts or action. Here and there in the United States at the widely dispersed water-holes were a few no madic ranchmen who owned cattle of primitive breed for which there were no purchasers, except the army and beef contractors. Some mines there were also, but these were merely those with easily reducible ores and limited in depth by the distance which a man could dig in solid rock without machines or powder, and from which burdens could be carried on the human back. In Utah alone had the white man attained a foothold.