cruelly deceived by these mirages!

Yuma, of which I have just spoken, is famed for many reasons. For one thing, the story that United States army officers "raised the temperature of the place thirty degrees" to be relieved from duty there, has been laughed at wherever Americans have been wont to congregate. And that old story told by Sherman, of the soldier who died at Yuma after living a particularly vicious existence here below, and who soon afterwards telegraphed from Hades for his blankets, has also done much to heighten the reputation of the little city, which sometimes still has applied to it the distinction of being the hottest place in the United States. This, however, is scarcely correct, as many places in the Southwest—Needles in California, and the Imperial Valley are examples—have often demonstrated higher temperatures than have ever been known at Yuma. A summer at the little Colorado River town is quite hot enough, however, to please the most tropical savage. It may be remarked here, in justice to the rest of the State, that the temperature of Yuma is not typical of Arizona as a whole. In the region I now live in—the Sonoita Valley in the southeastern part of the State, and in portions around Prescott, the summer temperatures are markedly cool and temperate.

Yuma, however, is not famed for its temperature alone; in fact, that feature of its claim to notice is least to be considered. The real noteworthy fact about Yuma from a historical point of view is that, as Arizona City, it was one of the earliest-settled points in the Territory and was at first easily the most important. The route of the major portion of the Forty-Niners took them across the Colorado River where Fort Yuma was situated on the California side; and the trend of exploration, business and commerce a few years later flowed westward to Yuma over the picturesque plains of the Gadsden Purchase. The famous California Column ferried itself across the Colorado at Yuma, and later on the Overland Mail came through the settlement. It is now a division point on the Southern Pacific Railway, just across the line from California, and has a population of three or four thousand.

At the time I first saw the place there was only Fort Yuma, on the California side of the river, and a small settlement on the Arizona side called Arizona City. It had formerly been called Colorado City, but the name was changed when the town was permanently settled. There were two ferries in operation at Yuma when our company arrived there, one of them run by the peaceable Yuma Indians and the other by a company headed by Don Diego Jaeger and Hartshorne. Fort Yuma had been established in 1851 by Major Heintzelman, U.S.A., but owing to scurvy (see De Long's history of Arizona) and the great difficulty in getting supplies, the Colorado River being then uncharted for traffic, it was abandoned and not permanently re-established until a year later, when Major Heintzelman returned from San Diego. The townsite of Colorado City was laid out in 1854, but floods wiped out the town with the result that a permanent settlement, called Arizona City, was not established until about 1862, four years before I reached there.

The first steamboat to reach Yuma with supplies was the Uncle Sam, which arrived in 1852. Of all this I can tell, of course, only by hearsay, but there is no doubt that the successful voyage of the Uncle Sam to Yuma established the importance of that place and gave it pre-eminence over any other shipping point into the territories for a long time.

Until the coming of the railroad, supplies for Arizona were shipped from San Francisco to the mouth of the Colorado and ferried from there up the river to Yuma, being there transferred to long wagon trains which traveled across the plains to Tucson, which was then the distributing point for the whole Territory.

Tucson was, of course, the chief city. I say "city" only in courtesy, for it was such in importance only, its size being smaller than an ordinary eastern village. Prescott, which was the first Territorial Capital; Tubac, considered by many the oldest settled town in Arizona, near which the famous mines worked by Sylvester Mowry were located; Ehrenberg, an important stage point; Sacaton, in the Pima and Maricopa Indian country, and other small settlements such as Apache Pass, which was a fort, were already in existence. The Gadsden Purchase having been of very recent date, most of the population was Indian, after which came the Mexicans and Spaniards and then the Americans, who arrogantly termed themselves the Whites, although the Spaniards possessed fully as white a complexion as the average pioneer from the eastern states. Until recently the Indian dominated the white man in Arizona in point of numbers, but fortunately only one Indian race—the Apache—showed unrelenting hostility to the white man and his works. Had all the Arizona Indians been as hostile as were the Apaches, the probabilities are that the settlement of Arizona by the whites would have been of far more recent date, for in instance after instance the Americans in Arizona were obliged to rely on the help of the peaceful Indians to combat the rapacious Apaches.

Yuma is the place where the infamous "Doc" Glanton and his gang operated. This was long before my time, and as the province of this book is merely to tell the story of life in the Territory as I saw it, it has no place within these pages. It may, however, be mentioned that Glanton was the leader of a notorious gang of freebooters who established a ferry across the Colorado at Yuma and used it as a hold-up scheme to trap unwary emigrants. The Yuma Indians also operated a ferry, for which they had hired as pilot a white man, whom some asserted to have been a deserter from the United States army. One day Glanton and his gang, angered at the successful rivalry of the Indians, fell on them and slew the pilot. The Glanton gang was subsequently wiped out by the Indians in retaliation.

When the Gila City gold rush set in Yuma was the point to which the adventurers came to reach the new city. I have heard that as many as three thousand gold seekers congregated at this find, but nothing is now to be seen of the former town but a few old deserted shacks and some Indian wickiups. Gold is still occasionally found in small quantities along the Gila River near this point, but the immense placer deposits have long since disappeared, although experts have been quoted as saying that the company brave enough to explore the fastnesses of the mountains back of the Gila at this point will probably be rewarded by finding rich gold mines.

I will not dwell on the hardships of that desert march from Yuma to Tucson, for which the rigors of the Civil War had fortunately prepared most of us, further than to say that it was many long, weary days before we finally came in sight of the "Old Pueblo." In Tucson I became, soon after our arrival, twenty years old. I was a fairly hardy youngster, too. We camped in Tucson on a piece of ground in the center of the town and soon after our arrival were set to work making a clean, orderly camp-park out of the wilderness of creosote bushes and mesquite. I remember that for some offence against the powers of the day I was then "serving time" for a short while and, among other things, I cut shrub on the site of Tucson's Military Plaza, with an inelegant piece of iron chain dangling uncomfortably from my left leg. Oh, I wasn't a saint in those days any more than I am a particularly bright candidate for wings and a harp now! I gave my superior officers fully as much trouble as the rest of 'em!