northward, and southward, or with beads or with empty tin cans, all of which served my purpose in various places, rather than to have the convenience of using the Maria Theresa or the Menelek dollar, which coins are now quite readily taken along the caravan routes from Addis Abeba to the east.

Rather this inconvenience of crude methods, with the greater simplicity and straightforwardness of the untutored native, than the coarse cunning which begins to appear when the native begins to suspect and compete with the superiority of the white man and to truckle only to one thing, namely, backsheesh.

THE FUTURE OF ABYSSINIA.

Today Menelek and the Sultan of Morocco control the only two territories independent of actual occupation or diplomatic claim on the part of some European power. As between these powers, this division has been made without bloodshed, and is a notable triumph for diplomacy; and I believe that the European domination of African territories may be counted as blessed, for certainly those territories which have passed beyond the first paroxysms of savage resistance now show larger and more comfortable populations than existed under native rule and misrule. This is not set forth as an apology for the grasping of territories held by lower races, since our ethical standard is not well enough determined for application to these cases, and since, moreover, the graspingcontinues to take place, whether we count it as right or wrong.

The ultimate determination of the Abyssinian and Morocco territories will put a much more severe strain upon diplomacy than it has yet been called upon to bear in regard to African affairs. The population now in occupancy of the territory is in both cases far above the average of African intelligence, and in

one case community of religious form. with European countries will tend to complicate the situation, in that the missionary cannot appear so opportunely as a casus belli. However, to overcome that difficulty, we may convince ourselves that the Christianity of the Abyssinians is not quite the correct style; and may thus approximate this case to: others in which the itching palm is stretched forth as if in prayer.

Here again let me say that it is not my desire to criticise missionary methods. To me, believing, as I do, that the universe is absolutely law-ordered, even to the lifting of a finger, the blood-thirsty missionary appears to be as solemn and as necessary a part of the scheme of the universe as any other part.

Quite as convenient, perhaps even more so, than the missionary as a casus belli is the railway that is, the railway of civilized man laid in barbarian country. Not only may it furnish the cause of war, but it, of course, immensely simplifies the problem of carrying out the war which it may have produced. While the French, together with the English, Italians, and Russians-the four nations which have sent emissaries to Menelek-are doubtless of the firm conviction that this is not the time for warmaking, that the enlightened peace of Menelek serves best all purposes which can now be served, it remains that when disorders of any sort arise, if the railway may have then been completed up to the top of the Abyssinian plateau, the French will have obtained a very great advantage for the playing of such part as they may then choose.

An extension of the British-Egyptian Railway up the Nile, now stopping at Khartum, may be made without great difficulty along the route which I followed, and which I pointed out in a paper about to appear in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London. Such extension would practically equate advantages in respect to transpor

tation, if we consider only a contest between either France or England on the one side and Abyssinia on the other; but if these great Powers were themselves at war, then the naval supremacy of England, operating from a great fortified sub-base such as Aden, would probby control and paralyze the Jibuti terminal of the French railway.

But taxed as is Great Britain now, it does not seem probable that this 500-mile extension will be undertaken at a very early date. So far as the peace of the civilized world and the continued independence of the Abyssinian are concerned, it seems probable that a continuation of the state of unpreparedness on the part both of France and England should serve best these ends of peace. To subsequently maintain at about equal point of advantage the facility which either of these great nations might have for making war upon, with, or through the Abyssinians would prolong the national life of this interesting people, who occupy in barbaric style one of those splendid stretches of the earth's surface which must ever tempt the daring European. driven forth as he is by a blind racial instinct-driven forth to combat and to push away the specter that Malthus raised.

Could you have been with me in marching over the devastation marking the as yet unconquered Bollasa region into the Sudan, where only a few months before the blood of the dying calipha had cemented the foundations of peace; could you have seen there the small but happy beginnings of well-ordered villages and the contented submission of these black and wayward children of the

desert and their obedience to the firm, wise rule of the English officer, recalling the unchanging story of almost unending tribal war, you would feel very nearly convinced that, if indeed peace and order be good for the lowly developed peoples of the world, this good will be earliest attained by the sacrifice to some such great policing power as Great Britain of an independence which ever has meant native tyranny.

But we must remember also that disasters which read terror into our blood but furnish in part the needed excitement to give some value to the crustacean lives of these rude people.

Passing one day through the ruins of a village marked by broken pottery vessels and grinding-stones, my grinning guide explained that here he had lived some few years ago; the village had been attacked by Mahdists or slavetraders, he seemed scarcely to know or care which, and he had lost his hut, three wives, and one or two children, himself escaping into the close-pressing bush. "But," said he, with the philosophy which made me poor in his comparison, "I now have another hut, other wives, and other children," and he laughed good-naturedly. Absolutely the only care at that time in the mind of this simple savage was a desire to get loose from the caravan in order that he might return to the hulk of a hippopotamus which I had shot two days before. Could he but secure that black carcass for himself and his small village, life would have no other cares-today, tomorrow, and even next week would be provided for. Heaven?

Could more be asked of

S

OME three to seven centuries before Columbus, the country lying south of Gila River, west of the Sierra Madre, and east of the Californian Gulf was occupied by an agricultural people, and the ruins of their villages, the remains of their irrigation. works, and the crumbling fortifications of their places of refuge on adjacent hilltops-mute witnesses of the rise and passing of a people-still survive in numbers. The finely wrought fictile ware, shapely stone implements, and obsidian blades from the ruins betoken the culture commonly known as Aztecan or Mexican, or better as Nahuatlan. The location and extent of the house remains, as well as the traces of great acequias, betoken irrigation systems more extensive and successful than those of the Mexicans or Americans of today. The vestiges of temples and plazas combine with the symbolic decoration of the pottery to betoken a complex social organization resting on at religious basis, while the corrals (each with its water hole) in many of the villages, together with some of the pictographs carved on neighboring cliffs, suggest, if they do not attest, that a llama-like animal, the coyote, the turkey, and perhaps other creatures, were domesticated by the villagers. The entrenched refuges ("las trincheras" of the modern Mexicans) are among various indications that the peaceful, pastoral folk were displaced and nearly destroyed by a predatory foe whose ruthless energies were directed against irrigation works as well as against families, farms, and flocks, and the testimony of the ruins is supported by the traditions of surviving tribes, which point to the marauding Apache as the

spoilsman and hence the hereditary enemy-of the plains people. During this early agricultural period the scant. waters of the region were where they are now, and were probably little, if any, more abundant than today, though better conserved and distributed by means of represos and low-gradient acequias. The village sites were those selected long after for aboriginal and Mexican pueblos, with a few others never again occupied, while the trails and roads, as they were by watering places and impassable sierras, must have followed lines corresponding with those of later travel. Among the natural routes fixed by water and mounttain, and still marked by ruins and smaller relics, was that which long after became the Yuma trail.

THE TIME OF TRADITION.

The ancient lore and modern customs of the Papago Indians tell of descent from the prehistoric irrigators-tell that their tribal ancestors were among the few survivors of the prehistoric pastoral folk who, driven into the deserts too far for foes to follow, were able to adjust themselves to one of the hardest environments in America, to engage in a ceaseless chase for water singularly like the chase for quarry in lower culture, and to produce a unique combination of crop-growing industries with migratory

habits.

One of the earliest havens of the ancestral exiles was a meager oasis already occupied by some of them, though divided from the customary Apache range by a hundred miles of waterless desert; here a tiny rivulet, fed by the subterranean seepage from rugged granite

ranges on north and south, trickles permanently over the sands of a broad wash occasionally swept by the freshets following storms in the same mountains; here the refugees began anew the development of tribal character; and here began their unwritten Book of Leviticus, following their Genesis and Exodus in curiously Hebraic order, in their Ancient Sacred Tales. Devotees (like other lowly folk) to the dark mysteries of unstudied nature, they had brought their old faith with them, but enshrined it anew in their second Eden; carrying a cult of the sea-a vestige of littoral life in earlier generations-in which they worshipped the ocean as the infinitely potent Mother of Waters, and finding their faith sharpened fearsomely by the incomparable preciousness of fluid in these outer deserts, they enjoined on their young men pilgrimages to the Gulf at its nearest point as sacramental requisites for entering into the stage and condition of full manhood; bringing seed of maize and beans from ancestral gardens, they not only planted but cherished their crops with a consuming watchfulness growing into actual worship, and finally giving name to both locality and tribe-for oasis and river came to be known as the Place of Corn (Sonoyta, as commonly written), and the tribe as Beans People (papahoaatam).* The habit of eternal vigilance on the part of the Papago of defense or flight, according to the strength of invading parties, led to the placing of outposts as far east of Sonoyta and as near to the Apache range as might be; and eventually a semi-symbolic outpost was established at the most conspicuous and impressive landmark of all Papagueria-Baboquivari Peak. This station was supported partly by shamans armed with magical devices, partly by bold and athletic warriors who could be trusted to traverse the hundred miles of

*Cf. Papagueria," THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, vol. IX, 1898, p. 345.

desert to Sonoyta between noon-day suns; and there is traditional evidence that the granite walls of the peak-so lofty and precipitous that but one Caucasian has scaled them-were climbed and its crest occupied by at least one party of tribesmen. party of tribesmen. In time Baboquivari became the Sacred Mount of all the Papago; and as the tribe multiplied and flowed feebly back toward the ancestral valleys, the sacramental pilgrimage of the young men was so extended as to cover the 150 miles from Baboquivari to the sea, with Sonoyta as a way station.

A half of the path thus trodden by the Papago pilgrims from some centuries before Columbus up to the beginning of the twentieth century was that retrodden by Caucasians for a century and a third as the Yuma trail.

THE COMING OF THE CAUCASIAN.

The first foreigners to approach the ancient trail were Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions (in all, three whites and one black), as they near the end of the most remarkable transcontinental journey in the history. of America, in the spring of 1536; three or four years later Coronado's army also approached and perhaps crossed within sight of Baboquivari, and it is practically certain that a detachment of this army actually followed the footsteps and guidance of the Papago pilgrims over a part of the trail. It was in September, 1540, that Captain Melchior Diaz set out from Coronado's headquarters at Corazones (at or near the site of the present Ures) with a force of 25 men in the hope of intercepting Alarçon's fleet on the coast, and so shaped his course as to strike Rio Colorado a little way above its mouth. His route was never mapped, nor even fully described (he lost his life through an accident in the Colorado country); but to one who has traversed the region

*Prof. R. H. Forbes, of the Territorial University of Arizona.

in several directions, sifted the local lore of waterpockets in the rocks and coyoteholes in the sandwashes, and traced the routes of both prehistoric and present travel, it seems clear that Diaz' detachment worked northwestward to the Horcacitas and on to Rio San Ignacio, and thence across the plains to Sonoyta, where he must have watered and rested before pushing forward by way of the high waterpockets (Tinajas Altas) to the great River of Good Guidance " (Rio de Bono Guia, an early name of the Colorado); and it must have been by the same route that the leaderless party returned in January, 1541.

With this expedition the third chapter in the history of the Yuma trail ends abruptly; for, through the most astounding blunder of American geography, the memory of Diaz and the records of Alarcon and his predecessor, Ulloa, dropped out of mind for more than a century and a half, during which the Californias were mapped as a great island in the Pacific.

THE JESUITS AND THEIR SUCCESSORS.

Toward the close of the seventeenth century the era of Jesuit missionizing in Papagueria opened, and not long after Padre Kino and his colleagues struck the tribesmen's trail from Baboquivari to Sonoyta; and it was in 1701 that Kino pushed westward, necessarily by way of Tinajas Altas (which he was the first to map), and rediscovered Rio Colorado, thereby puncturing the bubble of fictitious geography.

The good padres were ideal pioneers; wherever the Indian trails led, there they followed; and wherever an Indian settlement was found, there they erected crosses and sought converts. To them the Place of Corn on the slender rivulet was a fertile field. Some fifteen miles down the sandwash from the principal village they found a smaller settlement gathered about a spring of whitish water seeping from potash-bearing granites,

for which they adopted the native name House-ring Spring (Quitobac), and they set their wooden cross midway between the two settlements and called the place Santo Domingo.

As missionizing proceeded, routes of travel were opened from tribe-range to tribe-range; and in the course of a few decades the hard trail from Culiacan (or Ures, or Chihuahua, or Fronteras) to Santo Domingo, and thence to the Yuma country on the Colorado and on to the missions of California, became an established route of travel and communication. The palmiest days of the Yuma trail rose and set in the century 17401840. It was trodden by adventurers too poor to ride, yet too plucky to stay ; it was beaten by hoofs bearing churchly equipage and royal commissions and vice-regal reports too precious to be entrusted to the crude craft then plying the Pacific; it was furrowed by the huge hewn-log wheels of Mexican carts carrying families a few miles a day, and later by the iron tires of prairie schooners and primitive stages; its borders were trampled by stock driven out to enrich the distant province of Alta California; and its course was marked by the pitiful milestones of solitary graves, each with its cruciform heap of pebbles. During this period the hard route was dubbed "El Camino del Diablo ;" and it formed (alternatively with the easier but much

*The typical Papago house is of hemispherical shape and made of grass thatch attached to a framework of mesquite saplings and akatilla stems; it is called ki or key. The first stage in building is the erection of a first course of thatch in the form of a vertical ring 12 or 15 feet in diameter; this may be occupied for weeks or months before the upper courses are added to complete the walls and forming the roof; it is called ki-to. Bac is one of several Papago terms for water or watering place, and is applied specifically to springs. When the missionaries found a larger Papago settlement about a series of mineral springs 30 miles south of Sonoyta, also called Quitobac, they applied a Spanish diminutive to the first found village, and ever since it has been known as Quitobaquito.