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National Geographic : 1904 Apr
Contents
THE AMERICAN DESERTS flora and is centrally located with refer ence to the deserts of Texas, Chihua hua, New Mexico, California, and So nora. The town has a population of io,ooo, who have presented the labora tory with a convenient site and have aided it in many other ways. Tucson, for centuries before the land ing of Columbus, was one of the per manent settlements of the ancestors of the Papago Indians of today. These Indians were partly migratory, moving southward in autumn to hunt in the sierras during the winter and returning in spring to replant their crops. They scoured the Sonoran plains for chance water-holes, as well as more permanent waters, carrying religiously hoarded seeds; they chased rainstorms seen from commanding peaks for scores, if not hundreds, of miles, and wherever they found standing or running water, or even damp soil, they planted their seeds, guarded and cultivated the grow ing plants with infinite patience, and, after carefully harvesting the crop, planted some of the finest seeds as ob lations and preserved others against the ensuing season, so that the crop plants were both distributed and improved from year to year. It was among the desert hills west of Torres that the writers had an opportu nity to see a Papago Indian extract from a bisnaga(Echinocactusemoryi), or barrel cactus, water with which to quench his thirst. He cut the top from a plant about five feet high, and with a blunt stake of palo verde pounded to a pulp the upper six or eight inches of white flesh in the standing trunk. From this, handful by handful, he squeezed the water into the bowl he had made in the top of the trunk, throwing the discarded pulp on the ground. By this process he secured two or three quarts of clear water, slightly salty and slightly bitter to the taste, but of far better quality than some of the water a desert traveler is occasionally compelled to use. The Papago, dipping this water up in his hands, drank it with evident pleasure and said that his people were accus tomed, not only to secure their drink ing water in this way in times of ex treme drouth, but that they used it also to mix their meal preparatory to cook ing it into bread. WHAT IS A DESERT? The current conceptions of deserts are neither adequate nor correct if the de scriptions in the best dictionaries and cyclopedias are to be taken as an index. A work of wide circulation and use de fines a desert as "A region that is wholly or approximately without vegetation. Such regions are rainless, usually sandy, and commonly not habitable." The insufficiency of the above descrip tion rests upon faulty observations and upon the failure to recognize the fact that the habitability of a region is no criterion of its arid character. The de velopment of modern methods of trans portation has made possible the mainte nance of dwellings and towns with a considerable population at one or even two hundred miles from the nearest supply of water. Even such facilities are not necessary to the sustenance of a population in deserts of the most extreme type, as illustrated by the Sahara, which has a population of two and a half mil lion people. So far as the vegetation is concerned, the actual number of indi viduals is much less than on a similar area in a moist climate. This, in fact, is one of the chief characteristics of a desert, but it would not be safe to esti mate the total number of species much below the average number. Lastly, be it remembered that local topography has but little influence on the desert char acter of a region. Sandy flats, plains, valleys, and rocky hills reaching to such altitudes as to become mountains are in cluded in some desert tracts. It follows as a natural consequence of the sparse vegetation as one factor that the surface 159
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