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National Geographic : 1920 Jul
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ALONG OUR SIDE OF THE MEXICAN BORDER son was kept and whence Don Juan Bau tista de Anza set out in 1774 to build a highway to California. It was this same Don Juan who chose the site for San Francisco on the Golden Gate. Today near Tubac an American rubber company has bought thousands of acres of Santa Cruz Valley land and is farm ing guayule on a big scale for the manu facture of rubber. Nurseries for propa gation of young plants are set up and a model town of cement houses and shady streets for the employees is already built. Nogales, 3,800 feet above the sea, en joys a singularly prosperous trade for a town of its size. The declared exports from Mexico run as much as twenty mil lions a year. As at other important border towns, adequate military forces are stationed here, with permanent bar racks, hospitals, recreation halls, and stables. Some 12,ooo people live on the American side of the line, and a some what lesser number in the Mexican town. For police purposes, a high barbed wire fence is strung along the boundary line here, dividing the twin cities. Nogales has foundries, bonded ware houses, strong banks, daily papers, and clubs, and is surrounded by rich mines and profitable cattle ranches. Nothing along the whole border is more chastely beautiful than the old Mis sion of San Xavier del Bac, just south of Tucson, on the Nogales highway. It is pure white, visible for miles across the desert, and is built in the form of a cross. It is really one of the great his toric memorials of the United States. Nowadays the peaceful Pimas work their little farms and come devoutly to mass in this old church, where years ago other Pimas slew the priests and tried to de stroy the building. A short ride west of Nogales the due west trend of the line is broken, and it veers northwest by west, straight to the Colorado River, striking that stream a few miles below Yuma. This part of the boundary was first explored and run by one John Bartlett, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase. No section of the whole boundary line is so wild, dry, uninhabited,, and little known as this which stretches from Sasabe to the Yuma desert. Only a few smugglers, Yaqui gun-runners, and the wary, tireless line riders who hunt them really know much of this arid, empty waste. A $600,000 SUBSIDY FOR A STAGE-COACII LINE After this Gadsden Purchase survey, Congress in 1853 granted money for ex ploring a railway route from the Missis sippi to California; but trains did not run till 31 years later. In 1857, however, mail and passenger stages were started, under a government subsidy of $600,000 a year. This line used 100 Concord stages, 1,000 horses, 500 mules, and about 150 drivers. The fare from St. Louis to San Francisco via this border route was $Ioo. Official orders defined the border route in part as "from Preston, Texas, to the best point of crossing on the Rio Grande, and not far from Fort Fillmore; thence along the new road being opened and constructed, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, to Fort Yuma; thence through the best passes and along the best valleys for safe and expeditious staging to San Francisco." But that part of the trail from Tubac, Arizona, to California was worn and old long before the lumbering Concord stages, making a hundred miles a day, began to use it. Rafael Amador, an official courier with messages from Santa Ana to the Gov ernor of California, rode from Mexico City to Monterey in some 40 days. Though stripped and robbed by the Yumas and nearly dead of thirst and hunger, yet he made it. The coming of General Kearny, with his "Army of the West," to attack the Mexicans in California, in 1847, first mapped out this border trail and made it the main traveled route for the forty niners. Fully 8,ooo passed this way, many dying of thirst. Once in a while prospectors out of Yuma still come upon rusting parts of schooners or whitened bones of men and mules. Kit Carson, too, made a memorable dash across this desert in '47, with a young army officer named Beale, carry ing dispatches from the Fremont party to Washington. (This same Beale later introduced camels into the desert traffic. See footnote, page 65.) Significant of changing things, scores
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