THE DESERTS OF SOUTH-EAST CALIFORNIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2258, 10 June 1897, Page 49

THE DESERTS OF SOUTH-EAST CALIFORNIA.

Of the 157,000 square miles which com- ' pose the area of* California, about 35,000 square miles are desert. These do not to ; any distinctive extent appear in the northern and central part of the State, though as you approach the Nevada line at all latitudes the country assumes more sterile characteristics ; ' but when you cross the southern boundary of Mono County, an extreme eastern division of the State and about midway its length, you pass into a country which gradually assumes those qualities and appearances which constitute a desert ihe globe over. From a point about 30 miles west of the forty-first parallel of longitude and upon the ,<outh line of Mono County, southerly 200 miles to the base of the Sierra Madre range of mountains, east to the Nevada lino and ihe Colorado River along the entire longitudinal distance, the country is all desert. For 50 miles inland, following the bend of \he ocean beach at and below Los Angeles, there is a climate tempered by the sea fogs and the cool salt breezes; but these cannot climb the slopes of the Sierra Madre, the San Bsrnardino, and the San Jacinto mountains —so that thenca to Arizona and south to the Mexican line there is aridity, a parobed dryness, and a dancing heat which oppreaies all animal life when the sun is high, and .radiates and disappears soon after the sun has set; so that even the summer nights are 0001, and in winter there is a freezing temperature. The general aspect of this country is strange even to weirdness. It is not generally, barren, but is covered by the most curious and remarkable vegetation. For a hundred miles you may ride through orchards of the torch cactus, its thick trunk supportiog bare arms, jointed by like bare perpendicular branches, standing in rough nakedness and stillness. The yucca, whose central lifalk bears an abundance of pendulous white liowers, shows the green blade-leaves of the palm family up all canons; and the thorny mescal aud the Spanish dagger, the intricate brush of greasewood, the scrubby mesquito, the white sage, and the innumerable grasses which in tufts and bunches checker here and there a broad swaep of bareness, all make up a flora as curious as it is wonderful. Even in regions of the maximum aridity, where the fiercentas of the sun's rays is intolerable J to life above the grade of a lizard, some defiant organisms of the vegetable kingdom will suntain themselves and cling to a reluc- ! tant existence. It is a conn try, too, broken by numberless and strange mountains, which generally show a barrenness the valleys do not display ; in some parts their sharp ridges and craggy peaks will line a broad valley in continuous chain for many miles; again they will stand at varying height?, isolated high round cones or low broad lumps, leaping suddenly from the flat surface as though they ware set there by some enormous hand like giant bee-hives. Tha country shows everywhere evidences oi the most turbulent activities of fire occurring in past geological ages. Some of the plains are mere ashet, wbile the mountains and elevations are black lava. Igneous dykes plunge here and there througa sandatone, and the arid granite caps country rock blown out into peaks piercing far in the pale heavens. Owing to these mountainous characteristics the general altitude 'of the region is much higher than that on the coast aide of the Sierra Madre and other ranges I have named;' the average elevation of the plains of the desert is about 2000 ft above the sea; yet in strange contrast to this there are numerous sinks, some of them email and shelving perceptibly like a saucer, others vast and partaking of the characteristics of the general country, whose decline below the sea attains the depth of 260 ft. These sinks are all beds of lakes or rivers whoße waters have been dried out. In them are deep deposits of the minerals which Ihose waters held in solution. In that great lake bed, SO miles or so west of the Colorado River, and crossed by the Southern Pacific railroad, there is a wide blanket vein of salt, which is now being profitably mined and converted into the domestic article by works erected there. Thiß shows that the old lake was of salt water, and theorists say that it was once a part of the Pacific Ocean, which pushed up there through the Gulf of California: a high ridge of sand, making a wide reef, broadened into a plain and drove back the waters of the gulf, leaving this great lake here to give its waters to the relentless skies and to SDread its salt in a deep crust over its ample" bottom. But the salt beds are not alone the saline deposits left upon the desert as the token of wide waters long since succumbed to the furious sun. In many of these sinks are deep incrustations of the borate of soda, manifest in many forms, from the clear transparent crystals of tincal through infinite compounds with earthy substances to the crude borax. Enormous liberation of boracic

acid from the laboratory of old earth in thi region is everywhere apparent ; not only hag it taken up the soda, but it has combined with the lime, and youfind it nested in the clay beds in the form of the fibrous and fleecy cotton balls, or modifying the limestones in great reefs, 'rich in boracic acid, and, under the name of colemanite or pandermint, breaking through the bills and gulches for miles. The whole of Dsath Valley and the bed of the old Amargosa River are repositories of these substances ; not alone the various combinations of boracic acid, but deep layers of sal soda, carbonate of soda, and the numerous forms of carbonic acid, ice-like lakes of the sulphate of magnesia, towerirg mountains of sulphur, as you find near Keeler in Inyo County, all present such a wonderful chemical repository as no other region on the earth possesses. It is a vast and inexhaustible storehouse of crude compounds of inestimable value to the world, «rhich will carry the came of the Oalifornian deserto into the farthest parts of the globe. Of the animal life which ' inhabits this desert region there ia not a wide variety, nor is it characterised by excellence of grade. Of the human species the all-conquering white is there, though in sparse numbers, pursuing some occupation' of working some old mineral deposit from which he manages to eke out an existence, or prospecting the hills in permissible seasons with high hopes for big "finds." The stations along the railroads amount to little settlements where sometimes sm«ll industries are earned on. Thus, at Oro Grande, on the Santa Fe, is a group of limekilns, with the attendant; number of boarding houses, where the white female of the genus " laudlady " fieds a domain. The dark, jet-bearded visage of the Mexican is seen here and there, bnt the greater population is composed of Indians. These are remnants of the Piute tribes, which come from their reservation in Nevada; the Navajoes, from over in Arizona; and the Mojaves, with a few Pechangos, who are claimed by the reservation a* San Jacinto. They are all quiet and peaceful, canning no disturbances of the general sort, though occasionally they will, as individuals, steal or commit murder. The fauna is not extensive. In the mountains are a few lions, which have about exterminated all the sheep which once nte the bunchgrass of the canon?. The&e lions and sheep are earnestly hunted by the Indians. There are' badgers and foxes, gophers, rats, jackj rabbits and skunk 3, tarantulas, Scorpions, and centipedes ad libitum ; but the most ' numerous forms of life are lizards and serpents. Of these two latter a wonderful j collection of species might be made. The • serpents, almost without ex caption, are poisonous, but there are members of the lizard family which ars not only inimical to man, but are helpful ; and many is the desert prospector whose swollen tongue has been softened by the moistening blood of the chuckwalla, and whose life has been preserved by the "flesh of its body. — Lvppincott's Magazine.