Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 June 1892 — Treacherous. [ARTICLE]

Treacherous.

The few rivers of the American desert are as strange and treacherous' as its winds. The Colorado Is the only large one of them all, and the only one which behaves like an ordinary river. It is always turbid, and gets its Spanish name, which means the “red” from the color of its tide. The smaller streams are almost inva riably clear in dry weather, but fn a time of rain they become torrents — not so much of sandy water as of liquid sand! I have often seen them rolling down in freshets with waves four feet high, which seemed simply sand in flow, and it is a fact that the bodies of those who are drowned at such times are almost never recovered. The strange river buries them forever in its own sands. All these rivers have heads, but hardly one of them has a mouth. They rise in the mountains on the edge of some happier land, flow away out into the desert, milking a green gladness where their waters touch, and finally are swallowed up forever by the thirsty sands. The Mojave, for instance, is a beautiful little stream, clear as crystal through the summer, only a foot or so in depth but some two hundred feet wide. It is fifty or sixty miles long, and its upper valley is a narrow paradise, green’ with tall grasses and noble cottonwoods that recall the stately elms of the Connecticut valley. But presently the grass gives place to barren sand hanks, the hardier trees, whose roots bore deep to drink, grow small and straggling, and at last the river dies altogether upon the arid plain and leaves beyond as bare a desert as that which borders its bright oasis* ribbon on both sides.