ΤΟ WITH PICTURES BY MAXFIELD PARRISH. No part of the United States is less generally known than the Southwest, and none is better worth knowing. Of no other part of the United States is so large a proportion of the unpleasant and unattractive features known so well, and so small a proportion of the beauties, wonders, and utilities known so little. To the Eastern and Northern mind the Southwest raises a dim picture of hot desert, bare mountain, and monotonous plain sparsely grown up to cactus, sage, greasewood, or bunch-grass, and sown with the white bones of animals which have perished from hunger and thirst; a land of wild Indians, of lazy Mexicans, of rough cow-boys, of roving, half-wild cattle, of desperate mining ventures, of frequent trainrobberies. This impression is based in part on the stray paragraphs from this unknown land that occasionally creep into the metropolitan newspapers, but it is chiefly founded upon the hasty observations and reports of dusty transcontinental travelers, car-weary for three or four days, the edge of their interest quite blunted with longing for the green wonders and soft sunshine of California. Texas, southern California east of the Coast Range, and the western half of Oklahoma, including the "Strip." Eastern Texas, with its plentiful rainfall, its forests, and its fine plantations of cotton and corn, is quite a different country from western Texas, and must be classed with the South. In extent of territory the Southwest is an empire more than twice as large as Germany, and greater in area than the thirteen original States of the American Union. Its population is sparse and occupied almost exclusively in cattle- and sheep-raising, mining, and irrigation-farming, with a limited amount of lumbering. All its vast territory contains only a little more than half as many inhabitants as the city of Chicago. Its largest city, on the extreme eastern edge of the arid land, is San Antonio, Texas, with a population of fifty-three thousand. All of its other cities are much smaller. It is traversed east and west by two, in Texas three, great railroads, running generally parallel, having many branches, and connected by several cross-cuts running north and south. It is a land of amazing contrasts. It is both the oldest and the newest part of the United States-oldest in history and newest in Anglo-Saxon enterprise. Long before the Cavaliers set foot in Virginia or the first Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, even before Copyright, 1902, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved. What is generally known as the Southwest may be said to comprise all of the Territories of Arizona and New Mexico, the greater portion of Texas, perhaps best described as arid VOL. LXIV.-1. 5 |