On we went then over the mountains to the Tonto Basin and through the Reno Pass to the Verde River. We were encamped there over Sunday on January 1st in the former reservation of the now deserted Fort McDowell, and early on Monday morning we started for Phœnix. By a forced march of thirty miles we entered the city at ten o’clock the same evening and had a huge supper in a Chinese restaurant; then, while our animals were eating their fill of fresh alfalfa in a corral attached to a livery-stable, we slept deeply near by on a heap of hay, glad to have reached the end of our six weeks’ march across the narrowing frontier.
Not the most interesting nor profitable and certainly not the most adventurous of the many miles which I have walked in a slow progress across the continent has been this last stage of the journey up through California. And yet the remembrance of it will always have a place apart. Work was plenty, but I made no long stops, pressed on at the rate of thirty miles a day, impelled by the delight of walking in so glorious an air through the marvellous beauty of this Pacific slope.
Fresh from the dusty plains I was soon in the midst of the orange-groves heavily laden with ripe fruit all about Colton and Riverside, where the hills were terraced as in the Riviera and the sky was the deep, unfathomable blue of Italy. It was January, and the first, fresh green of the new year was upon the fields and had touched with infinite delicacy the rugged sides of the mountains whose summits flashed white in places from melting snow. The early mornings were frosty, but mid-day warmed to a gentle glow, and the cool of the evening came with the declining sun.
Many a time, on the plains or in the mountains, in the presence of some Mexican Pueblo of adobe huts in a strangely foreign setting of cedar-trees, with threads of water apparently flowing up hill along the irrigation ditches to scant fields reclaimed from the desert, it had been difficult to realize that one was still in America. Here again was strongest suggestion of the foreign, in the houses which survive from the Spanish period, and especially the old Mission churches, where dwells the dignity of age and one can pass completely into the very atmosphere of Spain.