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Show DESEPlT TEAMSTERS. SLOWLY BUT SURELY ARE PASSING AWAY. The Steel Track and Locomotive Csnrp Their ITiite A Ruugh Rider Tells "Why the Occupation Is One of the Most Dismal Ever Undertaken. (Special Letter.) Desert teamsters the white Arabs of the American Sahara, as some one has aptly called them are passing away. The rairoads are driving them back to civilization, to find other occupation. occu-pation. Ten years ago there were 1.200 teamsters on the deserts and in the arid mountains oi Arizona and southern California, with wagon trains unlike anything else in the world, on account of their size and the stupendous stupen-dous loads they carried. The Atchison, Topeka &. Santa Fe company has done some very extensive railroad building on the Colorado and Mojave deserts. To-day there are less than fifty genuine desert teamsters left in southern California, and their number num-ber is diminishing every month. Most of the freight teamsters on the deserts nowadays are Mexicans or half-breed Indians. The average white man is unfitted by temperament for such hardships and depressing solitude. There are some freight-teaming runs that require seventeen days for the round trip, and during the journey the men with the teams spend three-fourths three-fourths of the time remote from any other human beings. It requires twenty-one days to make the round trip from Mojave to the Death valley borax works in California, and it is seldom that a teamster sees even four or five ' A DESERT TRAIN. persons in his long, weary journey across the desert. On many desert freight wagons are two men the teamster and swamper. The former sits at the front of the first wagon and looks out for the horses and mules; the swamper is on the second wagon. His duty is to work the ponderous brakes on the big wagon on down grades and to urge on the dallying horses and mules by means of stones and rocks thrown at the beasts on the up grades. Mr. John E. Hodgson ("Happy Jack"), one of Buffalo Bill's rough riders, says: "The dreariness and melancholy produced pro-duced by months of freight teaming across the desert and through the blistering blis-tering mountains is indescribable. I have lived alone for three or four months at a time in a mining cabin away over the Verde mountains, and I have been where I never saw a human being for two or three weeks at a stretch, but the two trips I made as teamster from Phoenix to Prescott and back during the summer of 1S94 were enough for me. It would take at least $1,000 a trip to get me to contract to do more freight hauling like that. "What is it that makes freighting on the deserts so frightful? Why, the solitude, the hot sun, the aridity that makes one almost a mummy before he knows it, the slow, steady, humdrum creaking of the freight wagons as they just move through the sea of sand, the withering heat that comes ceaselessly day by day to one's face while he is out on a trip, and the depressing scenery scen-ery all about all turn one's disposition upside down. The nightly camps on the hot sand and the swallowing of cheap, half-cooked food are in themselves them-selves enough to upset a common man's stomach and mind. I cannot adequately tell of the awful monotony of a seven days' trip across the Gila desert, through the furnace-like canyons, can-yons, over the white, scaled, alkali foothills, and then up through the desolate, des-olate, forbidding and lifeless mountains moun-tains to the Rio Hasayampa, on the way from Phoenix to Prescott, that freight teamsters have endured in summer. sum-mer. The more intelligent the teamster, team-ster, so much more dreadful the monotonous mo-notonous solitude and enervating the conditions of the trip." |