whole command came to
the conclusion which I have already expressed, that it was worth
_nothing_. I have no hesitation in saying, that I would not hazard
the life of one valuable and useful man for every foot of land
between San Patricio and the valley of the Rio Grande. The country
is not now, and can never be, of the _slightest value_."

Major Gaines has been there lately. He is a competent observer. He is
contradicted by nobody. And so far as that country is concerned, I take
it for granted that it is not worth a dollar.

Now of New Mexico, what of that! Forty-nine fiftieths, at least, of the
whole of New Mexico, are a barren waste, a desert plain of mountain,
with no wood, no timber. Little fagots for lighting a fire are carried
thirty or forty miles on mules. There is no fall of rain there, as in
temperate climates. It is Asiatic in scenery altogether: enormously high
mountains, running up some of them ten thousand feet, with narrow
valleys at their bases, through which streams sometimes trickle along. A
strip, a garter, winds along, through which runs the Rio Grande, from
far away up in the Rocky Mountains to latitude 33 deg., a distance of three
or four hundred miles. There these sixty thousand persons reside. In the
mountains on the right and left are streams which, obeying the natural
tendency as tributaries, should flow into the Rio Grande, and which, in
certain seasons, when rains are abundant, do, some of them, actually
reach the Rio Grande; while the greater part always, and all for the
greater part of the year, never reach an outlet to the sea, but are
absorbed in the sands and desert plains of the country. There is no
cultivation there. There is cultivation where there is artificial
watering or irrigation, and nowhere else. Men can live only in the
narrow valley, and in the gorges of the mountains which rise round it,
and not along the course of the streams which lose themselves in the
sands.

Now there is no public domain in New Mexico, not a foot of land, to the
soil of which we shall obtain title. Not an acre becomes ours when the
country becomes ours. More than that, the country is as full of people,
such as they are, as it is likely to be. There is not the least thing in
it to invite settlement from the fertile valley of the Mississippi. And
I undertake to say, there would not be two hundred families of persons
who would emigrate from the United States to New Mexico, for