ouragement from the people of Yuma.
The cautions came not from the timid who see danger in every rumour,
but from the old steamboat captains, the miners, and prospectors who
knew the country and had interests in mineral claims across the
border. These claims they had lost in many cases because they had
failed for the last two years to keep up their assessment work. There
were vague suggestions of being stood up against an adobe wall with a
row of "yaller bellies" in front, or being thrown into damp dungeons
and held for a ransom.

The steamboat men could give me little information about the river.
The old channel had filled with silt, and the river was diverted into
a roundabout course little more than a creek in width, then spread
over whole delta. The widely spread water finally collected into an
ancient course of the Colorado, known as the Hardy or False Colorado.
As nearly as I could learn no one from Yuma had been through this new
channel beyond a certain point called Volcanic Lake. Two or three
parties had come back with stories of having attempted it, but found
themselves in the middle of a cane-brake with insufficient water to
float a boat. With a desire to be of real assistance to me, one old
captain called a Yuma Indian into his office and asked him his
opinion, suggesting that he might go along.

"Mebbe so get lost in the trees, mebbe so get shot by the Cocopah,"
the Indian replied as he shook his head.

The captain laughed at the last and said that the Yuma and Cocopah
Indians were not the best of friends, and accused each other of all
sorts of things which neither had committed. Some Mexicans and certain
outlawed whites who kept close to the border for different reasons,
and the possibilities of bogging in a cane-brake were the only
uncertainties. In so many words he advised me against going.

Still I persevered. I had planned so long on completing my boating
trip to the Gulf, that I disliked to abandon the idea altogether. I
felt sure, with a flood on the Colorado, there would be some channel
that a flat-bottomed boat could go through, when travelling with the
current; but the return trip and the chances of being made a target
for some hidden native who had lived on this unfriendly border and had
as much reason for respecting some citizens of the United States as
our own Indians had in the frontier days, caused me considerable
concern. I knew it was customary everywhere to make much of the
imaginary d