le, and can never be
advantageously worked without an abundant supply of mineral coal for
smelting; nor can any of its mines or estates be successfully worked
without greater security for life and property than at present exists.
The capitalists of Mexico will not invest their means in developing the
resources of Sonora, and in consequence, the finest country in the
world is fast receding to a state of nature. I found in the Palace at
Mexico a copy of the last report of the Governor of Sonora upon the
state of his Department, in which he mentions, among many other causes
of its decadence during the last few years, the extensive emigration of
its laboring population to California.

Extravagant as are these statements of the mineral riches of Sonora,
they probably do not come up to the reality, as the largest of them are
founded on the sums reported for taxation at the distant city of
Mexico, when it was notorious, as already stated, that a large portion
of the silver was fraudulently concealed in order to avoid the taxes.
Such concealment could be successfully carried on in a region so
distant and inaccessible as Sonora was in the time of Philip V., for it
was in the reign of that idiot king, before the liberal
mining-ordinances of Carlos III., that the Sonora mining-fever broke
out.

A hundred years have passed since the once formidable Apaches swept
over northern Sonora like a deluge, blotting out forever the hopes
which the Spanish court had conceived of retrieving the fallen finances
of their empire from this _El Dorado_. But Providence had ordered it
otherwise. The Spaniards had done enough to demonstrate its
inexhaustible wealth, and then they were driven away from this
"creation of silver,"[83] and the whole deposit held for a hundred
years in reserve for the uses of another race, who were destined to
overrun the continent.

I should have but half performed my task should I omit to speak of the
excellent bay and harbor of Guaymas, in the southern part of Sonora.
After San Francisco, it is the finest harbor on the Pacific, and is the
natural route through which our commerce with the East Indies should be
directed. The long experience of Spain taught her that a western route
to the East Indies was so much superior to the one by the Cape of Good
Hope as to compensate for a transhipment of all of her East India
merchandise upon mules' backs from Acapulco to Vera Cruz. Much more
advantageous must it be to us, when