Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill FOOD AND REARING Indian legend tells of a time when all was water; then land was made; for a long time the earth was too wet for human beings and at last the earth was dried out by a mighty fire. All these are pretty stories for those who are looking for deluge legends and the effects of blazing comets, but if the Indian account is true, the drying process was carried entirely too far in the Southwest. Water! water!, water! The word gains a new significance in this arid region. There is a rippling, cooling, refreshing note in it, a soothing of parched lips and a guaranty against death from thirst. So, all conversation among the people is replete with references to this mainstay of life, and one comes, like them, to discuss the water question with an earnest regard for its problems. Wherever there is water, almost always will there be found ancient ruins. In modern times the windmill of the settler often stands by the spring which quenched the thirst of the ancient inhabitants of a now crumbling pueblo. The blessings which were invoked in Biblical times upon the man who '' digged awell" apply also in this semi-desert, for Syria and Arizona do not differ greatly in climate. The Bedouin with his horses a.nd camels would not be out of place on the sand wastes of our Sahara; nor were the Spanish conquerors on unfamiliar ground when they exchanged the dusty plains and naked sierras of their native land for those of the New World. The traveler in Spain, northern Africa, or Asia Minor is impressed with the similarity between these countries and our Southwest, so that the name of New Spain, early applied by the Spaniards to all of Mexico, seems very appropriate. Like these countries, too, our Southwest is a land of thirst; the dry air and fervent sun parch the skin and devo...