MUSINGS OF THE ELEPHANT.

There is a butte in the Cabillo country that they call the Elephant.

Picture a country of lavenders and yellows and blues; an open, barren
land, with now a wide sweep of desert, now a chaos of mesa and mountain,
dead volcano and eroded plain. The desert, a buff yellow where blue
distance and black shadow and the purple of volcano spill have not
stained it. The mountains, bronze and lavender, lifting scarred peaks to
a quiet sky; a sky of turquoise blue. The Rio del Norte, a brown streak,
forcing a difficult and roundabout course through ranges and desert.

In a rough desert plain, which is surrounded by ranges, stands a broad
backed butte that was once a volcano. The Rio del Norte sweeps in a
curve about its base. Time and volcanic crumblings and desert wind have
carved the great beast into the semblance of an elephant at rest. The
giant head is slightly bowed. The curved trunk droops, but the eyes are
wide open and the ears are slightly lifted. By day it is a rich, red
bronze. By night, a purple that deepens to black. Watching, brooding,
listening, day or night, the butte dominates here the desert and the
river and the ranges.

This is the butte that they call the Elephant.

Below this butte the Service was building a dam. It was a huge
undertaking. When finished the dam would be as high as a twenty-story
building and as long as two city blocks. It would block the river,
turning it into a lake forty miles long, that would be a perpetual water
supply to over a hundred thousand acres of land in the Rio del Norte
valley.

The borders of the Rio del Norte have been cultivated for centuries.
Long before the Puritans landed in New England, the Spanish who followed
Coronado planted grape vines on the brown river's banks. The Spanish
found Pueblo Indians irrigating little hard-won fields here. The
irrigation ditches these Indians used were of dateless antiquity and yet
there were traces left of still older ditches used by a people who had
gone, leaving behind them only these pitiful dumb traces of heroic human
effort. After the Spanish came the Americans, patrolling their ditches
with guns lest the Apaches devastate their fields.

Spanish, Indians, Americans all fought to bring the treacherous Rio del
Norte under control, but failure came so often that at last they united
in begging the Reclamation Service for aid. It was to help these people
and to open up the untouched lands of the valle