udent ones
chose the longer detour; others, hardier and more temerarious, outfitted
at Copah, and assaulting the hill barrier of the Little Pinons at
Crosswater Gap, faced the jornada through the Land of Thirst.

Of these earliest of the desert caravans, the railroad builders,
following the same trail and pointing toward the same destination in the
gold gulches, found dismal reminders. In the longest of the thirsty
stretches there were clean-picked skeletons, and they were not always
the relics of the patient pack-animals. In which event Chandler, chief
of the Red Butte Western construction, proclaimed himself Eastern-bred
and a tenderfoot by compelling the grade contractors to stop and bury
them.

Why the railroad builders, with Copah for a starting-point and Red Butte
for a terminus, had elected to pitch their head-quarters camp in the
western edge of the desert, no later comer could ever determine. Lost,
also, is the identity of the camp's sponsor who, visioning the things
that were to be, borrowed from the California pioneers and named the
halting-place on the desert's edge "Angels." But for the more material
details Chandler was responsible. It was he who laid out the division
yards on the bald plain at the foot of the first mesa, planting the
"Crow's Nest" head-quarters building on the mesa side of the gridironing
tracks, and scattering the shops and repair plant along the opposite
boundary of the wide right-of-way.

The town had followed the shops, as a sheer necessity. First and always
the railroad nucleus, Angels became in turn, and in addition, the
forwarding station for a copper-mining district in the Timanyoni
foot-hills, and a little later, when a few adventurous cattlemen had
discovered that the sun-cured herbage of the desert borders was
nutritious and fattening, a stock-shipping point. But even in the day of
promise, when the railroad building was at its height and a handful of
promoters were plotting streets and town lots on the second mesa, and
printing glowing tributes--for strictly Eastern distribution--to the dry
atmosphere and the unfailing sunshine, the desert leaven was silently at
work. A few of the railroad men transplanted their families; but apart
from these, Angels was a man's town with elemental appetites, and with
only the coarse fare of the frontier fighting line to satisfy them.

Farther along, the desert came more definitely to its own. The rich Red
Butte "pockets" began to show sig