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," 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 a railroad from El Paso, passing through the midst of the silver district I have described, shall transfer our commerce with Japan and China to the Pacific side of our continent. Here the very silver necessary for the purchase of tea is nearly as abundant as tin in some of the European mines, and, as in California, the prospects held out to the farmer are equal to mineral attractions.
It would be folly for our government to acquire Sonora without first providing