contact with it until he reaches Dragoon Springs. This grama grass is beyond all comparison the most nutricious herbage ever cropped by quadrupeds. It is much heavier, contains more saccharine in connection with more farinaceous and strength-giving aliment than any other grass known. At least such is my experience, and that of all other men who have had occasion to test its virtues and time to pronounce upon its merits. I give it the very first rank among all sorts of hay, believing it to be superior to clover, timothy, alfalfa, or all three together. Although I have never been able to observe any seed upon this grass, it seems to combine the qualities of grain and hay in the greatest perfection. Horses will live and do well upon it, provided they can obtain it regularly, while doing active cavalry duty, without other feed; but they must have it, as stated, regularly in abundance, and be permitted to crop it from native pastures. It bears no flower, exhibits no seed, but seems to reproduce itself from the roots by the shooting up of young, green and vigorous spires, which are at first inclosed within the sheaths of their old and dried-up predecessors, and by their growth split and cast them to earth, and occupy their places.
I am not sufficiently versed in botany to give my readers a more elaborate and scientific account of this superb grass, and if I were, it would not be my desire in a work of this character to inflict upon the general reader a series of double-barreled Greek terms which not one in a thousand could understand, and, understanding, would care about. The object is to convey some tolerable idea of that great aliment for herbivorous animals upon which the Apache races rely for the support of their horses, and which, by its singularly strength-giving properties, is capable of enabling their ponies to perform extraordinary feats of endurance.
