Now of New Mexico, what of that!  Forty-nine fiftieths, at least, of the whole of New Mexico, are a barren waste, a desert plain of mountain, with no wood, no timber.  Little fagots for lighting a fire are carried thirty or forty miles on mules.  There is no fall of rain there, as in temperate climates.  It is Asiatic in scenery altogether:  enormously high mountains, running up some of them ten thousand feet, with narrow valleys at their bases, through which streams sometimes trickle along.  A strip, a garter, winds along, through which runs the Rio Grande, from far away up in the Rocky Mountains to latitude 33 deg., a distance of three or four hundred miles.  There these sixty thousand persons reside.  In the mountains on the right and left are streams which, obeying the natural tendency as tributaries, should flow into the Rio Grande, and which, in certain seasons, when rains are abundant, do, some of them, actually reach the Rio Grande; while the greater part always, and all for the greater part of the year, never reach an outlet to the sea, but are absorbed in the sands and desert plains of the country.  There is no cultivation there.  There is cultivation where there is artificial watering or irrigation, and nowhere else.  Men can live only in the narrow valley, and in the gorges of the mountains which rise round it, and not along the course of the streams which lose themselves in the sands.

Now there is no public domain in New Mexico, not a foot of land, to the soil of which we shall obtain title.  Not an acre becomes ours when the country becomes ours.  More than that, the country is as full of people, such as they are, as it is likely to be.  There is not the least thing in it to invite settlement from the fertile valley of the Mississippi.  And I undertake to say, there would not be two hundred families of persons who would emigrate from the United States to New Mexico, for agricultural purposes, in fifty years.  They could not live there.  Suppose they were to cultivate the lands; they could only make them productive in a slight degree by irrigation or artificial watering.  The people there produce little, and live on little.  That is not the characteristic, I take it, of the people of the Eastern or of the Middle States, or of the Valley of the Mississippi.  They produce a good deal, and they consume a good deal.

Again, Sir, New Mexico is not like Texas.  I have hoped, and I still hope, that Texas will be filled up from among ourselves, not with Spaniards, not with peons; that its inhabitants will not be Mexican landlords, with troops of slaves, predial or otherwise.