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Sept., 1919 AUTOBIOGRAPH?L NOT?_,S 179 The naturalists and the geologists ?vere assigned to one party or another, according to the opportunities for work offered by the several lines of travel. Thus each party was made up of from five to ten or more individuals according to circumstances. Though every effort was made to strip the personal belong- ings and camp equipage down to actual necessities, the impedimenta were not small, .and necessitated for each party a mule train of from six to fifteen or twenty animals. THE PACKERS Most of the packers were roustabouts picked up here and there more or less at random, for in those days men skilled in that kind of work were rare and hard to find. Among them were not a few of the typical "bad men of the west" who have more recently been introduced into polite society through the medium of the novel and the movie. Bad some of them certainly were, but as a rule I ?found them very communicative and entertaining as comrades of the trail, and daily communication width them soon taught me that, however bad they were, each and all of them had not a few redeeming traits. First and last I received many kindnesses at their hands. Theirs was the laborious task each morning of rounding up the mule herd--not always an easy matter, espe- cially when, owing to lack of grass or water, the herd had taken a notion to retrace its steps to the last camp, often fifteen or twenty miles away. Their duty, too, it was to assemble and tie into bundles the camp impedimenta, and then by means of the famed "diamond hitch" fasten the boxes and bundles to the aparejos (large padded saddles), which had been securely cinched on the unwilling mules. As many of the packages weighed upwards of a hundred pounds apiece, the job of lifting them into place and securing them there re- quired no mean degree of strength, skill, and patience. Three hundred pounds was not an uncommon load for a stout mule, and for a limited time on good roads a mule may carry as much as four hundred pounds. The packers trav- elled constantly with the train, not only to protect it, but to adjust and tighten the packs from time to time as needed. In rough country or rainy weather, this was not seldom, and not infrequently a pack animal was upset, or crowded off a mountain trail, to roll down a hundred feet or so into the stream below, when the packers had to plunge into the water, rescue the drowning animal and its pack, and replace the load. Polished manners and scholarly attain- ments were foreign to the packer's calling, and usually they lacked the gift of eloquent speech, but when things went wrong with the train, and stubborn mules needed rebuke, their outbursts of profane imaginings amounted to real eloquence. THE AMERICAN MULE This part of my theme would be incomplete did I not add a word on the Subject of the American Mule--an animal, which, to my mind, has never re- ceived full justice. Overlooking the bar sinister which attaches to his birth, and judging him in a friendly and not a hostile spirit, his native virtues are many, his faults few, and those chiefly due to bad treatment. Stripes and blows he never forgets and rarely forgives, and, as he has a good memory, he sometimes waits long for au opportunity to retaliate. That he is stubborn can- uot be denied, but he is also patient and long suffering, and such is his endur- ance that he survives and even prospers under circumstances, such as lack of food and water, which would quickly prove fatal to his nobler(?) and more