man and beast, and the bravest of the gold-hunters, seeking to penetrate
to the placer ground in the hill gulches between the twin Timanyoni
ranges, made a hundred-mile détour to avoid it.

Later, the discoveries of rich "pocket" deposits in the Red Butte
district lifted the intermontane hill country temporarily to the high
plane of a bonanza field. In the rush that followed, a few prudent ones
chose the longer détour; others, hardier and more temerarious, outfitted
at Copah, and assaulting the hill barrier of the Little Piñons 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