I include this Part 9 under some significant discomfort as it contains an unfeeling, racist and uneducated perspective of a people in general, and the women in particular, that I find repellent. However, people's attitudes towards others is what it is...I just need to say this part of our history sucks! E.C.
Not the least interesting feature of the lower Colorado River is the desert Indian - an aboriginal who is like no other i the world. All the early explorers lied to or about the Indians they met along the river. In the previous chapter I have told how Melchior Diaz described savages so powerful that one of them tripped off lightly with a log that had defied the efforts of a half dozen of his own hard-bitten veterans even to lift.
That was a tall yarn. If any who followed the doughty Diaz told a taller the honor goes to Father Garces when he recorded that none of the Mojaves were thieves and the women of the tribe were beautiful, modest and comely. He also added that:
The women wear petticoats. The men go entirely naked, and in a country so cold this is well worthy of compassion."Either the good Padre was carried away by the kindness of his hosts, or else the passing centuries have brought material changes, ethnological, meteorological and moral. The present day denizen of Needles, with its not infrequent summer temperatures of a hundred and thirty in the shade, undoubtedly rates himself as a proper object of compassion, but not because of a lack of clothes to protect himself from the cold. On the contrary, his principal grudge is against the law which prevents him from going around in the primitive state that so stirred good old Father Garces to pity when he first
I added the Waterman. 
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