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WATER NORTH AND WEST OF THE STAKED PLAINS

At many places along the northern escarpment of the Staked Plains there are small springs which come from the lower beds of the Plains, and at some places there are heavy sand beds in which an abundant supply of good water has been obtained from wells sunk to the depth of from ten to thirty feet. Just north of the point where the west line of Texas ascends the Plains there is a range of sand hills running parallel with the north escarpment of the Plains and at a distance of five or six miles, for a distance of nearly fifty miles, and in these hills water can be had in very shallow wells.

West of the Pecos river in New Mexico and the upper part of Texas there are a great number of very fine springs, some of them ranking in the quantity of water they furnish with the largest springs in the world. A more particular description of them will be given later.

With one or two exceptions these springs are all on the west side of the river, and those that form the exception are in the immediate vicinity of the river channel.

The principal sources of the water in these springs is in the mountain range to the westward. There the water falls in copious showers, and running down into the valleys is absorbed by the heavy beds of drift, and is finally conducted into the lower beds of the Tertiary, thus forming the same water beds in geologic age that is found at the bottom of the Tertiary strata on the Staked Plains. The Pecos river having cut this water-bearing bed in two, as soon as the water reaches this valley of erosion, it rushes out in the big springs mentioned.

Between the anticlinal axis which runs out from the mountains toward the plains below, these beds of Tertiary strata remain, and whereever these immense troughs exist there is an abundance of good, clear, sweet water, and these troughs furnish the storage reservoirs for the springs, that are unaffected by either drouth or floods.

Water is found also in the Permian and Carboniferous strata as well as in the Quaternary drift.

Some of the water coming from the Carboniferous is so impregnated with salts as to be unpalatable, and all the water in the Permian is so largely saturated with salts of various kinds that it is hardly palatable for either man or beast. It is said that the stock become used to that kind of water and do as well as when using the purest.

The water from the Quaternary is generally pure and good.

At the head of Delaware Creek are two springs within a few feet of each other—one of them comes from the Quaternary and the other from a fracture in the Carboniferous sandstone. That which comes from the Quaternary is sweet and good, while that from the Carboniferous is highly impregnated with salts, and emits a strong smell of sulphureted hydrogen.