Note 120 — Chapter III · Concluding the Route to the Great Salt Lake City. (continued 2)
Reading edition
The Spanish “chapparal” means a low oak copse. The word has been naturalized in Texas and New Mexico, and applied to the dense and bushy undergrowth, chiefly of briers and thorns, disposed in patches from a thicket of a hundred yards to the whole flank of a mountain range (especially in the Mexican Tierra Caliente), and so closely entwined that nothing larger than a wolf can force a way through it.