My last camp was down at the narrow, notched bottom of a dry channel, the only open way for the life in the neighborhood.  I therefore lay between two fires, built to fence out snakes and wolves.

From the summit of the eastern rim I had a glorious view of the valley out to the ocean, which would require a whole book for its description.  My bread gave out a day before reaching the settlements, but I felt all the fresher and clearer for the fast.

XII

Nevada Farms[15]

To the farmer who comes to this thirsty land from beneath rainy skies, Nevada seems one vast desert, all sage and sand, hopelessly irredeemable now and forever.  And this, under present conditions, is severely true.  For notwithstanding it has gardens, grainfields, and hayfields generously productive, these compared with the arid stretches of valley and plain, as beheld in general views from the mountain tops, are mere specks lying inconspicuously here and there, in out-of-the-way places, often thirty or forty miles apart.

In leafy regions, blessed with copious rains, we learn to measure the productive capacity of the soil by its natural vegetation.  But this rule is almost wholly inapplicable here, for, notwithstanding its savage nakedness, scarce at all veiled by a sparse growth of sage and linosyris[16], the desert soil of the Great Basin is as rich in the elements that in rainy regions rise and ripen into food as that of any other State in the Union.  The rocks of its numerous mountain ranges have been thoroughly crushed and ground by glaciers, thrashed and vitalized by the sun, and sifted and outspread in lake basins by powerful torrents that attended the breaking-up of the glacial period, as if in every way Nature had been making haste to prepare the land for the husbandman.  Soil, climate, topographical conditions, all that the most exacting could demand, are present, but one thing, water, is wanting.  The present rainfall would be wholly inadequate for agriculture, even if it were advantageously distributed over the lowlands, while in fact the greater portion is poured out on the heights in sudden and violent thundershowers called “cloud-bursts,” the waters of which are fruitlessly swallowed up in sandy gulches and deltas a few minutes after their first boisterous appearance.  The principal mountain chains, trending nearly north and south, parallel with the Sierra and the Wahsatch, receive a good deal of snow during winter, but no great masses are stored up as fountains for large perennial streams capable of irrigating considerable areas.  Most of it is melted before the end of May and absorbed by moraines and gravelly taluses, which send forth small rills that slip quietly down the upper canyons through narrow strips of flowery verdure, most of them sinking and vanishing before they reach the base of their fountain ranges.  Perhaps not one in ten of the whole number flow out into the open plains, not a single drop reaches the sea, and only a few are large enough to irrigate more than one farm of moderate size.