The immense expanse of mountain-girt valleys, on the edges of which these hidden ranches lie, make even the largest fields seem comic in size.  The smallest, however, are by no means insignificant in a pecuniary view.  On the east side of the Toyabe Range I discovered a jolly Irishman who informed me that his income from fifty acres, reinforced by a sheep range on the adjacent hills, was from seven to nine thousand dollars per annum.  His irrigating brook is about four feet wide and eight inches deep, flowing about two miles per hour.

On Duckwater Creek, Nye County, Mr. Irwin has reclaimed a tule swamp several hundred acres in extent, which is now chiefly devoted to alfalfa.  On twenty-five acres he claims to have raised this year thirty-seven tons of barley.  Indeed, I have not yet noticed a meager crop of any kind in the State.  Fruit alone is conspicuously absent.

On the California side of the Sierra grain will not ripen at much greater elevation than four thousand feet above sea level.  The valleys of Nevada lie at a height of from four to six thousand feet, and both wheat and barley ripen, wherever water may be had, up to seven thousand feet.  The harvest, of course, is later as the elevation increases.  In the valleys of the Carson and Walker Rivers, four thousand feet above the sea, the grain harvest is about a month later than in California.  In Reese River Valley, six thousand feet, it begins near the end of August.  Winter grain ripens somewhat earlier, while occasionally one meets a patch of barley in some cool, high-lying canyon that will not mature before the middle of September.

Unlike California, Nevada will probably be always richer in gold and silver than in grain.  Utah farmers hope to change the climate of the east side of the basin by prayer, and point to the recent rise in the waters of the Great Salt Lake as a beginning of moister times.  But Nevada’s only hope, in the way of any considerable increase in agriculture, is from artesian wells.  The experiment has been tried on a small scale with encouraging success.  But what is now wanted seems to be the boring of a few specimen wells of a large size out in the main valleys.  The encouragement that successful experiments of this kind would give to emigration seeking farms forms an object well worthy the attention of the Government.  But all that California farmers in the grand central valley require is the preservation of the forests and the wise distribution of the glorious abundance of water from the snow stored on the west flank of the Sierra.

Whether any considerable area of these sage plains will ever thus be made to blossom in grass and wheat, experience will show.  But in the mean time Nevada is beautiful in her wildness, and if tillers of the soil can thus be brought to see that possibly Nature may have other uses even for rich soils besides the feeding of human beings, then will these foodless “deserts” have taught a fine lesson.