t far overpaid all my pains. Most of the plants
are identical with those of the Sierra, but there are quite a number of
Mexican species. One coniferous tree was all I found. This is a spruce
of a species new to me, Douglasii macrocarpa. [14]

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 sa