ong denizen of Europe, or of the cis-Alleghany
portion of this continent, is so accustomed to the unfailing presence or
nearness of trees and springs, or streams, that he naturally supposes
them as universal as the air we breathe. In a New Englander's crude
conception, trees spring up and grow to stately maturity wherever they
are not repressed by constant vigilance and exertion, while brooks and
rivers are implied by the existence of hills and valleys, nay, of any
land whatever. But as you travel westward with the Missouri, springs,
streams, woods, become palpably scarcer and scarcer, until, unless in
the immediate valley of the Platte, Arkansas, or some more northerly
river that rushes full-fed from a long course among the snow-crowned
peaks of the Rocky Mountains, your eye ranges over a vast expanse
whereon neither forest, grove, nor even a single tree, is visible. If
the country is rolling, springs may at long intervals be found by those
who know just where to seek them; but streams are few and scanty, save
in winter, and in later summer they disappear almost entirely. Beyond
Salt Lake, the destitution of wood in Utah and Nevada is far less than
on the Plains, but that of water is even greater. Fifty miles from water
to water is the lowest interval in my experience on Simpson's route; but
I only traversed the eastern half of it, turning thence abruptly
northward to strike the valley of the Humboldt (formerly known as the
St. Mary's), which rising in the north-west corner of the new Territory
of Nevada, hardly fifty miles from the southern or Lewis branch of the
Columbia, flows southward from the Goose Creek Mountains that cradled
and nourished it, and thence hardly maintains its volume (which is that
of a decent mill stream) in its generally south-west course of three
hundred and fifty miles, till it is two thirds lost in a lake and the
residue in a reedy slough or sink, a hundred miles from the Sierra
Nevada and forty from the similar sink of the Carson, a larger and less
impulsive stream which drains a considerable section of the eastern
declivity of the Sierra Nevada only to meet this inglorious end.
Doubtless, the time has been when a large portion of western Nevada
formed one great lake or inland sea, whereof Pyramid and Mud Lakes, and
the sinks respectively of the Carson, Walker and Humboldt rivers, are
all that the thirsty earth and air have left us. The forty miles of low,
flat, naked desert--in part of heavy,