while he smokes his pipe, very little encouragement is required to
bring forth the story of the farmer's life--hunting, mining, fighting,

in the early Indian times, et. Only the few who are married hope to
return to California to educate their children, and the ease with

which money is made renders the fulfillment of these hopes
comparatively sure.

After dwelling thus long on the farms of this dry wonderland, my
readers may be led to fancy them of more importance as compared with

the unbroken fields of Nature than they really are. Making your way
along any of the wide gray valleys that stretch from north to south,

seldom will your eye be interrupted by a single mark of cultivation.
The smooth lake-like ground sweeps on indefinitely, growing more and

more dim in the glowing sunshine, while a mountain range from eight to
ten thousand feet high bounds the view on either hand. No singing

water, no green sod, no moist nook to rest in--mountain and valley
alike naked and shadowless in the sun-glare; and though, perhaps,

traveling a well-worn road to a gold or silver mine, and supplied with
repeated instructions, you can scarce hope to find any human

habitation from day to day, so vast and impressive is the hot, dusty,
alkaline wildness.

But after riding some thirty or forty miles, and while the sun may be
sinking behind the mountains, you come suddenly upon signs of

cultivation. Clumps of willows indicate water, and water indicates a
farm. Approaching more nearly, you discover what may be a patch of

barley spread out unevenly along the bottom of a flood bed, broken
perhaps, and rendered less distinct by boulder piles and the fringing

willows of a stream. Speedily you can confidently say that the grain
patch is surely such; its ragged bounds become clear; a sand-roofed

cabin comes to view littered with sun-cracked implements and with an
outer girdle of potato, cabbage, and alfalfa patches.

The immenseexpanse 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 chieflydevoted 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 gloriousabundance of water
from the snow stored on the west flank of the Sierra.

Whether any considerable area of these sage plains well 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.

XIII
Nevada Forests[17]

When the traveler from California has crossed the Sierra and gone a
little way down the eastern flank, the woods come to an end about as

suddenly and completely as if, going westward, he had reached the
ocean. From the very noblest forests in the world he emerges into

free sunshine and dead alkaline lake-levels. Mountains are seen
beyond, rising in bewildering abundance, range beyond range. But

however closely we have been accustomed to associate forests and
mountains, these always present a singularly barrenaspect, appearing

gray and forbidding and shadeless, like heaps of ashes dumped from the
blazing sky.

But wheresoever we may venture to go in all this good world, nature is
ever found richer and more beautiful than she seems, and nowhere may

you meet with more varied and delightful surprises than in the byways
and recesses of this sublime wilderness--lovely asters and abronias on

the dusty plains, rose-gardens around the mountain wells, and resiny
woods, where all seemed so desolate, adorning the hot foothills as

well as the cool summits, fed by cordial and benevolent storms of rain
and hail and snow; all of these scant and rare as compared with the

immeasurable exuberance of California, but still amply sufficient
throughout the barest deserts for a clear manifestation of God's love.

Though Nevada is situated in what is called the "Great Basin," no less
than sixty-five groups and chains of mountains rise within the bounds

of the State to a height of about from eight thousand to thirteen
thousand feet above the level of the sea, and as far as I have

observed, every one of these is planted, to some extent, with
coniferous trees, though it is only upon the highest that we find

anything that may fairly be called a forest. The lower ranges and the
foothills and slopes of the higher are roughened with small scrubby

junipers and nut pines, while the dominating peaks, together with the
ridges that swing in grand curves between them, are covered with a

closer and more erect growth of pine, spruce, and fir, resembling the
forests of the Eastern States both as to size and general botanical

characteristics. Here is found what is called the heavy timber, but
the tallest and most fully developed sections of the forests, growing

down in sheltered hollows on moist moraines, would be regarded in
California only as groves of saplings, and so, relatively, they are,

for by careful calculation we find that more than a thousand of these
trees would be required to furnish as much timber as may be obtained

from a single specimen of our Sierra giants.
The height of the timberline in eastern Nevada, near the middle of the

Great Basin, is about eleven thousand feet above sea level;
consequently the forests, in a dwarfed, storm-beaten condition, pass

over the summits of nearly every range in the State, broken here and
there only by mechanical conditions of the surface rocks. Only three

mountains in the State have as yet come under my observation whose
summits rise distinctly above the treeline. These are Wheeler's Peak,

twelve thousand three hundred feet high, Mount Moriah, about twelve
thousand feet, and Granite Mountain, about the same height, all of

which are situated near the boundary line between Nevada and Utah
Territory.

In a rambling mountaineering journey of eighteen hundred miles across
the state, I have met nine species of coniferous trees,--four pines,

two spruces, two junipers, and one fir,--about one third the number
found in California. By far the most abundant and interesting of

these is the Pinus Fremontiana,[18] or nut pine. In the number of
individual trees and extent of range this curious little conifer

surpasses all the others combined. Nearly every mountain in the State
is planted with it from near the base to a height of from eight

thousand to nine thousand feet above the sea. Some are covered from
base to summit by this one species, with only a sparse growth of

juniper on the lower slopes to break the continuity of these curious
woods, which, though dark-looking at a little distance, are yet almost

shadeless, and without any hint of the dark glens and hollows so
characteristic of other pine woods. Tens of thousands of acres occur