Chapter XX

On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peaks we had yet
seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its
heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless.

On the eighteenth day we encountered the eastward-bound telegraph-
constructors at Reese River station and sent a message to his Excellency
Gov. Nye at Carson City (distant one hundred and fifty-six miles).

On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American Desert--forty
memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from
six inches to a foot. We worked our passage most of the way across.
That is to say, we got out and walked. It was a dreary pull and a long
and thirsty one, for we had no water. From one extremity of this desert
to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the
forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step! The desert was one
prodigious graveyard. And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting
wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones. I think we saw
log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State
in the Union. Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the
fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California
endured?

At the border of the Desert lies Carson Lake, or The "Sink" of the
Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water some eighty or a hundred
miles in circumference. Carson River empties into it and is lost--sinks
mysteriously into the earth and never appears in the light of the sun
again--for the lake has no outlet whatever.

There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this mysterious
fate. They end in various lakes or "sinks," and that is the last of
them. Carson Lake, Humboldt Lake, Walker Lake, Mono Lake, are all great
sheets of water without any visible outlet. Water is always flowing into
them; none is ever seen to flow out of them, and yet they remain always
level full, neither receding nor overflowing. What they do with their
surplus is only known to the Creator.

On the western verge of the Desert we halted a moment at Ragtown. It
consisted of one log house and is not set down on the map.

This reminds me of a circumstance. Just after we left Julesburg, on the
Platte, I was sitting with the driver, and he said:

"I can tell you a most laughable thing indeed, if you would like to
listen to it. Horace Greeley went over this road once. When he was
leaving Carson City he told the driver, Hank Monk, that he had an
engagement to lecture at Placerville and was very anxious to go through
quick. Hank Monk cracked his whip and started off at an awful pace.
The coach bounced up and down in such a terrific way