Then These Mountain
Glaciers Vanished In Turn, After Sculpturing The Ranges Into Their
Present Condition.
Fourth, the few immense lakes extending over the lowlands, in the
midst of which many of the interior ranges stood as islands, became
shallow as the ice vanished from the mountains, and separated into
many distinct lakes, whose waters no longer reached the ocean.
Most
of these have disappeared by the filling of their basins with detritus
from the mountains, and now form sage plains and "alkali flats."
The transition from one to the other of these various conditions was
gradual and orderly: first, a nearly simple tableland; then a grand
mer de glace shedding its crawling silver currents to the sea, and
becoming gradually more wrinkled as unequal erosion roughened its bed,
and brought the highest peaks and ridges above the surface; then a
land of lakes, an almost continuous sheet of water stretching from the
Sierra to the Wahsatch, adorned with innumerable island mountains;
then a slow desiccation and decay to present conditions of sage and
sand.
XVI
Nevada's Dead Towns[21]
Nevada is one of the very youngest and wildest of the States;
nevertheless it is already strewn with ruins that seem as gray and
silent and time-worn as if the civilization to which they belonged had
perished centuries ago. Yet, strange to say, all these ruins are
results of mining efforts made within the last few years. Wander
where you may throughout the length and breadth of this mountain-barred wilderness, you everywhere come upon these dead mining towns,
with their tall chimney stacks, standing forlorn amid broken walls and
furnaces, and machinery half buried in sand, the very names of many of
them already forgotten amid the excitements of later discoveries, and
now known only through tradition - tradition ten years old.
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