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 glorious abundance 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 barren aspect, 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.
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