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.
