Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once
we made forty miles (through the Great American Desert),
and ten miles beyond—fifty in all —in
twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or
rest. To stretch out and go to sleep, even on
stony and frozen ground, after pushing a wagon and
two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that
for the moment it almost seems cheap at the price.
We camped two days in the neighborhood of the “Sink
of the Humboldt.” We tried to use the strong
alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not answer.
It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either.
It left a taste in the mouth, bitter and every way
execrable, and a burning in the stomach that was very
uncomfortable. We put molasses in it, but that
helped it very little; we added a pickle, yet the alkali
was the prominent taste and so it was unfit for drinking.
The coffee we made of this water was the meanest compound
man has yet invented. It was really viler to
the taste than the unameliorated water itself.
Mr. Ballou, being the architect and builder of the
beverage felt constrained to endorse and uphold it,
and so drank half a cup, by little sips, making shift
to praise it faintly the while, but finally threw out
the remainder, and said frankly it was “too technical
for him.”
But presently we found a spring of fresh water, convenient,
and then, with nothing to mar our enjoyment, and no
stragglers to interrupt it, we entered into our rest.
After leaving the Sink, we traveled along the Humboldt
river a little way. People accustomed to the
monster mile-wide Mississippi, grow accustomed to
associating the term “river” with a high
degree of watery grandeur. Consequently, such
people feel rather disappointed when they stand on
the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that
a “river” in Nevada is a sickly rivulet
which is just the counterpart of the Erie canal in
all respects save that the canal is twice as long and
four times as deep. One of the pleasantest and
most invigorating exercises one can contrive is to
run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is
overheated, and then drink it dry.
On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two
hundred miles and entered Unionville, Humboldt county,
in the midst of a driving snow-storm. Unionville
consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole.
Six of the cabins were strung along one side of a deep
canyon, and the other five faced them. The rest
of the landscape was made up of bleak mountain walls
that rose so high into the sky from both sides of the
canyon that the village was left, as it were, far down
in the bottom of a crevice. It was always daylight
on the mountain tops a long time before the darkness
lifted and revealed Unionville.
We built a small, rude cabin in the side of the crevice
and roofed it with canvas, leaving a corner open to
serve as a chimney, through which the cattle used
to tumble occasionally, at night, and mash our furniture
and interrupt our sleep. It was very cold weather
and fuel was scarce. Indians brought brush and
bushes several miles on their backs; and when we could
catch a laden Indian it was well—and when
we could not (which was the rule, not the exception),
we shivered and bore it.
