The forests of central Nevada, with some remarks on the those of adjacent regions

Abstract

To the traveler crossing the Great Basin by the line of the Pacific Railroad the country will appear almost as destitute of trees as the great plateau over which he has passed in approaching the Rocky Mountains from the east. This first impression will disappear, however, should he penetrate farther south, and ascend some of the low mountain ranges, which, with a general north-and-south trend, everywhere cut up this elevated interior region into long, narrow valleys. As compared with our Atlantic forests, or those still nobler ones which, farther to the west, owe their existence to the influence of the Pacific, the forests which clothe, with a scanty and stunted vegetation, the mountain slopes of Nevada are miserably poor in extent, productiveness, and especially in the number of species of which they are composed. Actually they are of immense value. For scanty as they are, they regulate and protect the rare and uncertain streams on which the agl'lculture of Nevada depends, and furnish a large population with fuel and lumber; a population, too, which, while consuming and wasting enormously its forests in vast mining operations, is practically cut off, by its isolation and the cost of transportation, from outside supply. A hurried journey made in Septemper last, undertaken for the purpose of studying in situ the trees of the" Great Basin," and of introducing into cultivation some of the peculiar plants of that region, took me to the great mining center of Eureka, and then throllgh Dry and Fish-spring valleys seventy-five , miles further southwest into the Monitor Range, to the point