CARSON RIVER.
The Carson River rises in the Sierras and has several tributaries across the line in California, in Alpine County. The river is about 220 miles in length and ends in Carson Lake. It enters Nevada in Douglas County. It has two branches, known as the East Fork and the West Fork. These unite near the town of Genoa, the county seat of Douglas County. The river then plows through the center of Douglas County into Ormsby, passing near Carson City, the capital of the State, thence into Lyon County, and finally finds its terminal “sink” in Carson Lake, in Churchill County. This lake has an outlet several miles in length into a second lake, or sink, which at times of great freshets is united with the lower sink of the Humboldt, as has already been mentioned. Carson Lake is circular in form and is about twelve miles long and eight or nine in width. It has a depth of forty or fifty feet, and its waters are quite sweet. The lower sink is about twenty miles long and from four to eight miles wide. Its waters, particularly toward the north end, where it is very shallow, are strongly alkaline. These lakes are at times resorted to by great flocks of all kinds of water fowl. It is a poor place for fish. Trout are not plentiful, and the other kinds—suckers and chubs—are soft and insipid.
The Carson River affords water for the irrigation of immense tracts of land in Douglas County, in Carson Valley, and other valleys below, and power for running many large quartz mills that work the ores of the Comstock Lode. The first of these mills are at Empire City, and they are thence found all along down the river to, and a short distance below, the town of Dayton.
Owing to the great quantities of water taken from it for the irrigation of ranches above in Carson Valley, the river becomes almost dry in the lower part of its course during the latter part of each summer. To remedy this evil large storage reservoirs should be constructed in the mountains and higher foot-hill regions.