Out on the Divide, a high part of the city where the wind has a fair sweep (this is generally of nights, when strangers are not likely to see it), the air is filled with dust, rags, tin cans, empty packing-cases, old cooking-stoves, all manner of second-hand furniture, crowbars, log-chains, lamp-posts, and similar rubbish. Hats! More hats are lost during the prevalence of a single zephyr than in any city in the Union on any election held in the last twenty years. These hats all go down the side of the mountain and land in a deep gulch known as Six-mile Cañon—the place where the Johntown Jasons found the first tag-locks of the big bonanza.
After a very severe zephyr, it is said, drifts of hats fully fifteen feet in depth, are to be seen in the bed of the cañon just named. All these hats are found and appropriated by the Piute Indians, who always go down to the cañon the next morning after a rousing and fruitful gale, to gather in the hat crop. When the innocent and guileless children of the desert come back to town, they are all loaded down to the guards with hats. Each head is decorated with at least half a dozen hats of all kinds and colors—braves, squaws, and pappooses are walking pyramids of hats.
There is a tradition in Virginia City, that in the spring of 1863, a donkey was caught up from the side of Mount Davidson—far up on the northern side, near the summit of the mountain—and carried eastward over the city, at a height of five or six hundred feet above the houses, finally landing near the Sugar-Loaf Mountain—nearly five miles away. Those who witnessed this remarkable instance of the force of the zephyr, say that as the poor beast was hurried away over the town, his neck was stretched out to its greatest length, and he was shrieking in the most despairing and heart-rending tones ever heard from any living creature. The oldest inhabitant sometimes tries to spoil this story by saying that what was seen was an old gander, the leader of a flock of wild geese, lost in the storm, and baffled in his attempt to make headway southward against the hurricane. It may be so, but most folks along the Comstock cling to the donkey and sneer at the gander.
Although there is hardly a green spot to be seen in any direction, yet there are, in many places in Washoe, landscapes that will always at once attract attention. From Virginia City, perched as it is, high on the side of Mount Davidson, is obtained a grand view of a vast wilderness of hills, mountains, and desert plains. The eye sweeps eastward over untold scores of hills and valleys to the tall peaks of the Humboldt mountains, distant not less than one hundred and eighty miles. Hill rises beyond hill far away in all directions, each hill exhibiting in all its outlines a stern individuality, and each rearing aloft a rock-crowned and treeless head.
In the interstices of these peaks, each of which stands a dark-browed and sullen Ajax, we catch glimpses of deserts that lie white and glittering, long journeys away, yet we almost feel our eyes scorched as we gaze, by their far-darted shimmer. These spots that so glitter and twinkle, far away through the brown of the hills, are great plains of salt and alkali—deserts more hungry and sterile than the wilds of Sahara. In the view before us we have the “hoar austerity of rugged desolation,” yet there dwells in it a grandeur that is almost awful, and a something very fascinating.
Every artist who looks upon this weird and unsmiling landscape feels his soul stirred with a desire to paint it. No man has yet painted it—no man will ever paint it. There is that in it which no cunning in colors can reach—no skill in drawing can express. The only way in which an artist can approach the subject is by painting what he feels, not what he sees. This vast landscape is at all times grand and worthy of study, but when its many moods are evoked by elemental disturbances, it becomes wildly beautiful.
Often in summer several thunder-showers are to be seen in progress at the same moment, far out in the wide wilderness, each separated from the other by a broad belt of blue sky and bright sunshine. While one dark storm-cloud hovers over the city, showering its moisture upon the thirsty earth, another is seen a whole day’s journey to the eastward, creeping along some parched desert, with the rain, in slanting columns, pouring upon the white and shining fields of alkali, and still others hang about the mountain peaks in various directions, sending down red bolts of lightning upon their dark granite summits. Away to the northeast the tall, turreted peaks of Castle District rise against an inky sky, each line of their rugged spires distinctly traceable, while to the southeast, looming high above the horizon, are seen, through a shower, the ashen-hued mountains of Como.
To the right of these, and miles on miles further away—far south of the Carson River—stand many tall, purple peaks, here and there one among the highest tipped with sunlight. Eastward, below the level of the city and almost in the centre of the picture, the Sugar-Loaf rears its rounded top, over which, and far beyond, stretched partly in sunlight and partly in shadow, lies the valley of the Carson. A green fringe of cottonwoods, visible along all the river’s eccentric meanderings, is the only tinge of green in all the broad land before us. Here and there are seen short reaches in the river that glitter like burnished silver in the rays of the evening sun.
A long table-mountain cuts short our view of the valley and river, but over this mountain we see, spread out like a vast sheet of parchment, the Forty-mile Desert, over which shadows of clouds move as slowly as in early times crawled across the same sands the long trains of weary pilgrims, wearing out the way to the land of gold, over the Sierras. Far beyond, where the cloud-shadows move in black squadrons across the desert sands—quite two days’ journey beyond—are reared against the eastern sky the Humboldt mountains, whose white peaks might pass for the tombs and cenotaphs of the giants of the olden times. Some of these are half hidden in patches of dark mist, or veiled by slanting columns of rain, while others stand in the full glory of the sun. But in this scene we have a constant change of light and shade. Peaks that were a moment since sooty-black, suddenly flash up and become golden and brilliant, soon again to resume their dusky robes, while neighboring peaks stand forth clad in the garments of their departed glory.
As the sun sinks lower, night is seen to settle into the deeper cañons, and take shelter behind the lower hills, and the shadow of Mount Davidson goes forth as a giant, and stretches darkness from hill-top to hill-top everywhere.