ALL DAY LONG HEAVY SHADOWS HANG OVER DEVIL’S GATE AND THE FOAMING WATERS CHAFE AGAINST ITS ROCKY PORTALS
So wrote Joaquin Miller thirty years ago; more and more the “purposes and plans” of the great basin become apparent. In forty-seven years Nevada alone has yielded in treasure $1,700,000,000.
But the store of riches is not alone in mines. Silt-laden rivers born in snow-clad mountain heights for untold centuries have carried their riches into the great basin. The principal streams of Nevada have no outlet but disappear in sinks. The Truckee, rising at Lake Tahoe almost at the summit of the Sierra, tumbles down the mountain side to a last resting place in Pyramid and Mud Lakes. The Carson River, rising in equally lofty heights, sinks in a lake of the same name, and the Humboldt, companion to the railway through central Nevada, flows from the Great Wells at the base of the Ruby Range and westerly finds its way 120 miles to a vanishing point in Humboldt Lake.
To give life to the desert by joining again these streams with the silt-surface earth of the Nevada valleys through irrigation, is the task now in hand. Ere finished, the commonwealth should be as great in agriculture and horticulture as in mining.
In Nevada’s 110,000 square miles are many thousands of fertile acres requiring but the touch of water to make them productive. Here are some of the great grazing lands of America. A total of not far from 10,000 carloads of cattle, horses and sheep is exported from Nevada every year.
IN OGDEN CANYON IS THE HERMITAGE, BUILT AMID ROMANTIC SURROUNDINGS AND ATTRACTING MANY LOVERS OF TROUT AND SCENERY
The Great Salt Lake Cut-off of the Overland Route westward from Ogden is now of course the main line; the old line runs to the north of Great Salt Lake, crossing the mountains at Promontory at an elevation of 4907 feet and rejoining the Great Salt Lake Cut-off at Umbria Junction. Through trains no longer are operated via Promontory and in the march of progress that station which one day held the attention of the entire country as the junction point of two great railways binding together the East and the West is now only a name on a side line. Yet the day of its birth was one of glory. New York City celebrated it with the chimes ringing out Old Hundred and a salute of one hundred guns; Philadelphia rang all its bells in celebration and Chicago rejoiced with a mass meeting where Vice President Colfax spoke, and sent through the decorated streets a parade four miles in length. Omaha turned loose with all of its firearms and paraded with every able-bodied man in town in line, and closed the day with fireworks and illuminations. As usual, San Francisco was fore-handed with its rejoicing, starting its celebration two days in advance of the driving of the golden spike, and continuing it two days thereafter to preserve a proper equilibrium. Bret Harte wrote a poem for the event.
The reasons for abandoning the old historic route in favor of the new mid-sea pathway across Great Salt Lake are more eloquently expressed in the diagram on [page 47] than can be done by words.
Westward from Ogden, on the new route passing the Lake stations and then Lucin and Montello, the first place of importance is Cobre, junction point with the new Nevada Northern Railway with its line southward through Cherry to Ely, a distance of 153 miles. At Ely is a mountain of copper, one of the great mines of the world. Vast development work is under way here. The Cherry Creek section has gold and silver; as far back as 1876 twenty carloads of ore were teamed 150 miles to the railway and shipped to a smelter, returning an average of $800 to the ton. Absence of transportation has prevented development until now.