The Lahontan Valley is a basin in Churchill County,

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a landlocked state in the Western United States. It borders Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the seventh-most extensive, th ...

, United States. The valley is a landform of the central portion of the prehistoric Lake Lahontan's lakebed of 20,000-9,000 years ago. The valley and the adjacent

Carson Sink Carson Sink is a playa in the northeastern portion of the Carson Desert in present-day Nevada, United States of America, that was formerly the terminus of the Carson River. Today the sink is fed by drainage canals of the Truckee-Carson Irriga ...

represent a small portion of the lake bed. Humboldt Lake is to the valley's northeast. Pyramid Lake is west. Walker Lake is to the south. The valley is part of the larger

Great Basin Desert The Great Basin Desert is part of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range in the western United States. The desert is a geographical region that largely overlaps the Great Basin shrub steppe defined by the World Wildlife ...

, however during the

California Gold Rush The California gold rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the U ...

the valley was often called the Forty Mile Desert.

Description

The Lahontan Valley is mostly uninhabited desert, aside from the city of Fallon and the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Reservation. There is sparse habitation in farmland around the Carson River and irrigation canals surrounding Fallon, an arc of farms around the Soda Lakes volcano, the railroad junction at Hazen and the ghost town of Stillwater. There is a geothermal power plant at

Soda Lake A soda lake or alkaline lake is a lake on the strongly base (chemistry), basic side of neutrality, typically with a pH, pH value between 9 and 12. They are characterized by high concentrations of carbonate salts, typically sodium carbonate (and ...

and combined geothermal/solar plant at Stillwater. The valley derives its name from

Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce de Lahontan, Baron de Lahontan Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan (9 June 1666 – before 1716) was a French aristocrat, writer, and explorer who served in the French military in Canada, where he traveled extensively in the Wisconsin and Minnesota region and the upper Mississip ...

, a French soldier.

Forty Mile Desert

The Forty Mile Desert is a

name for Nevada's Lahontan Valley and the adjoining area to the northwest. Emigrants following the

California Trail The California Trail was an emigrant trail of about across the western half of the North American continent from Missouri River towns to what is now the state of California. After it was established, the first half of the California Trail f ...

west came into the Lahontan Valley via the

Humboldt River The Humboldt River is the longest river in the northern and central part of Nevada. It extends in a general east-to-west direction from its headwaters in northern Nevada's Jarbidge Mountains, Jarbidge, Independence Mountains, Independence, and ...

. West of the river's end in the Humboldt Sink, the trail forked, with one branch leading towards the

Carson River The Carson River is a northwestern Nevada river that empties into the Carson Sink, an endorheic basin. The main stem of the river is long although the addition of the East Fork makes the total length , traversing five counties: Alpine Count ...

and the other towards the

Truckee River The Truckee River is a river in the U.S. states of California and Nevada. The river flows northeasterly and is long.U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed October 20, 2012 Th ...

. Regardless of which route they took, the travelers would have to endure about of desert without usable water. The Truckee route traversed the area starting at modern Lovelock, reaching the waters of the Truckee River near modern Wadsworth. This path is along a series of smaller valleys separated from the main part of the Lahontan Valley by the Hot Springs Mountains. Modern

Interstate 80 Interstate 80 (I-80) is an east–west transcontinental freeway that crosses the United States from San Francisco, California, to Teaneck, New Jersey, in the New York metropolitan area. The highway was designated in 1956 as one of the ori ...

closely approximates this path. The Carson route across the Lahontan Valley proceeds south from modern Lovelock towards an area west of modern Fallon called Ragtown, which had the last usable water on the

. State Historical Marker No. 19. The

First transcontinental railroad America's first transcontinental railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route (Union Pacific Railroad), Overland Route") was a continuous railroad line built between 1863 and 1869 that connected the exis ...

(modern Overland Route) and

U.S. Route 95 U.S. Route 95 (US 95) is a major north–south United States Numbered Highway System, United States Highway in the western United States. It travels through the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho, staying inland ...

loosely follow the Carson route. In Chapter XX of ''

Roughing It ''Roughing It'' is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature by Mark Twain. It was written in 1870–71 and published in 1872, following his first travel book '' The Innocents Abroad'' (1869). ''Roughing It'' is dedicated to Twain's m ...

'', Mark Twain speaks of his traversing it during the stagecoach journey his brother and he made from Missouri to Nevada in the summer of 1861:

On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American Desert—forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from six inches to a foot. We worked our passage most of the way across. That is to say, we got out and walked. It was a dreary pull and a long and thirsty one, for we had no water. From one extremity of this desert to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step! The desert was one prodigious graveyard. And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones. I think we saw log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State in the Union. Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California endured?

Per a state historical marker at a

rest area A rest area is a public facility located next to a large thoroughfare such as a motorway, Limited-access road, expressway, or highway, at which drivers and passengers can rest, eat, or refuel without exiting onto secondary roads. Other names ...

at the junction of I-80 and US 95, the Forty Mile Desert was the most dreaded part of the California Trail. If possible, the stretch was crossed at night. An 1850 survey counted 953 graves along this portion of the trail, along with thousands of animal skeletons and abandoned belongings of the desperate travelers. State Historical Marker No. 26.

References

External links

Carson Trail
at Emigrant Trails West, photo tour of southern wagon route across Forty Mile Desert
Truckee Trail
at Emigrant Trails West, photo tour of northern wagon route across Forty Mile Desert {{Authority control California Trail Valleys of Churchill County, Nevada