average every three years. Fortunately I have been able to retire at last from active business, and unless I become tired of traveling, or doing nothing, shall in future carefully avoid all mining speculations, or speculations of any kind. I have been looking at the sketch of a Californian miner, and I can only say that it reminds me of some of my earlier days. I worked hard I assure you to get my first capital out of the dust of the earth.

LILIAN: What are those men doing?

MR. GOLDUST The man holding the hose is directing two powerful hydraulic streams against the rock to loosen the earth and so cause it to wash down the sluice. The other man in the picture is shoveling the loosened gravel or earth into the sluice, from which, by various mechanical or chemical contrivances, the gold is finally extracted.

THE PRESIDENT: It is now time for the club to take its departure from the land of the Sierras. I invite you, therefore, to take your places in the train. The journey is long and not destitute of interest or of peril. You will be thankful to pass in safety over the long trestle bridges across the creeks in the Sacramento Valley, and will duly admire the snow-sheds and deep cuttings through which you are traveling at the moderate pace of twenty-two miles

per hour.

GRACE I intended to state that there is an interesting article on the Coniferous Forests of the Sierra Nevada in the Century Magazine for last September (1881). The writer says that these forests are the noblest and most beautiful on earth, though, owing to the shortness of the time which has elapsed since their discovery, they are as yet but little known. He asserts that the soils on which the forests are growing are in fact glacier moraines, that is, soil deposited by the ice glaciers after being crushed and ground from the solid flanks of the mountains. I would like to know something more about these glacier moraines, and the action of ice in preparing beds for the growth of these immense forests.

THE PRESIDENT: We have not time this evening to go into so large and interesting a subject, but it will certainly come before us again, and your curiosity may then be gratified. I have read the article you speak of with great interest, and consider it an excellent contribution to the natural history of this region.

The proceedings of the club then assumed an informal character.

CHAPTER V.

THE GREAT AMERICAN BASIN AND UTAH.

HE second meeting of the J. U. T. C. was held at the house of Dr.
Every member was present, and also several invited

Paulus.

guests.

The routine business having been disposed of, the President invited Dr. Paulus to conduct the club through its second tour.

DR. PAULUS: If you look at the map of America, you will find on the western portion two lofty mountain chains or systems. One is comparatively close to the Pacific Coast, and includes the Coast range and the Sierra, which, though separated by an extensive and rich valley, may be regarded for our present purpose as one system; the other is the great Rocky Mountain system, running from the extreme north to the peninsula. Between these two mountain systems is a vast undulating and broken valley, called by geographers the Great American Basin. KATE: A very matter of fact name.

JOHN German bach, brook, or place of flowing water: geographically, a dip on the surface.

DR. PAULUS: We are now descending into this Great Basin on its western side, hastening down the Sierra's slopes as fast as the railroad people think it prudent to draw us. Remember, however, that the Great American Basin, though it includes the whole of Nevada, and parts of Utah, Arizona, and California, is far surpassed in extent by the basin or valley of the Mississippi, which lies to the east of the Rocky Mountains. Indeed, geographers not uncommonly ignore, as it were, the Great American Basin, by including all the three mountain systems of which I have spoken the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra, and the Coast range-in one grand system, which they speak of as the Rocky Mountains, or Pacific coast range, in opposition to the great Appalachian or Eastern mountain system. But for the present we have to do with this great valley, and not with the whole of it either.

We have some picturesque views here which will help us in some degree to understand what this valley or basin is like. It is by no means uniform in its features, but presents almost infinite variety of physical aspect, and is at present the scene of some of the strangest developments in human character and history.

THE PRESIDENT: Will Dr. Paulus mention some of the special geological and physical features of this Basin?

DR. PAULUS: I presume you refer to the peculiarity that it is what I may term self-drained. None of its rivers seem to have any outlet towards the sea. The region, however, abounds in lakes, in some of which the water is salt. These lakes

receive the rivers, but in consequence of the little rainfall and the great evaporation they rarely have any outlet-the Great Salt Lake, for instance; or, if they have, the stream is usually soon absorbed in the earth.

JOHN I understand that this region, though comparatively depressed, is an elevated plateau, with ranges of hills running through it, generally north and south.

DR. PAULUS: Yes, and these hills are of a volcanic origin, treeless, and rain is gradually washing their substance down into the valleys. But enough of these preliminaries. That portion of this Great Basin we are now entering is very peculiar, and to the eye unattractive. It is termed the Great American Desert, and is applied especially to a tract of land some seventy to one hundred miles square,

The Great American Basin and Utah.

45

though of very irregular outline, and apparently utterly profitless and barren, both in an agricultural and mineral sense. In traveling through this region the eye sees only bare, brown hills and plains, covered with sand and alkali, with a thin growth of sage-bush, and grass. There is no water visible. Special trains convey this necessary commodity daily to the different stations along the railroad. In wet weather the soil becomes like mortar, and traveling, except by the railroad,

is well nigh impossible.

LILIAN: Does sage grow out in this desert? I should think that there must be good soil in it somewhere.

THE PRESIDENT: It is not the garden sage, nor anything like it.

bush is a species of Arte

misia, the wormwood

group of the order Composita. It seems indigenous to these dry alkaline soils, and as it is a shrubby plant, it makes good fire-wood in these regions.

DR. PAULUS: We are now entering, if you please, the confines of Utah territory.

GRACE: The land of

Blue-beards.

DR. PAULUS: Most of

CORINNA.

The sage

it, unfortunately, is held by the Mormons; but they will not interfere with us, though we may have a little to say about them by and by. Here is Corinna, not a Mormon town, though in Utah.

KATE: It does not look much of a place.

DR. PAULUS: No, nor very picturesque; but it is a specimen of a frontier city, and has a large trade with the great mining regions of this great Basin. At Ogden City we leave the Union Pacific for the Utah railroad for Salt Lake City. But before going there, I wish you to look at some beautiful views