Across the Forty Mile Desert

The deadliest stretch of the Emigrant Trail

Apr 07, 2024

Photo of riding on the highway across the dry and barren Forty Mile Desert in Nevada. The sky is crystal blue. The highway heads arrow straight toward a vanishing point on the horizon, where barren brown mountains lie. Alongside the road is sand and sage.

[This is Chapter 7. The story begins here… I recommend viewing on a laptop or desktop or even a tablet to let the photos breathe a little more and help convey the vastness of the American West.]

May 22, 1903 — Wadsworth, Nevada

"I left Wadsworth at 7 o'clock on the morning of May 22 and, leaving it, said farewell to the Truckee River, and what few vestiges of trees and grass there were in this part of Nevada. Out of Wadsworth I was facing the great desert; the plains of alkali that sifts down from the mountains on each side, and which are barren of everything except sagebrush. As I stand before mounting and gaze across that parched, dull-gray waste of sand, alkali and rocks, with the spots of gray-green sagebrush, and think of parting from the Truckee River, which seemed so trivial a water course before, a pang of regret shoots through me. I know I shall miss the gurgling stream, and there is a sinking of the spirits that cannot be overcome as I face the leaden-hued skies and sands so unutterably dreary. Almost one can, in fancy, see the sign of ‘leave hope behind all who venture here.’ This is the Forty Mile Desert of Nevada that was so dreaded by the immigrants in the days when the prairie schooner, the bronco, and the mule were the only conveyances used by man to cross it. Many perished in this desert from want, and many more from the attacks of the then hostile Indians. The old overland trail is what I was following. It is what the railroad follows, and in many places the rails have been laid directly over the old wagon tracks. At times the old trail runs right alongside of the rails, and now and then it swings off for a few hundred yards, a quarter or a half mile maybe, only to wind back again to where the surveyors kept to a straight line for the railroad and removed the rocks and sand dunes that the prairie schooners digressed to avoid."

George A Wyman

Satellite view of the Nevada desert from Fernley in the lower left to Lovelock in the upper right from Google Maps. A blue line representing the route runs from the lower left to upper right of the image. There are a couple of roads running north and south into Fernley and Wadsworth in the lower left. There is another road - labeled 95- running up from the bottom center to the blue line. There are no other roads. The majority of the image is barren desert - white sands, tan soils, a dark ridge of hills in the lower left, and a line of green near Wadworth in the lower left marking a river. In the upper right, leading to Lovelock, is an oblong area - a green grid of irrigated fields. The blue line extends beyond Lovelock orr the upper right corner of the image. — Source: Google Maps

July 14, 2016 - Traveling across the Great Barren Desert was difficult enough but the most difficult section was a forty mile stretch between the Truckee and Humboldt Rivers where there was no water at all. For those severely weakened by the long journey, it was a death sentence

Roadside Placard FORTY MILE DESERT THE 40 MILE DESERT, BEGINNING HERE, IS A BARREN STRETCH OF WATERLESS ALKALI WASTELAND. IT WAS THE MOST DREADED SECTION OF THE CALIFORNIA EMIGRANT TRAIL. IF POSSIBLE, IT WAS TRAVELED BY NIGHT BECAUSE OF THE GREAT HEAT. THE ROUTE WAS FIRST TRAVELED BY THE WALKER-CHILES PARTY IN 1843, WITH THE FIRST WAGON TRAIN, REGARDLESS OF ITS HORRORS, IT BECAME THE ACCEPTED ROUTE, AS IT SPLIT FIVE MILES SOUTHWEST OF HERE INTO THE TWO MAIN TRAILS TO CALIFORNIA-THE CARSON RIVER AND TRUCKEE RIVER ROUTES. STARVATION FOR MEN AND ANIMALS STALKED EVERY MILE. A SURVEY MADE IN 1850 SHOWED THESE APPALLING STATISTICS---1,061 DEAD MULES, ALMOST 5,000 HORSES, 3,750 CATTLE. AND 953 GRAVES. THE THEN VALUE OF PERSONAL PROPERTY LOSS WAS SET AT $1,000,000. THE HEAVIEST TRAFFIC CAME FROM 1849 TO 1869. IT WAS STILL USED AFTER COMPLETION OF THE CENTRAL PACIFIC RAILROAD IN 1869. STATE HISTORICAL MARKER NO.26 NEVADA STATE PARK SYSTEM CHURCHILL COUNTY MUSEUM COMMITTEE — Photo: Alvis E Hendley, San Francisco

Wyman had a considerably easier time crossing the Forty Mile Desert, but it was by no means easy. The sand is deep here.

"I walked the first mile out of Wadsworth pushing the motor bicycle and pausing every 10 feet to take a ******e. Then I took to the railroad."

George A Wyman

Wyman struggled with the poor roads, crashing so often that he stopped writing about it ("I do not mention falls, as a rule, as it would make the story one long monotony of falling off and getting on again."). He obviously didn’t have a fancy interstate to retreat to, and his answer to the deep sand was at once deceptively simple yet treacherous; riding on the railroad tracks of the Transcontinental Railroad. He did not ride alongside the tracks or on the smooth iron rail, he rode across the railway ties, sometimes on the outside the rails but often between them. Imagine roads so bad that riding on the railroad tracks sounded like a good idea. That was the Nevada that Wyman was trying to cross.

Photograph of the Nevada desert. In the foreground are short, dry grasses. Beyond that, the rails of the railroad can be seen, with telephone poles running alongside and a short, squat utilitarian building (akin to a shipping container) nearby. Beyond, the white sands of the desert. And beyond that in the hazy distance, rugged, barren mountains. — Massie, 2016

"I bumped along over the ties for 20 miles and then reached Massie, a telegraph station with a water tank for the train and section hands. The water for these tanks is hauled in water cars from Wadsworth. At Wadsworth I had taken the precaution of adding a water bottle to my Equipment, and here I mixed it with good water. I had hardly got to riding again before I got my first puncture of the trip, and it was a beauty. It was a hole into which you could stick your finger. It was no laughing matter at the time, yet there was something bizarre about the incident that now causes me to smile, for that cut was made by a fragment of a beer bottle. Imagine it if you please - I am in the middle of the Forty Mile Desert with a wild waste of sand and sagebrush bounding the horizon from every point of view, and, save the lonely telegraph shanty, there is not a sign of human life about. So far as the outlook is concerned, I and the telegraph operators are the sole inhabitants of a globe of sand, and yet I get my tire cut by a piece of beer bottle bearing a choice Milwaukee label. It rather adds to the grotesqueness of the situation when I recall the appearance of the ground alongside the railroad track in that unholy desert, where countless men and animals have perished after being crazed by thirst. All along the tracks the ground is strewn with beer bottles that have been tossed from the car windows as the trains sped by. Now and then one of the flying bottles struck a tie or a fellow waif and broke, but most of them landed on the sand or brush and lie there intact. I could have gathered enough of these unbroken glass beer flagons to have started a good sized bottling establishment, and, in spite of the gloom caused by my puncture. I could not help thinking what a veritable paradise this same deadly wilderness would be to some city junkman. In this land of the ‘Terrible Thirst’ an habitual beer drinker surely would be turned into a raving lunatic by this sight."

George A Wyman

Gandy dancers (railroad workers), Mississippi, 1976 Roland L. Freeman The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Black and white photo of men using long steel bars to reposition the rails of a railroad track. Three of the men are alongside the near rail, and another three alongside the far rail. Three of the men closest to the camera are visible and recognizable as African American. The other three are obscured by the three men in front but their long steel bars can ben seen. The men are wearing worn and dirty clothes - slacks, shirts, and hats, but the man closest to the camera has finer trousers, a long-sleeved collared shirt, suspenders, and a straw porkpie hat. All six men have placed one end of the steel bar beneath the iron rail, and with a firm grip on the other end of the bar are straining their backs to reposition the rail. There is gravel ballast at their feet and tall wild grasses along the edge of the tracks. In the distance, supervising the work, is a white man with dark slacks and a white short sleeve shirt. He is standing with his feet shoulder width apart and watching the six men. — Gandy dancers (railroad workers), Mississippi, 1976, Roland L. Freeman, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

One of the benefits of following the Transcontinental Railroad was that work crews were stationed all along the railroad. Each section crew was responsible for maintaining a section of track, inspecting and replacing deteriorated ties, maintaining ballast (the crushed stone between the ties), and using long poles (a "gandy") to lever rails back into place after a passing train shifted them out of alignment. This was low-wage, back-breaking work and the section crews (mostly immigrants and ethnic minorities) lived alongside the railroad in section houses, simple wooden structures or railway cars. For a good part of his trip, Wyman found food, accommodations, and sometimes help with repairs with railroad work crews.

The explorer and engineer merely paved the way for, and conceived the uniting of the wide-spread states with twin bands of steel. It was the itinerant worker-the "gandy-dancer"-who tramped the ties, who laid the foundations for the net-work of railroads that now run from coast to coast. In the desert's burning heat, in the mountains, on the plains, he labored without thought of the greatness of his labor, drawing his meagre pay envelope to promptly blow it in. — From “Hoboes Go South With Fall”, by a ‘Workin’ Stiff.”, Detroit Evening Times, Friday, November 19, 1915.

Wyman plugged the flat and soldiered on. He passed a railroad section gang and got a little delirious in the unending heat.

"So far as signs of life other than my own were concerned I might have been a pre-Adamite soul wandering in the void world before the work of creation began; but the railroad was there to testify to the presence of man prior to me. And with that before me, I imagine myself to be the last of the race, who by some strange freak has escaped the blight that caused the end of the world and had been left alone on the dead planet, over which I was now coursing in search of a habitable spot. Perhaps you can picture the cheerfulness of the place that inspired such fancies in my mind~ imaginings of this sort are the legitimate offspring of the desert…It is not strange that men go mad in a waste of sand so broad that to the eye it is as limitless as the sky, so dead that one feels a thrill of relief at the sight of a lizard or a swooping vulture: the wonder is that any man can see it and afterward be sane."

George A Wyman

I ride past expansive salt flats baking beneath an unrelenting sun, the white lines on the road ticking like a metronome while the mountains move slowly in my peripheral vision. Every vent in my high-tech summer riding jacket is open yet I still feel like I'm in a hair dryer. There's a sparse, rugged beauty to this place but after a half hour in this giant toaster oven I want nothing more than to find an exit and a gas station with a shaded canopy and convenience store with air conditioning and a refrigerator case full of cold refreshing drinks. I want to sit in that small ice box and drink Yoo-Hoo or something cold with caffeine to cool my core. I want to snack on Buggles and Cheetos. I want to go to a bathroom with a heavy steel door, cinder block walls, and harsh fluorescent lighting and turn on the faucet and douse my face with cold water. I want to close my eyes for five minutes and recharge my body before tackling the rest of the Forty Mile Desert.

Photo of a narrow concrete tunnel-like underpass beneath the interstate in Nevada. The underpass is just wide enough for the asphalt two-lane road that runs beneath it and towards the horizon. Beyond the underpass, the road heads through sandy, scrubby land toward the on and off ramps of the interstate.

There's an exit up ahead. I count down the miles and look forward to the gas station of my mind. I use my turn signal to exit (even though there’s nobody around) and come to a stop at the bottom of the ramp. To the right is a gated dirt road leading straight into the Forty Mile Desert (and maybe a mine). Straight ahead is the ramp back onto the highway. That's it. No gas station, no convenience store, no air conditioning, no Yoo-Hoo, not even a small building or tree where I can hide in the shade for five minutes. I take the connector road running beneath the highway to the other side in the foolish hope that my gas station oasis is hiding there. Nope. Defeated, I park in the shade beneath the highway, sit on a little gravel hill, and take a big, cool swig from my insulated water bottle. I lean back and my eyelids drop. George, how did you deal with the heat, the sun, and the vastness of the West? How did you…Five minutes later, I'm awake and refreshed. I take a another swig of cool water, put my helmet back on, and get the hell out of the Forty Mile Desert.

"Sixteen miles east of Brown's I reached Lovelock's and the Forty Mile Desert had been crossed. I don't know who named it but he had a poor sense of justice to deprive the desert of any part or due in distance when he gave it the Forty Mile title. It is 63 miles on the straight rails from the station at Wadsworth to that at Lovelock's and the green growth of the town does not encroach upon the 63 miles of desert for more the 8 or 9 miles. l am speaking by railroad statistics now, for I lost my cyclometer between Reno and Wadsworth, and could not tell what my mileage was. This was the second cyclometer. the first having been bounced off the bridge over the Sacramento"

George A Wyman

Photo from the seat of a moving motorcycle on the interestate. The photo is of the motorcycle's left rearview mirror. In the mirror is a large RV behind the motorcycle switching lanes to pass the motorcycle. Beyond the RV are rugged brown mountains. The mirror also shows the rider's gloved hand and a portion of his jacket. Below the mirror, the asphalt of the interstate is blurred by the motorcycle's speed.

With the Forty Mile Desert in my mirrors, I pull into Lovelock, Nevada. Wyman called this place an oasis and compared to the Forty Mile Desert, he's not entirely wrong; there are actually trees here thanks to the Humboldt River. But as I roll through town, "oasis" isn't the first word that comes to mind, "empty" is more like it. The main drag is dotted with nondescript and low flat-topped buildings, small restaurants that look like they haven't been open for weeks, and mid-century motels (the kind Tod and Buz might have stayed at) that look like they haven't seen a fresh coat of paint since Barry Goldwater was in the news. In the two minutes it takes to go from one end of town to another, I don't see another soul.

"Lovelock's is much like an oasis, for while the Forty Mile Desert of Nevada ends there, to the east of it is the Great American Desert of Utah, and eastward beyond that is again the Red Desert of Wyoming, and I learned that the worst is not always over when the alkali wastes of Nevada have been crossed. This oasis of Lovelock's is about 20 miles across, and there is some excellent farming land on it. It is quite a place, but I reached it in the middle of the afternoon, and did not stop, except to get some gasoline and a cyclometer. I pushed on through Lovelock's to Humboldt, 33 miles beyond for my overnight stop."

George A Wyman

I was hoping to get a charge and then proceed to Humboldt, the next town on Wyman's journey. The mobile home park on the edge of town wants $10 for a charge, which is kind of steep. And it's later in the day than I had anticipated (I blame the $5 breakfast) and frankly I'm knackered from the heat. More importantly, Humboldt is little more than a dot on the map these days.

Photo of roadside signs on metal poles painted white at the entrance to a motel. The closest sign is white with "Cadillac Inn" in a dark red. Cadillac is written in decorative script, Inn is all caps, serif, between the words is the crest of Cadillac automobiles. The is a light fixture on top of the sign to illuminate the name. Below is a black painted area with an unlit neon "NO VACANCY" sign. Further down and hanging off the side of the pole is a white "WiFi" sign with inactive spotlights pointed at it. On the other side is another horizontal protuberance with a hook on the end. Nothing is hanging from it. O the other side of the motel driveway is another Cadillac Inn sign on another white pole. This one looks newer and is internally lit. It has CADILLAC in all caps, block serif, red letters on white on top. Hanging below is a vertical red sign with white letters, with INN written vertically, below which is written "Quality (italics) ROOMS" on two lines, and below that "BUDGET PRICES" on two lines. In the right of the photo is the corner of the motel. Beyond are some tall bushes and beyond that are tall signs for McDonalds and Chevron on very large poles.

I decide to look for a room in Lovelock. I stop at the Cadillac Inn, a classic 50s-era motel with a neon sign on a pole by the curb, a little office by the street, and a low-slung L-shaped building wrapping around a small, empty parking lot. I step into the office and step back in time, the paneling, the little reception counter, and the bulletin board with local attractions all evoking the mid-century. It's a greenhouse in there though, at least twenty degrees hotter than outside. At least it's a dry heat. I ring the bell on the counter and slowly bake. After a short wait a young woman appears. She and her husband just bought the place and are working on fixing it up. She says that mining keeps the town afloat. They have a room. I take it.

Photo of a black electric motorcycle with yellow bags in the parking courtyard of the Cadillac Inn. It's a sunny day but the sun is lower in the sky, causing the motorcycle to cast a long shadow on the asphalt. On the far side of the courtyard is one of the low-slung, one-story wings of the motel, with a nearly flat roof and red doors to the rooms opening up to the courtyard. By the street is the Cadillac Inn sign on a tall white pole.

The room is more old Chevy than Cadillac, with a single bed on a plywood platform and simple furnishings. But it's clean and has new sheets. I turn the air conditioner onto "High Cool" and it wheezes into action with a faint, pack-a-day “breeze” tumbling weakly from its vents; this is going to take a while. I run an extension cord from the room to the bike sitting just outside and then take a shower to undo the day's exertions.

Photo taken at dusk of a series of low slung building across the street. Electric lines criss cross the dark street. The building would be difficult to see in front of the stand of tall trees were it not for the pink and purple neon lights that outline the roofline and other architectural features of the buildings. Behind, on two massive poles, is a large neon sign, "CASINO"

Fresh and clean, I step outside and walk to the casino/hotel/restaurant nearby. The sun is setting but I can still feel the day's heat radiating off the asphalt. The restaurant's got a diner vibe, with thickly cushioned booths along the walls. I belly up to the counter and order chicken fried steak. There are a handful of men at the counter but none of them seem to be in a conversing mood, so I sit and eat and fall into my phone as the slot machines in the adjacent, empty casino blink and ping.

Photo of a plate of food - chicken fried steak with white gravy on top, mashed potatoes with more white gravy, and peas and carrots that look like they came from a can.

After dinner, I walk back to the hotel. There are a handful of work trucks in the parking lot now. The sky is a deep and clear blue. The air conditioner is still working to cool the room but it's actually cooler outside. I sit on my little porch and listen to the night while the Zero charges.

A man sits on the porch outside of his hotel room on a lawn chair. The door to his room is red. A single overhead light illuminates the concrete porch. Sneaking out of the corner of the doorway is an orange extension cord that snakes across the concrete and past the man to a black electric motorcycle sitting in the dark. A couple of shrubs frame the photo. A small US flag hangs from one of the posts holding up the overhanging roof.

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Following Wyman: An Electric Motorcycle Adventure

Across the Forty Mile Desert

The deadliest stretch of the Emigrant Trail

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