This I decided was our objective point: Very little snow could be seen elsewhere, and between me and the snowy mountains lay a low, black rocky range, and a wide level plain, that had no signs of water, as I had learned them in our trip thus far across the country.
The black range seemed to run nearly north and south, and to the north and northwest the country looked volcanic, black and desolate.
As I looked and thought, I believed that we were much farther from a fertile region then most of our party had any idea of.

Such of them as had read Fremont's travels, and most of them going to California had fortified themselves before starting by reading Fremont; said that the mountains were near California and were fertile from their very summits down to the sea, but that to the east of the mountains it was a desert region for hundred of miles.

As I explained it to them, and so they soon saw for themselves, they believed that the snowy range ahead of us was the last range to cross before we entered the long-sought California, and it seemed not far off, and prospect quite encouraging.
Our road had been winding around among the buttes which looked like the Indian baskets turned upside down on the great barren plain.

What water we found was in small pools in the wash-out places near the foothills at the edge of the valley, probably running down the ravines after some storm.

There were dry lake beds scattered around over the plain, but it did not seem as if there had ever been volume of water enough lately to force itself out so far into the plain as these lakes were.