SKETCHES OF THE WASHOE SILVER MINES

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Across this Territory, running from north to south, are two chains of mountains, dividing it into three nearly equal parts. The most eastern of these ranges, called the Wasatch, separates the basin of Great Salt Lake from that of the Fremont or Great American Desert. The most western, the Humboldt, separates the Great Desert from what has recently come to be known as

WESTERN UTAH.

This district has for natural boundaries the Divide between the waters of the Pacific and the Great Basin on the north, the Humboldt mountains on the east, and the Sierra Nevada on the south and west, separating it from the State of California. The whole region, though covered with clusters of lofty hills, and nearly surrounded by mountains, may be considered an elevated table-land, it having an absolute altitude of more than four thousand feet above the level of the sea. The ranges that traverse or encompass it, have an elevation of from two to eight thousand feet above its general plain, reaching at many points the line of constant snow. The conformation of these various interior ranges and mountain groups is such as to divide this territory into a series of independent basins, each having a drainage of its own, but none of them an outlet to the sea. The common receptacle of this drainage is a lake or sink, into which the larger streams make their way, the smaller being dissipated by the dry and burning atmosphere, or swallowed up by the equally arid earth. None of its waters flow to the great and purifying ocean. Some of these sinks are mere sloughs, being reduced in the hot season to mud lakes or marshes, or perhaps entirely dried up. In some instances they cover an area two or three times as large, during the spring freshets, as at a late period in the summer.