The Carson Spur
by Bruce Patterson



"The cowards never got started, and the weaklings died along the way." The pioneers who in the 1850s and '60s passed by this stretch of the Carson River fancied themselves a special breed. And I suppose they were in the sense that all breeds are special in some way. But were the pioneers tougher and more courageous than the rest of their generation? Maybe not when you consider that most of them came to California by wagon because they were too scared to come by sea. Like modern Americans who, too scared to fly, insist on driving cross country, the pioneers did what they did not always for noble purposes.

Of course they had good reason to be scared of coming to California by sea. In those days most American and British passenger ships plying the Atlantic waters were either slavers out of Africa or "coffin ships" out of Ireland. Back then the life expectancies of steerage passengers aboard even the best ships were not long. Considering that the ocean voyage between New York and San Francisco made the Atlantic crossing seem like a hop across a puddle, and considering that at least a third of the wagoneering pilgrims were European immigrants fresh off the boat, you can hardly blame them for preferring to come to California by land.

A green streak wandering through barren terrain wrinkled like a dusty brown blanket — that's what the lower Carson River looks like from the air. But viewed from the shade of a sprawling old cottonwood tree, the "river" doesn't look like much at all. I'd been hoping to see more water here, but then I wasn't surprised by the lack of it. Although the Carson's source is atop the Sierra just a spit north of Sonora Pass some 130 river miles away, and even though the Carson drains about a 50 mile swath of the Sierra's east face, upstream are plenty of diversions, both urban and agricultural, and like most of the West's rivers, the Carson gets smaller the further downstream you go.

The California Trail through this part of Nevada wasn't a single trail. For one thing, if you followed in the tracks of too many of the wagons in front of you, then you literally got caught in their ruts. So everybody made their own way at one time or another. As a result, in places the trail was a mile wide. Also there were shortcuts to be taken, alternate routes, even branch trails leading to various waterholes, patches of graze and geological curiosities.

The pilgrims who took the Carson Spur supposedly fared worse than those who, sticking to the mainstem, headed southwest from the Humboldt Sink, crossed the Forty Mile Desert and met up with the Truckee River. So I'd been expecting to see the mouth of a rugged canyon here where the north-south running state highway crosses the Carson. Instead the river, having over the millennia shifted back and forth depositing silt, gravels and glacial till, has created a gently sloping, long valley of green tablelands that are in places 200 yards wide. Along with the cottonwoods are willows, alders and tamarisk and, back during the heyday of national reclamation, the trees provided wind break for hundreds of acres of irrigated alfalfa.

But even with the free water and the free graze, the cattle ranchers couldn't make it out in this lean country, at least not after the big boys came after WWII and undercut them in the local markets. By the 1970s all but the most stubbornly contrary, backward and superstitious of the ranchers had given up the ghost. This seven-mile long strip of recently acquired state owned land is now called "The Ranches" and it consists mostly of pale, long abandoned hay fields. Dappled with the weathered remains of pasture fences, derelict wood corrals and leaning chutes and barns, the land looks forlorn, sad in the way that all relics are sad.

I'm reminded of a sight I'd once seen further down into the desert, out past Fallon and on the way to Austin. We came up over a rise in our car and there was a hundred head of cattle crossing the highway, getting herded from one pasture to the next. Working the sides of the herd were some cowboys aboard horses and trailing was a fine young cowgirl. She brought her horse up close to our car so that she could sneak a peek at us through our windshield and, noticing me smiling at her, she smiled back, touched her hat with a finger and then got back to work.

Except now she was showing off, her high-stepping cutting horse lunging back and forth just for fun. Living under a giant sky like what hangs out that way, a person didn't get many chances to be showing off and she was making the best of it.

The sight of the cowgirl became a fond memory of mine until we passed along that same stretch of highway some years later. We came over the rise and saw that the ranch had gone belly up. It's pastures had returned to scrub and its deserted main house, its old, imported Sierra pine shiplap walls sandblasted by wind storms, its windows vandalized, its roof shingles shedding and its doors gone missing — it was gathering tumble weeds.

If I had my way, I'd jump aboard a bulldozer, drop my blade and rough up this Carson River land. I'd erase what was left of the derelict irrigation checks and ditches, make some piles of dirt and depressions in order to return some contours to the hay fields, then I'd plow everything under and reseed the place in native bunch grasses, shrubs and trees.

That way, after a few years had passed and the land looked natural again, a modern pilgrim wouldn't have to be reminded of what had been lost.

But I hadn't come out here to brood. My wife and I were here for the beyond the pale solitude and the old traces. We'd already visited what was left of Buckland Station.

In 1859 Samuel S. Buckland had started a ranch and had opened a road house that came to serve as a way station for the Overland Stage Company and the Pony Express. My wife and I had seen the Buckland family graves lined up nearby at the ruins of Fort Churchill. Before he died, old man Buckland had buried two newborn babies, a little daughter and a half-grown son before he buried his beloved wife, who died at age 33. Yet, judging by the other Boot Hills I've wandered through over the years, old man Buckland hadn't been too unlucky.

When I was a little kid I toured some Nevada ghost town's cemetery and noticed that nearly all of the graves were filled with the remains of babies, children and young women. I remember my mom going on about how tough things were for these poor pioneer women who'd been forced to come out here into the middle of nowhere just to live in some miserable, wind blown, snow-blown, scruffy little mining camp like this one. How tragic it was, my mom thought, that these young women would wind up buried and forgotten in some overgrown little boot hill like this. How, whether or not they had husbands to provide for them and to protect them, their lives were brutal.

When my mom was done talking, my dad tapped me on the shoulder, pointed across the valley and said, "Nearly all of the men are buried over there, son, way down deep under the side of that mountain."

Fort Churchill, jagged adobe mud ruins set in a square enclosing a parade ground atop a bluff beside the Carson, tells a story typical of how The West was won. In 1860 three single white male yahoos kidnapped and enslaved two young Piute girls. When the girls' fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins and friends came to fetch them, the white men refused to give them back. So the Piute took the girls back, killed the white men and burned down their shanties for good measure.

Like wild fire the word spread all through the nearby homesteads and mining camps that the Indians had gone on the warpath. In no time at all and in the name of self protection the whites had gotten up a vigilante posse numbering 105 able men strong, all aboard sound horses, each equipped with rifles (or shotguns), side arms, water and plenty of ammunition. Hoping to catch the Piute in their homes, the posse rode north past the bend of the Truckee and onward to Pyramid lake, the headquarters of the "renegade tribe."

Actually, the posse almost made it to Pyramid Lake. For the Piute had their own grapevine and they knew the vigilantes were coming. With the help of some Bannock and Shoshone friends, they cut them off at the pass, so to speak. Leaving behind 73 dead, what was left of the vigilante posse wound up running for their lives.

As word of the "massacre" spread among the whites, panic took hold. To the homesteaders living in the Carson Valley, to those living in the mountain mining camps and those squatting with their cows, horses and dogs out along the empty desert bajadas, it may as well have been terrorists plowing passenger jets into the Twin Towers. God fearing pilgrims sat up in their cabins and dugouts and imagined they'd be next. Some spent the night facing their bolted front doors with shotguns in their laps. Others agonized over whether or not to flee in order to save their innocent wives and children.

Urgent, heart-rending pleas went out for government protection, and soon from California federal troops came to the rescue. Like the Pied Piper, as the column of Federals advanced through the Truckee Meadows and downstream and onward toward the hostiles, they gathered more and more "volunteers" behind them.

The Indians and the cavalry "did battle" and this time, when it was over, about 160 Indians were dead along with two whites. As a result of this second "battle," the Indians were properly chastised.

But just because the United States Cavalry had tamed the Indians, that didn't mean that the whites trusted the Indians to stay tamed. The settlers (once you'd unhitched the horses, you stopped being a pioneer and became a settler) demanded "permanent" protection and so Fort Churchill was born. Tens of thousands of federal dollars were spent to build and provision the fort and, over the coming years, thousands of US soldiers were posted there.

Yet, so far as I know, none of them ever did kill any Indians. During the heyday of Fort Churchill, the leading causes of death among the troopers were getting liquored up and drowning in the river, heat stroke, drinking bad water, eating spoiled food, getting double-barreled by a mule and falling off a horse and landing on their head. Also, unable to passively abide the unrelenting peacefulness and quietude of the place, out of boredom some troopers started fights that escalated into blood feuds and these, too, resulted in some casualties.

Finally, after years of sitting around, drilling and parading while awaiting the Pyramid Lake Piute to act up again, in 1869 the fort was abandoned. Samuel S. Buckland, who was now the Indian Agent, bought Fort Churchill lock, stock and barrel for $750 cash and promptly set about cannibalizing it.

Leaving the fort nowadays, the most direct route back to US Highway 50 and on to Virginia City is along a 16-mile stretch of dirt road that runs beside the river. More than any other one thing, it is this bit of dirt road that has drawn us to this place. Had it wound up a canyon as I'd expected, then the traces left by the pioneers would have been obvious for us to see. Also, somewhere along these 16 miles, I'd been hoping to spot some nameless rock pile to climb, or some roiling cascades to get cool beside.

But, as it was, the valley was third rate cattle pasture and we decided that, if the dirt road stayed as badly wash-boarded as it was here near the fort, then we'd turn around and get back to Highway 50 by way of pavement.

After advancing a couple of miles, I'd just about decided to turn back when up ahead I saw a young man on foot. He was humping a backpack, swinging a walking stick and stepping it out so fast that I thought he might be in some kind of training. I slowed the car way down so we wouldn't dust him and, just before we passed, he pivoted around and stuck out his thumb.

After the kid was settled in the back seat and we were again making headway — couldn't very well turn around now — I asked the kid how he'd come to be so far out in the sticks. (We hadn't seen a single soul at The Ranches, Buckland Station or at Fort Churchill.) The kid — he looked to be about 16 or 17 years old — said simply that he couldn't stand the people he'd been camping with and so he was going home. He said it like it was as cut and dried as jerky and so there was no more for him to bother about, or to think about, and surely no more to talk about, least not with strangers like us.

And that youthful air of defiant self reliance, that instinctive wariness of talk, his brooding silence and the way his eyes rested on the desert scrub — it all told me that, had we not come along (we'd see no other cars), he'd still of made it home just fine, even considering that he carried no water.

Because of an occasional sharp, loose rock on the road, I didn't get much of a chance to gawk at the scenery. Not that I missed much. About the whole way the road was hemmed in by quadruple-nasty barbed wire fences with store-bought No Trespassing signs stuck to them — I swear — about every other post, mile after mile. When we passed a rusty little cattle gate with two No Trespassing signs stuck to it, plus two more No Trespassing signs flanking it, it occurred to me that if the landowner had spent as much money on fencing as he had on signs, then his boundaries wouldn't look so god-awful, butt ugly.

Up ahead — back at The Ranches they'd been about 30 miles away — we could see a broad swath of the Virginia Mountains. Somewhere up there was Virginia City, our destination after dropping the kid at his home in Dayton. Folks in Virginia City liked to brag that from there on a clear day you could look east and see 100 miles into the Basin and Range. If that was true, then I wondered if, once we'd arrived up there, we'd be able to look back down the way we came and see the green streak.