Desert Well Station (Overland Mail and Stage Station)

Out on the bleak run east of the Carson River, this was a typical stage stop of the 1843-to-1869 era—two wells, an inn, and corrals—on the Overland Mail road, later a Pony Express relay. One well was reserved for the camels hauling salt to the Comstock mills. The station earned its lasting fame from Mark Twain, who described in Roughing It a comic, freezing night spent lost in a snowstorm unable to find it. Later known as Nelson's, the station was demolished in the 1980s; only the state marker remains near Silver Springs.

What the plaque says

Located approximately one mile south are the remains of a typical stage station of the period 1843 to 1869, an era of transition between the arrival of the first emigrant wagon trains and the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Desert Well Station, which was later known as Nelsons, achieved a measure of fame when Mark Twain wrote of his experience there in Roughing It. The original site featured two wells, an inn, and corrals. One of the wells was used exclusively by camels brought to the Nevada desert to haul salt to the mines on the Comstock.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Virginia City — 16 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 16 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Carson City — 26 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since
• Reno — 26 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World

More markers nearby

• Buckland’s Station — 7.8 mi
• Sutro — 13 mi
• Camels in Dayton — 15 mi
• Dayton — 15 mi