The Humboldt River is the only river that belongs entirely to Nevada, and it is a river that goes nowhere. It rises in the snowfields of the Ruby Mountains and the ranges around them, runs some three hundred miles west across the top of the state, and then simply quits — spreading across a flat of silt and salt called the Humboldt Sink and evaporating into the air, without ever reaching a sea. Every other great river of the West runs to an ocean. This one runs to a dead end. And yet, for a quarter of a million people, it was the only way across the Great Basin.
The river of many names
For decades, mapmakers had drawn a river that did not exist — the Buenaventura, a broad water they imagined draining the unknown interior westward into San Francisco Bay. There is no such river. The Great Basin keeps everything that falls on it; not one of its streams reaches the sea. What was actually out here a British fur trapper named Peter Skene Ogden found in 1828, and for a while the stream carried his name, and the name Mary's River after that. In 1845 the explorer John C. Frémont renamed it a final time, for the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt — a man who never laid eyes on it. The emigrants who came next had names of their own. They called it the Humbug River, and worse, because it was brackish and sluggish and looped back on itself for miles, and because it grew fouler with every day they followed it down.
The indispensable curse
They followed it anyway, because it was water, and because it was continuous, and nothing else across three hundred miles of basin and range was either. The California Trail came down the Humboldt because there was no other line to take — past the future site of Elko, through the grassy river bottoms at Carlin, on to the ford at Winnemucca, and down the river's long meander to the Big Meadows at Lovelock, the last good grass before the water gave out in the Humboldt Sink. Beyond the Sink lay the Forty Mile Desert, the most dreaded crossing on the entire trail — a waterless stretch marked, by the great migration year of 1850, with the swollen carcasses of oxen and the wagons their owners had abandoned to save themselves. The whole ordeal is laid out, honestly and well, at the California Trail Interpretive Center west of Elko. And the water that made any of it possible had come, in the beginning, off the high snow of the Rubies.
The people whose road it already was
None of this was empty country. It was Newe Sogobia, and it was Numu land — the homeland of the Western Shoshone and the Northern Paiute, who had lived along the Humboldt for thousands of years before the first wagon creaked down it. Theirs was a careful, diverse economy: cutthroat trout taken from the river in the high water of spring, then roots and chokecherries, grass seed, and pine nuts gathered from the ranges. Most kept no horses, and did so deliberately — a horse would eat the very seed grasses that carried a family through winter. Then the trail arrived, and in a single peak season perhaps fifty thousand head of emigrant livestock ground those grasses to dust, while the travelers shot out the game and fouled the water everyone drank. Scorned with a slur and pushed toward starvation, some of the Newe and Numu took back what they could, running off the emigrants' stock in the dark. The river that was a lifeline to the people passing through was a catastrophe to the people already home — a longer reckoning told across Newe Sogobia, the land that was never for sale.
The road the river made
In 1868 the iron came up the Humboldt, and for the same reason the wagons had: the Central Pacific needed a level grade with water beside it, and the river handed it one nearly all the way across the state. The rails threaded Palisade Canyon between the water and the black basalt cliffs, and they made towns as they went — Elko a railhead by Christmas Eve of 1868, Carlin laid out that same December on the old wagon-camp meadows, Winnemucca soon the seat of its county. When the golden spike went into the tie at Promontory in May of 1869, it put the California Trail out of business almost overnight; the wagons stopped, and the rails carried everyone now. Nearly a century after that, the engineers of Interstate 80 poured their concrete down the same corridor, because the river had already found the only sensible way through. Three roads, laid one atop the other, every one of them tracing the same reluctant water.
Out of sight
The Humboldt still runs beside the interstate, low and brown and almost entirely ignored — out of sight and out of mind to the drivers holding eighty across the top of Nevada. It never reached the ocean; it never needed to. It had only to be the one unbroken thread of water across a country that makes none, and on that thin thread it carried a wagon road, a railroad, and an interstate in turn. The river that goes nowhere is the reason everyone else got somewhere.