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135 C HA PT E R S I X Late Pleistocene Vegetation of the Great Basin Learning about Ancient Vegetation William Lewis Manly and his traveling companions spent the Christmas of 1849 in Death Valley. Manly’s companions did not escape until mid-February, and then only because Manly and his friend John Rogers walked out, returning with supplies, directions, and hope. Not until March 7 did the whole group reach Rancho San Francisco, near Los Angeles, and full safety. On their way out, they gave Death Valley its name, even though only one of their immediate group had actually died there: “We took off our hats, and then overlooking the scene of so much trial, suffering and death spoke the thought uppermost saying: — ‘Good bye Death Valley!’ then faced away and made our steps toward camp” (Manly 1894:216). Manly and his group had been lured into Death Valley by talk of a cutoff that would save them many days in the trip from Salt Lake City to California. The shortcut they tried left the Old Spanish Trail in southwestern Utah and then cut southwest across southern Nevada, leading the travelers to Ash Meadows, then into the heart of what is now Death Valley National Park. Seventy miles northwest of Las Vegas, Manly’s group passed by Papoose Lake, now close to the boundary between Nellis Air Force Base and the Nevada Test Site. Realizing that continuing west might see them die of thirst, the small band of travelers headed south: We turned up a cañon leading toward the mountain and had a pretty heavy up grade and a rough bed for a road. Part way up we came to a high cliff and in its face were niches or cavities as large as a barrel or larger, and in some of them we found balls of a glistening substance looking something like pieces of varigated [sic] candy stuck together. The balls were as large as small pumpkins. It was evidently food of some sort, and we found it sweet but sickish, and those who were so hungry as to break up one of the balls and divide it among the others, making a good meal of it, were a little troubled with nausea afterwards . (Manly 1894:126). Manly guessed that what they had found was a food cache belonging to Indians, and was concerned that what they had done might cause them serious problems. “I considered it bad policy to rob the Indians of any of their food,” he went on to say, “for they must be pretty smart people to live in this desolate country and find enough to keep them alive . . . they were probably revengeful, and might seek to have revenge on us for the injury” (Manly 1894:126). The Manly party wasn’t the only one to take notice of this “glistening substance,” though it may have been the only group to have mistaken it for food. In 1843, John C. Frémont found the same stuff. Exploring the canyon of a small tributary of the Bear River in far southern Idaho on August 29 of that year, he found “several curious caves” on the roofs of which he noted “bituminous exudations from the rock” (Frémont 1845:141). Sixteen years later, the U.S. Army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers assigned Captain James H. Simpson the task of discovering a better wagon route across the Great Basin. Simpson gladly accepted the task—no surprise, since he had suggested it in the first place—and traveled from Salt Lake City to Genoa, Nevada, and back during the spring and summer of 1859. By the time he was done, he not only had found a better wagon route but had also blazed a path that the Pony Express was to follow closely in 1860, that the telegraph was to use in completing its transcontinental service in 1861 (putting the Pony Express out of business), and that U.S. Highway 50 follows closely today. On July 16, 1859, Simpson was exploring Dome Canyon in the House Range, just west of the Sevier Desert and south of what is now Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge. He found the “walls of the cañon full of small caves, and as 136 THE LATE ICE AGE GREAT BASIN usual showing a great deal of the resinous, pitchy substance, that seemingly oozes out of the rock” (Simpson 1983:125). Unlike the members of Manly’s party, however, Simpson did not...

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