And the log-chains, wagon tyres, and rotting wrecks of vehicles were almost as thick as the bones.

I think we saw log-chains enough rusting there in the desert, to reach across any State in the Union.

Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California endured?
At the border of the Desert lies Carson Lake, or The "Sink" of the Carson, a shallow, melancholy sheet of water some eighty or a hundred miles in circumference.

Carson River empties into it and is lost--sinks mysteriously into the earth and never appears in the light of the sun again--for the lake has no outlet whatever.
There are several rivers in Nevada, and they all have this mysterious fate.

They end in various lakes or "sinks," and that is the last of them.