Once
over the first summit, you rested the animals amid the scrub pine trees
and the snow drifts. The second, western ridge had still to be scaled
by a road that dipped sideways in places and was almost incredibly
steep. But after you had climbed and cursed your way to the crest of
the mountain wall above, you looked down on the rivers and
valleys you had come so far to see—the Sacramento and the San Joaquin,
with all their golden tributaries. Over steep grades and sandy, you
descended to California. There were men in those days.
These
views of Carson Canyon, Red Lake, and the second summit of the Sierra
Nevada were sketched from daguerreotypes made in 1851 by J. Wesley
Jones (and now lost), whose desire to write and lecture about the grand
phenomenon of a nation on the march took him out on the California
Trail and supplied what are possibly the only contemporary pictures of
these subjects in existence.
