16 EESOUECES OF CALIFOKXIA. 



The largest is Goose Lake, ten miles long and five wide. All 

 are destitute of large tributaries, sweet water, and valuable 

 adjacent land. 



§ 16. Klamath Basin. — North of latitude 41° lies the basin 

 of the Klamath River, which rises in Oregon, crosses the Cali- 

 fornian line about eighty miles from the sea, then turns south- 

 westward, and, after a course of about one hundred and fifty 

 miles, empties into the Pacific in 41° 33'. The basin of the 

 Klamath is very rugged, particularly that part of it within 

 forty miles of the ocean. Along the main river there is no 

 valley, or bottom-land ; its whole length is between steep hills 

 and mountains, and through rocky caiions. Its largest tribu- 

 taries, the Trinity and Salmon, run through a country almost 

 as rugged as that bordering the main stream. Scott and Shasta 

 Rivers, which are the only other notable tributaries of the Kla- 

 math — they all flow from the southward — have valleys of 

 bottom-land, about five miles wide and forty long. 



§17. TItah Basin. — A prominent feature of the North 

 American continent is the Great Basin of Utah, a triangular 

 district of country, bounded on the north by the basin of the 

 Columbia, on the southeast by the basin of the Colorado, and 

 on the southwest by the Sierra Nevada and San Bernardino 

 Mountains. This Great Basin — an elevated tract of laud, most 

 of which is four thousand or five thousand feet above the sea- 

 level, mountainous, barren, and cheerless, with no outlet for 

 its waters — extends into California, including a district about 

 two hundred miles long and one hundred wide, in the south- 

 eastern portion of the state. The Californian portion of the 

 Great Basin is one of the driest and most sterile parts of the 

 earth's surface, cut up by numerous irregular ridges of bare, 

 rocky mountains, with intervening valleys of sand and volcanic 

 scoriae, and occasional springs and little streams which termi- 

 nate in lakes, presenting a Avide extent of muddy salt water 

 after heavy rains, and, in the dry season, wide beds of dried 

 and cracked mud, covered with a white alkaline efflorescence. 

 The chief stream in the Californian portion of the Great Basin 



