16 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
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- 
furnian 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 cations. 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 ouly other notable tributaries of the Kia- 
math—they all flow from the southward—have valleys of 
bottom-land, about five miles wide and forty long. 
$17. Utah 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 land, 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 
scoriz, and occasional springs and little streams which termi- 
nate in lakes, presenting a wide 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 
