Capt. McCoy had calculated that he would soon find game in the country through which his route lay, and therefore he had turned over to Carson, and the division of the party under his command, nearly all the food which was left, but this was insufficient to give them full meals for more than three days. Their prospect was a dreary one indeed, for at the earlier season of coming down the river, they had not half enough to eat, even with the few beaver they had taken, to add to the supply, and even this was now denied them. And now, that the reader may understand Carson's position, we invite him to enjoy with us a few of the incidents passed through, and views observed in our passage up this river, which the untraveled eastern man would find so entirely new, and the man of travel and of letters would find so full of interest, as did the man whose name the river bears, for it was named by Fremont, after Carson, whom he had learned to love and respect, long before he reached it. We shall speak especially of the features of this country, common to so much that lies between the civilizations of the Atlantic and the Pacific slopes, though the latter was not a civilization; and when from the desert Carson gazed with admiration at the snow mountains, he surmised, as he afterwards realized through hunger, cold, danger, and suffering, that this was the chain of mountains which separated him from California. At the station-house, upon the lake, called the Sink of the Humboldt, we were told that the Humboldt did not connect with this lake, except in the spring season, after the rains; and that for the last two years it had not been connected even at that time; and that in the autumn one could pass between the lake and the limit of the marsh in which the river loses itself, upon dry ground; and that the sinks, or the margins of the lakes or marshes in which the Carson, the Walker, and the Susan Rivers, neither of them less than a hundred miles in length, and some of them several hundred, in the wet season empty or lose themselves, were all within the limit of a single day's ride, and in the direct vicinity of the desert upon which the reader last saw Carson. It was the evening of the second of July, during a rain storm, (an unusual occurrence at this season of the year, no traveler having ever reported a similar one so far as we had heard,) that, weary, and wet, and cold, we found our way in the dark to this river in the wilderness. The house of the traders at the sink was made of logs, with two rooms--the logs having been drawn from the mountains, forty miles distant. There was no timber in sight, and nothing that was green except some grass about the lake, which we were told was poison, and on examining, we found it encrusted with a crystalization of potash, left on it by the subsiding water in which the grass had started.