In the latter part of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, many Spanish and American pathfinders crossed the Sink on their way from Yuma to the California missions, but none of them found anything like a lake. Colonel W. H. Emory, who traversed it with General Kearney in the fall of 1846, described it as a hot, arid desert, where there was a stretch of “ninety miles from water to water,” and where no vegetation could be found except scattered desert shrubs and two small patches of sun-burned grass. Captain A. R. Johnson, who also accompanied the Kearney expedition, was the first to notice the fact that this stretch of waterless desert was the dried-up bottom of an ancient lake; but neither he nor Colonel Emory observed the still more suggestive fact that it was below the level of the sea. In the deepest part of the basin, near the present station of Salton, they discovered a small lagoon; but its water proved to be so saturated with alkali and salt that it was “wholly unfit for man or brute.” Three years later, gold-seekers from the East began to take this route to the Pacific Coast, and Bayard Taylor, in his “El-dorado,” has given their impressions of the Salton Sink in the following words: “The emigrants by the Gila route gave a terrible account of the crossing of the Great Desert lying west of the Colorado. They described this region as scorching and sterile--a country of burning salt plains and shifting hills of sand, where the only signs of human habitation were the bones of animals and men scattered along the trails.” Such, seventy years ago, was the Salton Sink, and such it had been during the three preceding centuries of recorded history. If anyone had then ventured to predict that this dried-up bed of the Gulf of California, this hot, sterile and apparently irreclaimable desert, would eventually become a beautiful cultivated valley, producing cotton, barley, alfalfa, dates, melons and fruit, to the value of ten or fifteen million dollars every year, he would have been generally regarded as a visionary enthusiast, if not a desert-crazed monomaniac.