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CHAPTER III PHYSIOGRAPHY A -The Modern Backdrop (1) PRESENT PHYSIOGRAPHY The term "Great Basin" in the past and present has had several meanings. To some people it was all the reaches between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada-Cascade chain from British Colum- bia north and Mexico south. To others it was a much smaller area. In early days of the last century, wandering Mountain Men found it an inhospitable land, and ventured on it only occasionally and. inci- dentally, always intent on finding their way elsewhere. It was a desert to all of them. The "writin' man" Zenas Leonard, scribe of the 1833 Walker expedi- tion, gave us the first account of ;Mountain Men in Nevada's "desert." Ile wrote with a combination of imagination and lack of it. His storv is High Fancy in its erasure of the typical mountain-valley aspect and unimaginative in its lack of factual detail. He remembered only a great plain reaching out before them. To those of later times, some of Nvhom became connoisseurs of aridity, it was also largely a barren wasteland. As for the term "Great Basin:" If it was to be a region of interior drainage -a land of disappointment from the fable of Buenaventura which Stansbury and Fremont sought-it would have to withdraw from the north and south and fall back to tortuous boundaries only a few hundred miles apart. This is the most restrictive meaning of the (treat Basin, and under its terms, Nevada does not lie entirely within the Basin, but protrudes at various points-the northeast and south- east parts of the State are not then technically in the Basin siam these areas drain into, respectively, the Columbia and Colorado Rivets and thence to the sea. While the concept of interior drainage is the most logical definition in keeping with the "basin" idea, it does not show the true biological picture in most respects. There is no basic difference, for example, between an arroyo with a stream in it and one without water as far as most of the "desert" plants and land animals are concerned; or whether such a stream winds to the sea or sinks from sight in an interior valley. Biologically,- tile Great Basin has been variously delineated wiith key' phu?ts--a common practice has been to use the Creosote bush -(Larrea diraricata) as an approximate indicator (exclusive of its fringe areas) of the -southern limits of a "biologically" defined Great Basin, with equally unsatisfactory results.' 'Also. the term "Basin and Range Province" has peen used by geonnarpholo- Rlsts and structural geologists to inchule not only the Great Basin prolwr in the restrieted sense of drainage. but additional areas In southern Califor t anti southwestern Utah, which have the characteristic north-south, paraltel noun- lain blocks. 4