Extract from beginning of chapter:

EUREKA, NEVADA

During May and June [1880], I worked as a temporary assistant to Hague on the United States Geological Survey, and on the first of July, I received my appointment as assistant geologist and felt duly elated. It had been King's plan that Hague should have charge of the Division of the Pacific Coast with headquarters in San Francisco, and that he should study the volcanoes of that region beginning with Lassen Peak. But it seemed advisable that his first work should be of a more utilitarian character, so he was commissioned to investigate the geology of the Eureka Mining District in central Nevada.¹

Leaving New York on the evening of the 16^th of July, we were joined in Utica, New York, by a tall, slender, red-whiskered young man who was said to be a promising paleontologist, who had already made a reputation out of his studies of Trenton trilobites, and who had spent the previous season in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado [River]. The next morning, I made the acquaintance of Charles D. Walcott² and commenced a lifelong friendship full of interesting experiences and pleasant memories. At the end of the sixth day, we reached Eureka, after a journey, which, for a young geologist, became more and more fascinating and instructive as it proceeded. Nowhere can one see geological structures on a grander scale or in more easily comprehended exposures than in the barren ranges of the Great Basin desert! Its simplicity as well as its nakedness