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Fatal missteps, Part 2: Freak Accidents on the Westering Trails

A small, still pond sits in a desert setting void of much vegetation. — NPS Photo

Emigrants on the Truckee Route to California typically started across Nevada’s Fortymile Desert in the evening in order to avoid the heat of the midday sun. The one reliable place to find water along the desert trek was a place called Boiling Springs, where travelers could dip out and cool the precious water for their livestock to drink. Forty-niner Bennet Clark described the area:

The hot springs are a great natural curiosity, about an acre of surface is dotted with them & many are incessantly Boiling—one of them throws up the water & spray 4 or 5 feet high so violet is its ebullition. Others are calm—the largest spring is 40 yards in circumference & from 4 to 8 feet deep.

For travelers arriving in the dark of night, Boiling Springs was an accident waiting to happen – and so it did, at least twice. John E. Dalton wrote in 1851:

A mother and her six year old son arrived at Boiling Spring about 2 A.M., and the boy, hearing the noise ran to see what it was. His mother took after him to bring him back, and just as [she] came up with him, in they both went – scalding all of one side of each of them from head to foot, the skin peeling off. They were just alive the last I heard from them, and not expected to survive.

Samuel Mathews reported a second accident: “Mr. Greenabum fell in it up to his knees and the water instantly took all the skin off. He will be a cripple for life.”