Rush to the River

Emigrants headed for Stephens Pass and the California gold fields — dry and dirty from long, punishing water-short days on the 40-mile Desert to the northeast — rushed train by train to the “Big Bend” of the sparkling pure Truckee River at the nearby Wadsworth townsite. Then known as the lower emigrant crossing, the “Bend” was once a Paiute seasonal village site, later Drytown and now Wadsworth. John Fremont camped near the “Bend” January 16, 1844 and passed by here on his 1845 expedition. The Central Pacific Railroad reached the Wadsworth-Fernley area in 1868 building eastward. The nation’s first reclamation project, the Newlands Project of the early 1900s, turned Fernley Valley to the south into a verdant agricultural area.

Dedicated by Snowshoe Thompson Chapter No. 1827 E Clampus Vitus August 28 1982