The best known and largest collection of marks that I know of covers a large smooth ledge at Hopkins Soda Springs, 12 miles south of the summit on the Central Pacific railroad. The rock is much the same in character as those I have described, but the groundwork in this case is a solid ledge 10 feet one way and perhaps 40 the other, all closely covered with rude characters, many of which seem to point to human figures, animals, reptiles, etc. The ledge lies at an angle of 45°, and must have been a tempting place for a lazy artist who chanced that way.
Many other places on the Truckee river have such rocks all very much alike, and yet each bearing its own distinct features in the marking. Near a rock half a mile east of Verdi, a station on the Central Pacific railroad, 10 miles east of Reno, lie two others, the larger of which has lines originating in a hole at the upper right-hand corner, all running in tangents and angles, making a double-ended kind of an arrangement of many-headed arrows, pointing three ways. A snail-like scroll lies between the two arms, but does not touch them. Below are blotches, as if the artist had tried his tools.
This region has been roamed over by the Washoe Indians from a remote period, but none of them know anything of these works. One who has gray hair and more wrinkles than hairs, who is bent with age and who is said to be a hundred years old, was led to the spot. He said he saw them a heap long time ago, when he was only a few summers old, and they looked then just as they do now.
Mr. Lovejoy, a well-known newspaper man, took up, in 1854, the ranche where the rocks lie, and said just before his death that they were in exactly the same condition when he first saw them as they are to-day. Others say the same, and they are certainly of a date prior to the settlement of this coast by Americans and probably by the Spanish.
They are very peculiar in many respects, and the rock is wonderfully adapted to the uses to which it has been put. Wherever the surface has been broken the color has changed to gray, and no amount of wear or weather seems to turn it back. The indentation is so shallow as to be imperceptible to sight or touch, and yet the marks are as plain as they could be made, and can be seen as far as the rock can be distinguished from its fellows.