[1] The valley is a landform of the central portion of the prehistoric Lake Lahontan's lakebed of 20,000-9,000 years ago.

There is sparse habitation in farmland around the Carson River and irrigation canals surrounding Fallon, an arc of farms around the Soda Lakes volcano, the railroad junction at Hazen and the ghost town of Stillwater.

[2] The Forty Mile Desert is a California Gold Rush name for Nevada's Lahontan Valley and the adjoining area to the northwest.

In Chapter XX of Roughing It, Mark Twain speaks of his traversing it during the stagecoach journey his brother and he made from Missouri to Nevada in the summer of 1861: On the nineteenth day we crossed the Great American Desert—forty memorable miles of bottomless sand, into which the coach wheels sunk from six inches to a foot.

Do not these relics suggest something of an idea of the fearful suffering and privation the early emigrants to California endured?Per a state historical marker at a rest area at the junction of I-80 and US 95, the Forty Mile Desert was the most dreaded part of the California Trail.

An 1850 survey counted 953 graves along this portion of the trail, along with thousands of animal skeletons and abandoned belongings of the desperate travelers.