I have read in the diaries of John C. Fremont that when traveling south of Oregon during his 1843 expedition through Nevada, he discovered an area between Oregon and Pyramid Lake, where there was the remains of a petrified forest.
There was a family friend of my father who found this area and gave some of us several pieces of the petrified wood which we still have. I have one about 6 feet long that has knot holes showing in the petrified wood. The area has since been protected with a chain-link enclosure to protect it.
My great-grandfather, Pietro Cassinelli, an Italian emigrant, arrived in Dayton in the late 1880s after working his way across America as a cowboy. Within a few years, he and his cousin, Bert, acquired a ranch along the Carson River.
There, he and his wife, Theresa, raised a family of 12 children, one of whom was my grandfather, Pete.
When I was a boy working on Pete’s ranch in Sparks years later, he told me about a petrified forest with many logs of petrified wood he had seen near the ranch in Dayton where he had grown up and went to school in the early 1900s.
This is the same ranch now known as the Ricci ranch on the south side of the Carson River in Dayton.
Mark Twain wrote about this in Chapter 26 of his classic book “Roughing It”. In the book, Twain claimed some of the petrified wood was black and resembled coal.
Twain was skeptical about the idea of coal existing in Nevada until he spoke to a Captain Burch on the subject and was told in the region of Dayton, Burch had seen petrified logs the length of 200 feet.
This established the fact huge forests once existed in this remote area. It also firmed up in Twain’s mind that coal may also actually exist in Nevada.
Coal and petrified wood both take millions of years to form under ideal conditions deep below the ground.
Now, let’s jump forward to modern times. My family and I enjoy hiking, rock hunting and exploring the many hiking trails in and around the area of Dayton where we live. Occasionally, we find a few pieces of petrified wood but nothing like the 200-foot trees described in “Roughing It.”
There was one particular area near my great-grandfather’s ranch where we did find an abundance of petrified wood ranging in size from a few inches to more than one foot in diameter.
In the same area, we also found some long trenches, obviously dug more than 100 years ago, that were surrounded by a few fragments of petrified wood. This was an indication that the petrified forest and petrified logs described to me by my grandfather and written about in “Roughing It” did actually exist. All the huge logs have obviously been dug up and taken away, just leaving the trenches. We we have no idea who took the logs or where they ever ended up.
Amazingly, some of the pieces we have found in the same area are black and have the appearance of coal, except they have the wood grain typical of petrified wood. This is likely what Mark Twain mistook for coal when he wrote “Roughing It.”
I have a collection of petrified wood we have found in a wheelbarrow in my back yard. It is a colorful collection and there are several pieces of the black petrified wood we have found.
Our theory has always been the black petrified wood was caused by the trees being in some ancient forest fires or perhaps knocked down during a volcanic eruption millions of years ago and being covered over with hot volcanic ash.
This would have turned the wood black like charcoal and buried it until it became petrified.
My family and I believe we have rediscovered what remains of the petrified forest described by Mark Twain in his book about his travels through Nevada in the 1860s.
This article is by Dayton Author and Historian, Dennis Cassinelli. You can order his books at a discount on his blog at denniscassinelli.com Just click on ”order books”