The Great Basin is an arid (dry) region in the western United States. It includes most of Nevada, the western half of Utah, and parts of Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Although it is called the Great Basin, it is not a single basin but a group of many enclosed basins and mountain ranges with no drainage to the sea.
The Great Basin covers about 190,000 square miles (492,000 square kilometers). The area is bordered by the Sierra Nevada range on the west and the Wasatch Range on the east. The Columbia Plateau borders it on the north, and the Mojave Desert is on the south. Most of this same area is also known as the Great Basin Desert.
The mountain ranges of the Great Basin are from 60 to 120 miles (95 to 190 kilometers) long and 3 to 15 miles (5 to 24 kilometers) wide. The valleys are generally wider than the ranges and are mostly deserts, with hot days and cold nights. The ranges have peaks that commonly reach 9,000 feet (2,750 meters) or more above sea level. For this reason, they catch a moderate amount of precipitation. However, the Sierra Nevada otherwise block the winds that flow from the Pacific Ocean from reaching the Great Basin. As a result, the moisture in the winds cannot reach the basin. The area has an annual rainfall of only about 6 to 12 inches (150 to 300 millimeters).
Minerals are the greatest resource of the Great Basin. The area is one of the richest sources of gold, magnesite, barite, mercury, lithium, silver, diatomite, gemstones, beryllium ore, copper, iron ore, and molybdenum. Irrigation is needed for the little farming that is done in the Great Basin. Services also contribute significantly to the economy. Tourism, especially in the Reno-Carson City area of Nevada, and finance, in Salt Lake City, Utah, are important. Other notable features of the area include Great Basin National Park in Nevada, Lake Tahoe in California, and the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Native Americans lived in the Great Basin region for at least 10,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. They included the Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute. Some of the Great Basin Indians were in contact with the Spanish in New Mexico as early as the 1600s. The Spanish entered the Great Basin in the 1700s. The American explorer Jedediah Smith made the first journey across the basin in 1824 but did not document his travels. He was followed by John C. Frémont, who surveyed the eastern Great Basin in 1846 but did not cross it.
In 1847 Brigham Young brought large-scale settlement to the area when he chose Salt Lake City as a Mormon refuge. He went on to establish more than 300 Mormon communities in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Idaho. At about the same time the California gold rush brought thousands of people westward, many of them attempting alternate routes across the Great Basin. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, more people traveled to the West. After 1870 most Native Americans were forced onto reservations, leaving much of the area open for white settlement.