Dennis Cassinelli

 

petrified wood submitted photo

My Great Grandfather, Pietro Cassinelli, an Italian emigrant, arrived in Dayton, Nevada 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.

My brother-in-law, Phil Hanna, who has moved to Dayton with my sister, Rae, recently turned me on to something that Mark Twain wrote in Chapter 26 of his classic book, Roughing It.

When describing some of the mineral resources of Nevada, Twain remarked “Lately evidences of bituminous coal have been detected. My theory has ever been that coal is a ligneous formation” (Ligneous meaning resembling wood).

Twain was skeptical about the idea of coal existing in Nevada until he spoke to a Captain Burch on the subject and was told that in the region of Dayton, Burch had seen petrified trees the length of two hundred feet. This established the fact that huge forests once existed in this remote area. This 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 region. Occasionally, we find a few pieces of petrified wood but nothing like the two hundred foot trees described in Mark Twain’s 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 over one foot in diameter.

In the same area, we also found some long trenches, obviously dug over 100 years ago, that were surrounded by a few fragments of petrified wood. This was an indication that the petrified forest described to me by my grandfather and written about by Mark Twain in Roughing It did actually exist. All the huge logs have obviously been taken away, and we have no idea who took them or where they ever ended up.

Amazingly, some of the pieces we have found 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 Rouging It. Our theory has always been that 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 re-discovered what remains of the petrified forest described by Mark Twain in his book about his travels through Nevada in the 1860’s.

This article is by Dayton Author and Historian, Dennis Cassinelli, who can be contacted at cassinelli-books@charter.net . or on his blog at denniscassinelli.com. All Dennis’ books sold through this publication will be at a 50% discount to reduce inventory and Dennis will pay the postage.