Emigrants headed for Stephens Pass and the California gold fields, dry and dirty from long, punishing, water-short days on the forty-mile Desert to the northeast, rushed train by train to the Big Bend of the sparkling pure Truckee River at the nearby Wadsworth townsite. Then known as the lower emigrant crossing, the Bend was once a Paiute seasonal village site, later Drytown and now Wadsworth. John Fremont camped near the Bend on January 16, 1844, and passed by here on his 1845 expedition. The Central Pacific Railroad reached the Wadsworth-Fernley area in 1868 while building eastward. The nation’s first reclamation project, the Newlands Project of the early 1900s, turned Fernley Valley to the south into a verdant agricultural area.