The California Emigrant Trail stretched about 2,000 miles from the Missouri River to California, and along roughly 280 miles of its course across northern Nevada it followed the Humboldt River, the only watercourse across the high desert of the Great Basin. Beginning at Humboldt Wells near present-day Wells, Nevada, the river flows west and southwest to the Humboldt Sink, and emigrants generally needed 16 days to travel along it. Most crossed Nevada in the heat of August, when the trail was very dusty, the river nearly dry, and the water alkaline. From 1849 to 1853, during the height of the California Gold Rush, about 200,000 emigrants passed this location, and another 50,000 made the journey before the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. By the time emigrants reached this point, they had been on the trail for three months, had traveled about 1,600 miles, and were 400 miles from their destination, with the waterless Forty-Mile Desert and the climb over the Sierra Nevada Range still ahead. In 1849, James F. Wilkins wrote that after traveling 3 more miles down the river, his party found only very scanty picking for the oxen, and he judged from speaking with almost every company he saw that no body of men had ever left the states on any expedition with so much quarreling and fighting, with the strong abusing the weak, as the California expedition of 1849.