Approximately twenty-five miles east of Fallon, Nevada, U.S. Highway 50 crosses a barren, alkali-crusted, dry lake bed known as the Four Mile Flat. Along this windblown stretch of the Loneliest Highway in America, a hundred or so yards north toward the wavering dunes of Sand Mountain, is a small, weathered looking picket fence that surrounds a five-foot-square pile of rocks topped by a whitewashed wooden cross. Local folklore maintains this is either gravesite or a memorial.

An early wagon road dating to the 1850s ascended north from Dayton along Gold Canyon, eventually reaching Virginia City. After 1859, another road descended east from Virginia City along Six Mile Canyon to the Carson Valley. Because teamsters used it to haul ore to the Carson River for processing, the road was named Mill Street. To the west, Jumbo Grade and Ophir Grade gave access to mills along the shore of Washoe Lake.

West Wendover, which sits on the eastern edge of Nevada, is a flourishing community, and a testament to the powerful lure of the gaming industry. The city is an offshoot of Wendover, Utah, which was established by officials of the Western Pacific Railroad as a watering station in 1907.

Captain James Hervey Simpson of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers laid out the Great Basin portion of modern U.S. 50 as part of a wagon road. Simpson, a West Point graduate (1832), became the Army's chief topographical engineer in Utah in 1858. He came to the assignment with experience in surveying and constructing roads in the West. Simpson was certain that a shorter route through the Great Basin to California was possible.