Uncovering Nevada's Past

A Primary Source History of the Silver State

John B. Reid, Ronald M. James, John B. Reid, Ronald M. James

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780874176506
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Nevada's relatively brief history has been nonetheless remarkably eventful. From the activities of the first Euro-American explorers to the booms and busts of the mining industry, from the struggles and artistry of the Native Americans to the establishment of liberal divorce laws and such unique industries as legalized gambling and prostitution, from Cold War atomic tests to the civil rights movement, from the arrival of a diverse and rapidly growing urban population to the Sagebrush Rebellion, Nevada has played a part in the nation's development while following its own ruggedly independent path. In Uncovering Nevada's Past, historians John B. Reid and Ronald M. James have collected more than fifty major documents and visual images—some never before published—that define Nevada's colorful and complex development. Here are the words of such literary luminaries as Mark Twain, Sarah Winnemucca, and Arthur Miller; anonymous newspaper articles; public documents including Abraham Lincoln's proclamation of Nevada statehood and the probate records of murdered Virginia City prostitute Julia Bulette; personal letters; political speeches; and personal accounts of, among other subjects, the construction of Hoover Dam, life in a mining boomtown, racial segregation in Las Vegas, political careers, and atomic testing. Images include photographs of significant Nevada architecture, the masterpieces of renowned Paiute basketmaker Dat-so-la-lee, tree carvings by Basque sheepherders, and tourism promotions. The collection ranges from the earliest descriptions of the region to the current debate on Yucca Mountain. The volume editors have provided an introduction and headnotes that set the documents into their historical and social context. Uncovering Nevada's Past is a vital, enlightening record of Nevada's history—in the words of the people who lived and made it—that makes for lively and engaging reading.

PART 1 | Beginnings

1

The Physical Environment

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A Computer-Enhanced Map of Nevada Geography

Is Nevada's geography a blessing or a curse? For twenty-first-century Nevadans, it is a benefit, without question. The sunny and temperate climate has attracted vacationers, retirees, and others for the last half century. The warm winters in Las Vegas are central to its status as a resort area, and the snowy Sierra Nevada in the winter attracts skiers from around the world. Beautiful Lake Tahoe provides year-round recreation for Nevadans and visitors. However, for nineteenth-century explorers, emigrants, and settlers this positive view of Nevada's geography would have been incomprehensible. The mountains that provide such beauty and recreation today were extraordinary obstacles before railroads and automobiles. The north/south orientation of Nevada's mountain ranges made the journey from the Great Salt Lake to California extraordinarily difficult, and the fact that Nevada's rivers do not drain to the sea prevented water travel as an alternative. The enhanced topographical image included here provides a perspective on Nevada's geography that was unimaginable to early emigrants to the state. If they had seen this image, would they have made the trip?

—John B. Reid

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Mark Twain on Nevada's “Harsh Land”

Who would stay in such a region one moment longer than he must? I thought I had seen barrenness before…but I was green. …Here, on the Humboldt, famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him. …There can never be any considerable settlement here.

These are strange words indeed for Horace Greeley (1811–72), the famous nineteenth-century journalist who made “Go West, young man” a national slogan. While he encouraged those seeking opportunity to turn their eyes to an undeveloped frontier, he saw little to recommend the Great Basin to settlers. The same was true for many others who headed to the Pacific Coast in search of cheap land, easy gains, and a temperate climate.

When young Samuel Clemens came west in 1861 with his brother Orion, newly appointed as secretary-treasurer for the Nevada Territory, he found the region shocking in its severity. The following is an excerpt from Roughing It (1871), his account of his Nevada sojourn.

—Ronald M. James

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My brother had just been appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory—an office of such majesty that it concentrated in itself the duties and dignities of Treasurer, Comptroller, Secretary of State, and Acting Governor in the Governor's absence. A salary of eighteen hundred dollars a year and the title of “Mr. Secretary,” gave to the great position an air of wild and imposing grandeur. I was young and ignorant, and I envied my brother. I coveted his distinction and his financial splendor, but particularly and especially the long, strange journey he was going to make, and the curious new world he was going to explore. He was going to travel! I never had been away from home, and that word “travel” had a seductive charm for me. Pretty soon he would be hundreds and hundreds of miles away on the great plains and deserts, and among the mountains of the Far West, and would see buffaloes and Indians, and prairie dogs, and antelopes, and have all kinds of adventures, and maybe get hanged or scalped, and have ever such a fine time, and write home and tell us all about it, and be a hero. And he would see the gold mines and the silver mines, and maybe go about on an afternoon when his work was done, and pick up two or three pailfuls of shining slugs, and nuggets of gold and silver on the hillside. And by and by he would become very rich, and return home by sea, and be able to talk as calmly about San Francisco and the ocean and “the isthmus” as if it was nothing of any consequence to have seen those marvels face to face. What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe. And so, when he offered me, in cold blood, the sublime position of private secretary under him, it appeared to me that the heavens and the earth passed away, and the firmament was rolled together as a scroll! I had nothing more to desire. My contentment was complete. At the end of an hour or two I was ready for the journey. Not much packing up was necessary, because we were going in the overland stage from the Missouri frontier to Nevada, and passengers were only allowed a small quantity of baggage apiece. There was no Pacific railroad in those fine times of ten or twelve years ago—not a single rail of it.

I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months—I had no thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business. I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years!

I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri River. …

[After an eventful trip through the American West, Twain and his fellow travelers approached Nevada Territory's capital city.]

We were approaching the end of our long journey. It was the morning of the twentieth day. At noon we would reach Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a standstill and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, but on the contrary depressing.

Visibly our new home was a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains. There was not a tree in sight. There was no vegetation but the endless sagebrush and greasewood. All nature was gray with it. We were plowing through great depths of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning house. We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the mail-bags, the driver—we and the sagebrush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color. Long trains of freight-wagons in the distance enveloped in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. These teams and their masters were the only life we saw. Otherwise we moved in the midst of solitude, silence, and desolation. Every twenty steps we passed the skeleton of some dead beast of burden, with its dust-coated skin stretched tightly over its empty ribs. Frequently a solemn raven sat upon the skull or the hips and contemplated the passing coach with meditative serenity.

By and by Carson City was pointed out to us. It nestled in the edge of a great plain and was a sufficient number of miles away to look like an assemblage of mere white spots in the shadow of a grim range of mountains overlooking it, whose summits seemed lifted clear out of companionship and consciousness of earthly things.

We arrived, disembarked, and the stage went on. It was a “wooden” town; its population two thousand souls. The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down on, but not too high for various other purposes; in fact, hardly high enough. They were packed close together, side by side, as if room were scarce in that mighty plain. The sidewalk was of boards that were more or less loose and inclined to rattle when walked upon. In the middle of the town, opposite the stores, was the “plaza,” which is native to all towns beyond the Rocky Mountains—a large, unfenced, level vacancy, with a liberty pole in it, and very useful as a place for public auctions, horse trades, and mass-meetings, and likewise for teamsters to camp in. Two other sides of the plaza were faced by stores, offices, and stables. The rest of Carson City was pretty scattering. …

This was all we saw that day, for it was two o'clock, now, and according to custom the daily “Washoe Zephyr” set in; a soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view. Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to newcomers; for the vast dust-cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air—things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust—hats, chickens, and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sagebrush, and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo-robes lower still; shovels and coal-scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats, and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies, and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots.

It was something to see that much. I could have seen more, if I could have kept the dust out of my eyes.

But seriously a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats. Carson streets seldom look inactive on summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a spider.

2

Contacts and Conflicts

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The Adventures of Zenas Leonard, Fur Trader

The first battle between Indians and whites in what is today Nevada took place in 1833, when Nevada was still part of Mexico. By the 1830s, several different fur companies competed fiercely with one another for a diminishing supply of beaver in the Pacific Northwest. Hoping to discover fertile new lands for trapping, Captain Benjamin Bonneville in July 1833 dispatched a party of about forty trappers from an area north of the Great Salt Lake, placing them under the leadership of his lieutenant Joseph Walker. This party entered today's Nevada near Pilot Peak (the first peak described in the excerpt below) and became the first white party to cross northern Nevada from east to west. They traveled along the Humboldt River, which was at that time referred to as the Unknown River, Ogden's River, or Mary's River.

The Walker party was disappointed with Nevada. Unaware that fur trapper Peter Ogden and his men had taken about one thousand beaver from the Humboldt River area several years earlier, the Walker party found the river “barren,” and they bestowed the name of Barren River upon it. They also found forage scarce and the landscape desolate. In their ill temper, men in the Walker party were all the more frustrated to discover that Indians were stealing their beaver traps at night. Some hot-headed trappers apparently vowed to kill the first Indian they met and, accordingly, shot and killed an Indian who was fishing, tossing his body into the river. Although Walker scolded the men who committed this act, the party became anxious that the Indians would seek revenge. When they encountered a great gathering of Indians further down the river in the area of today's Humboldt Sink, they feared for their lives and launched the attack described below; they killed thirty-nine Indians by Zenas Leonard's reckoning, while suffering no casualties themselves, and repeated the act the following summer on their return trip from Monterey, California, where they had wintered.

Washington Irving's well-known The Adventures of Captain Bonneville U.S.A. (1837) was the first published report of this trip, wherein Irving strongly condemned the Walker party for the vicious massacre of peaceful and merely curious Indians. Perhaps in defense of his leader, Joseph Walker, Zenas Leonard—a young man from Pennsylvania who served as clerk on the expedition—reported an eyewitness account of the incident that was first published in the newspapers of his hometown in 1839 and is excerpted here. He insists that the party's defensive strike was justified and came only after repeated efforts to avoid violence. Later historians have surmised that the Indians who stole the traps upriver were Shoshones, while the peaceful gathering downriver were innocent Paiutes. Whatever the case, this 1833 massacre set a pattern of mutual mistrust between Indians and white travelers and settlers in Nevada that would break out in repeated acts of violence and war throughout the nineteenth century.

—Cheryll Glotfelty

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After traveling a few days longer through these barren plains, we came to the mountain described by the Indian as having its peak covered with snow. It presents a most singular appearance—being entirely unconnected with any other chain. It is surrounded on either side by level plains, and rises abruptly to a great height, rugged and hard to ascend. To take a view of the surrounding country from this mountain, the eye meets with nothing but a smooth, sandy, level plain. On the whole, this mountain may be set down as one of the most remarkable phenomena of nature. Its top is covered with the pinion tree, bearing a kind of must, which the natives are very fond of, and which they collect for winter provision. This hill is nearly round, and looks like a hill or mound, such as may be met with in the prairies on the east side of the mountain.

Not far from our encampment we found the source of the river mentioned by the Indian. After we all got tired gazing at this mountain and the adjacent curiosities, we left it and followed down the river, in order to find water and grass for our horses. On this stream we found old signs of beaver, and we supposed that, as game was scarce in this country, the Indians had caught them for provision. The natives which we occasionally met with, still continued to be of the most poor and dejected kind—being entirely naked and very filthy. We came to the hut of one of these Indians who happened to have a considerable quantity of fur collected. At this hut we obtained a large robe composed of beaver skins fastened together, in exchange for two awls and one fish hook. This robe was worth from thirty to forty dollars. We continued traveling down this river, now and then catching a few beaver. But, as we continued to extend our acquaintance with the natives, they began to practice their national failing of stealing. So eager were they to possess themselves of our traps, that we were forced to quit trapping in this vicinity and make for some other quarter. The great annoyance we sustained in this respect greatly displeased some of our men, and they were for taking vengeance before we left the country—but this was not the disposition of Captain Walker. These discontents being out hunting one day, fell in with a few Indians, two or three of whom they killed, and then returned to camp, not daring to let the Captain know it. The next day while hunting, they repeated the same violation—but this time not quite so successful, for the Captain found it out, and immediately took measures for its effectual suppression.

At this place, all the branches of this stream is collected from the mountain into the main channel, which forms quite a large stream; and to which we gave the name of Barren River [the Humboldt River]—a name which we thought would be quite appropriate, as the country, natives and everything belonging to it, justly deserves the name. You may travel for many days on the banks of this river, without finding a stick large enough to make a walking cane. While we were on its margin, we were compelled to do without fire, unless we chanced to come across some drift that had collected together on the beach. As we proceeded down the river we found that the trails of the Indians began to look as if their numbers were increasing, ever since our men had killed some of their brethren. The further we descended the river, the more promising the country began to appear, although it still retained its dry, sandy nature. We had now arrived within view of a cluster of hills or mounds, which presented the appearance, from a distance, of a number of beautiful cities built up together. Here we had the pleasure of seeing timber, which grew in very sparing quantities some places along the river beach.

On the 4th of September [1833] we arrived at some lakes, formed by this river, which we supposed to be those mentioned by the Indian chief whom we met at the Great Salt Lake. Here the country is low and swampy, producing an abundance of very fine grass—which was very acceptable to our horses, as it was the first good grazing they had been in for a long time—and here, on the borders of one of these lakes, we encamped, for the purpose of spending the night and letting our horses have their satisfaction. A little before sunset, on taking a view of the surrounding waste with a spy-glass, we discovered smoke issuing from the high grass in every direction. This was sufficient to convince us that we were in the midst of a large body of Indians; but as we could see no timber to go to, we concluded that it would be as well to remain in our present situation and defend ourselves as well as we could. We readily guessed that these Indians were in arms to revenge the death of those which our men had killed up the river; and if they could succeed in getting any advantage over us, we had no expectation that they would give us any quarter. Our first care, therefore, was to secure our horses, which we did by fastening them all together, and then hitching them to pickets drove into the ground. This done, we commenced constructing something for our own safety. The lake was immediately in our rear, and piling up all our baggage in front, we had quite a substantial breastwork—which would have been as impregnable to the Indian's arrow as were the cotton bags to the British bullets at New Orleans in 1815. Before we had got everything completed, however, the Indians issued from their hiding places in the grass, to the number, as near as I could guess, of eight or nine hundred, and marched straight toward us, dancing and singing in the greatest glee. When within about 150 yards of us, they all sat down on the ground, and dispatched five of their chiefs to our camp to inquire whether their people might come in and smoke with us. This request Captain Walker very prudently refused, as they evidently had no good intentions, but told them that he was willing to meet them half way between our breastwork, and where their people were then sitting. This appeared to displease them very much, and they went back not the least bit pleased with the reception they had met with.

After the five deputies related the result of their visit to their constituents, a part of them rose up and signed to us (which was the only mode of communicating with them) that they were coming to our camp. At this ten or twelve of our men mounted the breastwork and made signs to them that if they advanced a step further it was at the peril of their lives. They wanted to...