A Short History of Reno, Second Edition

Richard Moreno

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780874179859
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This completely revised and updated edition of A Short History of Reno provides an entertaining and informative account of Reno's remarkably colorful history. Richard Moreno discusses Reno's efforts, from its early beginnings in the 1850s to the present day, to reinvent itself as a recreation, entertainment, education, and technology hub. Moreno looks at the gamblers, casino builders, and performers who helped create the world-famous gaming industry, and he considers the celebrities who came to end unhappy marriages back when Reno was "the divorce capital of the world."Moreno brings the city's history up-to-date with coverage of the businesspeople and civic leaders who helped make Reno an attraction that still lures millions of visitors each year. Today's travelers and residents explore Reno's flamboyant heart and scenic wonders, topics the author examines in an accessible and lively fashion.

Chapter One

Seeds of a Community

Thousands on their pilgrimage to the land of fabulous richness found their first El Dorado in the sparkling waters of the Truckee and the rich grasses of its valley.

—N. A. HUMMEL, General History and Resources of Washoe County, Nevada, 1888

With lush foliage, a relatively temperate climate, and a fast-flowing river teeming with fish, the Truckee Meadows provided just about everything the native people of northern Nevada might need. According to archaeological evidence, the area served as a seasonal home for the nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes of the Great Basin for many generations. The earliest humans in the region were most likely small family and extended-family units that set up temporary camps along the Truckee River and south near sloughs located below Steamboat Hills.

In their book, The River and the Railroad, archaeologist/historians Mary Ringhoff and Edward J. Stoner acknowledge that while no one is certain of the identity of the original settlers in the Truckee Meadows, there is physical evidence of the presence of humans in the area more than 5,000 years ago. Additionally, stone arrowheads and other objects uncovered in Washoe Valley show human activity in the region about 12,000 years ago.

By about 1,500 years ago, members of the Washo (also spelled Washoe) people were the predominant culture living along the eastern Sierra Nevada range, including the Honey Lake and Lake Tahoe regions. The Washo established winter villages in the Truckee Meadows that are believed to have consisted of clusters of round-shaped pit houses with rock-lined hearths and sometimes with a covering of brush and branches.

The Washo wintered near the present site of the University of Nevada, Reno, as well as the present-day locations of Idlewild Park, East Sparks, Glendale, Huffaker Hills, the Mount Rose fan and where the sloughs of the Double Diamond area are now located. The Northern Paiute people (also known as the Paviotso) inhabited a much larger area, about one-third of present-day Nevada and parts of southeastern Oregon, southern Idaho, and eastern California. They resided to the north and east of the Washo, including around Pyramid Lake.

The first non–Native Americans to enter the Truckee Meadows were members of the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy wagon party, which camped along the Truckee River in the meadows in mid-October of 1844. The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party, which consisted of ten families totaling fifty men, women, and children, had departed from Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 22, 1844. The wagon party initially traveled with a much larger group of about forty wagons headed for Oregon.

The party elected Elisha Stephens, a mountain man who had hunted beaver in the Pacific Northwest, to serve as captain, while their guides included eighty-year-old Caleb Greenwood, an experienced trapper, scout, and mountain man, and his two sons. Others in the party included Dr. John Townsend, who traveled with his wife and brother-in-law, Moses Schallenberger; the twenty-three-member Murphy family, led by Martin Murphy Sr.; and the Miller and Hitchcock families.

At Fort Hall, Idaho, the party split from the main group that was heading to Oregon, and journeyed on a route to California that had been traveled by only two previous wagon trains. The wagons followed Mary’s River (now known as the Humboldt River) to a Paiute village near present-day Battle Mountain, Nevada. There they were introduced to an elderly man who appeared to be the chief of the village. He was friendly to the group and communicated with Greenwood by means of sign language and diagrams drawn in the dirt. He indicated he knew an easy way to continue their journey west.

Stephens, Townsend, and another man, Joseph Foster, asked the chief to show them the trail. They returned three days later to report that the man had guided them to an eastward flowing stream that came from the Sierra Nevada range. According to many accounts, the man used a word that sounded like “tro-kay,” which apparently was Paiute for “all right,” as he pointed west, but members of the party interpreted the word as his name. After they returned, they began calling the man “Chief Truckee.” An alternate version of the story is that “Truckee” was an Anglicized version of the chief’s Paiute name, said to have been “Tru-ki-zo.”

With the assistance of Chief Truckee, who agreed to travel with them for a spell, the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party headed west and reached the stream that flowed out of the mountains near the site of present-day Wadsworth. Elated to reach the waterway, the group’s members named it Truckee, in honor of their guide. At the time, they did not know this was the same river that explorer John C. Frémont had encountered a year earlier and had named Salmon Trout River. Frémont, however, did not follow the river west into the Truckee Meadows; he headed south of it, instead, until he encountered the Carson River.

In Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail, historian Dale Morgan noted Chief Truckee’s importance in the development of the California Trail, writing: “The Paiute chief Truckee has had less attention in connection with the opening of the California Trail than he merits. It was he who guided the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party up the Truckee and over Donner Pass.”

Led by Truckee, the party followed the river through the narrow canyons between modern-day Wadsworth and Sparks, and in mid-October reached the Truckee Meadows. After camping for a short time in the meadows—Reno’s first overnight tourists—they decided to press onward into the mountains in order to avoid becoming trapped by snow, which had begun to fall in the higher elevations.

Despite hardships created by the winter weather—the heavy snow caused the group to abandon many of its wagons at a small mountain lake that would later be named Donner Lake, and one member, Moses Schallenberger, was unable to travel due to severe leg cramps and had to live alone in a crude cabin near the lake for three months until he could be rescued—all of the members of the party eventually made it to California.

John C. Frémont visited the Truckee Meadows during his third expedition through Nevada, in 1845. In Memoirs of My Life and Times, published in 1886, Frémont wrote that his expedition, like the earlier Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party, began following the Truckee River near Wadsworth and “on the evening of the 4th [December] camped at its head on the east side of the pass in the Sierra Nevada [in the modern day Truckee Meadows]. Our effort had been to reach the pass before a heavy fall of snow, and we had succeeded. All night we watched the sky, ready to attempt the passage with the first indication of falling snow; but the sky continued clear. On our way up, the fine weather we had left at the foot of the mountain continued to favor us, and when we reached the pass the only snow showing was on the peaks of the mountain.”

The successful crossing of western Nevada by the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party as well as Frémont’s expedition, both groups using the Truckee River route to reach California, attracted the attention of other travelers. One such group was the Donner-Reed party, which departed from Springfield, Illinois, for California in April 1846. Led by George and Jacob Donner, the caravan joined a larger train of wagons in Missouri, reached Wyoming in July, and was about to proceed along the tested and recommended Oregon Trail.

The Donners, however, were impatient to reach their destination. They had read The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, an account written by Lansford Hastings, a young adventurer who said he had found a shortcut on a return trip from California. The route through Utah, Hastings claimed, was some three hundred miles shorter than the more well-traveled Oregon route. So the Donner brothers persuaded some of the others, including the Reed, Breen, Eddy, and Murphy families, to follow Hastings’s shortcut.

The new route may have been quicker for Hastings, who had done it as one man on horseback, but the Donner-Reed group’s clumsy wagons couldn’t travel so easily over mountains and through the rugged terrain. As a result of delays caused by literally having to carve their own trail across portions of eastern Nevada, the party’s twenty-three wagonloads of men, women, and children began to run low on food and water. They sent two scouts ahead to Sutter’s Fort in California to try to bring back supplies.

Fortunately, the Donner-Reed party soon reached the Truckee Meadows, where their hopes revived. Exhausted after grueling weeks of desert heat and hardship, particularly when crossing the stretch of inhospitable land that later became known as the Forty-Mile Desert, they welcomed the refreshing river and cool shade. Even though it was late October and they had been warned to cross the Sierra before heavy snows covered the trails, the exhausted travelers decided to rest for several days in this pleasant campground. It was a fatal mistake. On the last day of October, when they finally reached the mountain pass that led to California, later named Donner Pass, heavy snows forced them to turn back.

On the shores of a frozen Donner Lake (the same mountain lake where Moses Schallenberger had been forced to live for three months), they set up camp. Through a winter of starvation, death, and, by some accounts, cannibalism, they struggled to stay alive long enough to complete their journey. It wasn’t until April 1847 that the last member of the group was finally rescued and taken to California. In the end, only 48 of the original 87 members of the party survived.

While the fate of the Donner Party initially discouraged people from heading west—the number of emigrants traveling to California dropped from an estimated 1,500 in 1846 to 450 in 1847 and 400 in 1848—the discovery of rich gold deposits in California soon pushed aside any reservations about the arduous and dangerous journey. In 1849, some 25,000 people flocked to the Golden State. Many of these would-be prospectors from the east paused at the green oasis beside the Truckee before crossing the mountains that separated them from the fortunes they hoped to find.

Settling Western Nevada

In the spring of 1850, Joseph Demont, Abner Blackburn, and Hampton S. Beatie, followers of Joseph Smith’s Church of the Latter Day Saints (also known as the Mormon Church), erected a crude log trading post in Carson Valley, about fifty miles south of the Truckee Meadows, to supply California-bound emigrants. The temporary post was abandoned with the onset of winter, but the following spring another group of Mormons, led by John Reese, arrived to establish a permanent colony on behalf of the church. The new settlement was called Mormon Station (now known as Genoa). By the mid-1850s, Mormon settlers had spread out from the station, claiming much of the land to the north, including the southern portion of the Truckee Meadows, as well as Steamboat Springs and the Washoe Valley.

In 1857, however, members of the Mormon Church were forced to quickly sell their holdings when church leader Brigham Young summoned them to Salt Lake City in the Utah Territory, the center of church life, to help protect the congregation and its leaders from a feared confrontation with the US government (the “Utah War”). President James Buchanan had ordered federal troops to the territory to re-affirm federal control over the region. The situation was quietly resolved in July 1858 when Young acknowledged federal jurisdiction and stepped down as governor of the Utah Territory.

Among the earliest non-Mormon settlers to put down roots in the Truckee Meadows were Peleg and Joshua Brown, who arrived in January 1857. The Brown brothers, originally from Rhode Island, had driven 170 head of cattle from Kentucky to Nevada. According to a letter written by Peleg Brown to his family, Joshua bought three land claims, totaling about 1,000 acres, for $250. One of the claims was located in Washoe Valley, while the other two were in the Truckee Meadows. Joshua later traded his Washoe Valley holdings to a claim jumper living on his land for a plow.

In 1858, Peleg Brown bought his own parcel, located about three miles south of his brother’s land, and established a ranch with 138 head of cattle, five oxen, five bulls, and five horses. He cultivated a five-acre garden with corn, potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables and fruits. In 1864, Peleg, who had married a year before, built a substantial three-story house and, a bit later, a barn. The second floor of the house was divided into fourteen small bedrooms, which Peleg and his wife rented to boarders.

In 1866, Peleg bought his brother’s holdings, as well as several other surrounding parcels and consolidated the property into a single 620-acre ranch. Now an established landowner, he introduced alfalfa hay to the Truckee Meadows and helped develop the Steamboat Canal, a thirty-four-mile irrigation ditch to transport water from the Truckee River to Steamboat Valley.

By the early 1870s, Peleg Brown’s ranch was considered one of the finest in the state. He was elected a Washoe County commissioner in 1872 and later served as a Washoe County delegate to the state Republican convention. In 1877, he donated an acre of land to the county for construction of a school, the Brown School, which was completed in 1878, the year he died.

As for Peleg Brown’s ranch, it remained in his family until 1940, when it was sold to Louis Damonte. While much of it was subsequently divided into smaller parcels and developed, many of the original Peleg Brown ranch buildings have been maintained and remain in use by Damonte’s descendants.

Another who found success in the south Truckee Meadows was Granville W. Huffaker, who, in 1858, drove into the region an estimated five hundred head of cattle from Salt Lake City and settled on land located about six miles south of Glendale, near the southwest tip of a series of small hills that would eventually be named after him.

Huffaker was born in 1831 in Monticello, Kentucky, and by the 1850s was a partner with Louis P. Drexler in operating a general store in Salt Lake City. When the Mormon congregation was called back to Salt Lake City in the late 1850s, Huffaker and Drexler, who did not belong to the church, sold their store and headed to the Truckee Meadows to make their fortunes. Huffaker selected the site of his ranch well. It sat at the crossroads of the major north-south and east-west travel roads and quickly grew into the largest freight and stage station in the region.

In addition to overseeing his 600-acre ranch and his stage and freight operations, Huffaker established the region’s first post office in 1862 and served as postmaster for a decade. Within a few years, Huffaker’s Station, as it became known, had expanded to include several hotels and saloons as well as livery stables and corrals. By the mid-1860s, nearly three hundred people lived around the settlement. In 1867, a one-room schoolhouse was erected on land donated by Huffaker and served as a popular gathering spot for community dances and meetings.

At about the same time that the Brown brothers and Huffaker were getting established at the south end of the Truckee Meadows, John F. Stone and Charles C. Gates opened a trading post on the south side of the Truckee River (at a place that would later become known as Glendale) to serve travelers, and in 1860 they erected a toll bridge across the Truckee River, which is believed to be the first bridge over the river in the meadows. Stone and Gates’s bridge, however, was short-lived; flooding during the following spring washed it away, and the river once again became an obstacle for travelers.

Also among the early settlers in the Truckee Meadows was A. A. Longley, another transplanted Kentuckian, who traveled to Nevada in 1861 and eventually acquired about 600 acres in the southeastern part of the Truckee Meadows. According to Myron Angel’s Thompson & West’s History of Nevada, published in 1881, Longley “by his persistent efforts, and indomitable will and energy . . . produced from the original barren waste of sage-brush a beautiful, well-appointed ranch.”

Huffaker, Brown, and Longley, as well a handful of other pioneering ranchers in the meadows, owed much of their success to the discovery of rich silver deposits in 1859 in mountains located about 25 miles southeast of the meadows, in an area that would become known as Virginia City. Within a short time, thousands of would-be prospectors and others, many from California, had caught mining fever and flocked to the region. Those fortune seekers were a ready market for the meat, fruits, vegetables, and other commodities produced in the Truckee Meadows.

The Rush to Washoe

It was gold, not silver, that originally attracted miners to Virginia City. Starting in the early 1850s, a small group of placer miners began uncovering nuggets, pebbles, and flakes of gold at the junction of Gold Canyon and the Carson River (near the present-day town of Dayton). Over the next few years, they began to spread up the canyon and onto the slopes of Sun Mountain. In the spring of 1859, two placer miners, Pete...