A Great Basin Mosaic

The Cultures of Rural Nevada

James W. Hulse

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780874174663
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Nevada of lesser-known cities, towns, and outposts deserve their separate chronicles, and here Hulse fills a wide gap. He contributes in a text rich with memories tramping through rural Nevada as a child, then as a journalist seeking news and gossip, then later as an academic historian and a parent trying to share the wonders of the high desert with his family. Nobody is more qualified to write about the cultural nuances of rural Nevada than Hulse, who retired after 35 years as a professor of history at University of Nevada, Reno.

Robert Laxalt wrote an article in National Geographic in 1974 entitled "The Other Nevada" in which he referred to "the Nevada that has been eclipsed by the tinsel trimmings of Las Vegas, the round-the-clock casinos, the ski slopes of the Sierra. It is a Nevada that few tourists see." With this book Hulse reflects on Laxalt's insights and shows changes—often slow-moving and incremental—that have occurred since then. Much of the terrain of rural Nevada has not changed at all, while others have adapted to technological revolutions of recent times. Hulse states that there is no single "other" Nevada, but several subcultures with distinct features. He offers a tour of sorts to what John Muir called the "bewildering abundance" of the Nevada landscape.

CHAPTER ONE

Two Passageways Across the Basin

The Great Basin offered two main routes for the explorers and emigrants who crossed the terrain between the Rocky Mountains and central California in the 1840s and 50s. Most emigrants chose the Humboldt Trail. It was well mapped but hazardous because of the fickle water supply. The alternative—the Center—was a more rugged tangle of options across the midriff of the Basin. It was explored several times for faster passage—for example by the Pony Express.

These choices were still available to motorists in 2016. The Humboldt route was the overwhelming favorite because it is relatively level. It was chosen for the first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s (the Central Pacific west of Utah) and as the main east-west corridor—the Eisenhower Highway (I-80)—in the 1950s.

Approximately a hundred miles south of the Humboldt trail is U.S. Route 50, which was promoted in the 1920s as the Lincoln Highway. It has always been less popular but is more scenic because of its mountainous terrain.

THE HUMBOLDT RIVER ROUTE

The Humboldt River is the aorta of the northwestern Great Basin. This is a clumsy metaphor, because the Humboldt does not circulate. It meanders west through a parched desert for 300 miles before ending in an alkaline sink. It is a puny waterway, hardly worthy of being called a river, but it is the lifeblood of the northwestern Great Basin. Anglo–Americans first learned of it in the reports of the Canadian explorer Peter Skene Ogden, probing for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1820s. He was looking for beaver, whose pelts brought high prices in European luxury markets. Ogden’s traps did not snare many beaver in the Humboldt basin, but he lifted the curtain on an unknown segment of the North American continent for later explorers.

Scholars are uncertain how far Ogden penetrated into the southern desert, but recently recovered records indicate that he explored the Humboldt Basin three times between 1826 and 1830. The earliest maps based on his reports identify this stream as “Unknown River” or “Ogden’s River.”

Next, Joseph R. Walker led his semisecret, fact-finding mission to California on behalf of the U.S. Army in 1833 along the Humboldt when this region was part of Mexico. Official reports were ambiguous about his authority and intentions. Accompanied by about sixty men when he crossed the region west of the Great Salt Lake, he encountered a number of Native Americans.

At times, the Indians reportedly pilfered the expedition’s beaver traps and other gear, and some of Walker’s men wantonly killed several Natives as revenge. While Walker may have disapproved of such activities and punished the men when he learned of their conduct, this did not prevent a greater crisis in the lower Humboldt basin.

When the expedition arrived at the ponds of the Sink, Walker thought that large numbers of the Natives—in this case Northern Paiutes—were gathering at a distance and encircling their encampment. Perhaps the Native Americans had no experience of guns and their deadly possibilities. When Walker demonstrated how his guns could kill ducks at a far distance with great noise, the Paiutes briefly retreated. When they returned, Walker’s men mowed them down by the dozens.

This slaughter became known to Anglo–Americans only in later years. The journals of some of Walker’s men mentioned it, and the novelist Washington Irving described it as a wild western adventure. But the bloody episode lingered in the folklore of Native Americans for decades.

In spite of its challenges, the Humboldt corridor was the least arduous route across the most barren sections of the American west—between the Utah salt flats and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. No better east-west corridor with a stream of fresh water is available anywhere near this parallel—ca. 40–41 degrees latitude—for several hundred miles north or south.

In the 1840s, another explorer with a crew of careful record-keepers and more sophisticated instruments defined the physical features of the region in greater detail. John Fremont, the American “pathfinder,” made three extended probes into and across the region. He named it the “Great Basin,” a land of interior drainage where the streams do not find an outlet to the sea. He also replaced “Ogden’s River” on the maps with that of Alexander von Humboldt, the famous early nineteenth-century German explorer who never visited Nevada but whose reputation Fremont admired.

A few years after Fremont had defined the Basin, the Humboldt Trail became the preferred route for emigrant caravans on their way to California. It was on this route in the Sierras that the Donner Party of 1846 experienced its notorious disaster, which temporarily dampened eastern enthusiasm for a western paradise. But just three years later, reports of gold diggings in California aroused thousands. They came with their loaded wagons, unprepared for the journey across the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the deserts of the Great Basin, and finally the Sierra Nevada.

Of them all, the Great Basin was the most dreaded challenge on the journey across the continent. The Humboldt River was a refreshing gift from the mountains for emigrants and their animals, especially when they arrived upstream in springtime. But the water meandered and became bitterly alkaline and polluted as later-arriving emigrants moved downstream toward the end of summer. They usually needed three or four weeks to make the trek down the Humboldt from its headwaters to the Sink. “This is the paradox of the Humboldt,” Dale Morgan wrote in the early 1940s, “that it was almost the most necessary river of America, and the most hated.”

After the emigrants had crossed the Sink, they faced the Forty-Mile Desert before arriving at the refreshing waters of the Truckee or Carson rivers. Then they faced the steep canyons and daunting summits of the Sierra Nevada.

Most emigrants of the 1850s, depending on carts and wagons pulled by oxen, chose the Carson route. For all the troubles and challenges the California Trail presented east and west of here, the Humboldt Basin was the most direct passageway for wheeled vehicles, as subsequent builders of railroads and interstate highways relearned many decades later.

As it flows for 250 miles, from the upstream tributaries above the town of Wells to the Sink south of Lovelock, the Humboldt drops only about 1,700 feet in elevation. Whatever other challenges the route presented to the traveler, extreme and abrupt slopes were the least important. This was not the case with the alternate routes farther south across the central expanse of the Great Basin.

THE WIDE AND RUGGED MIDDLE CORRIDOR

At about the same time Peter Ogden was making his first visit to the Humboldt River on behalf of his Canadian sponsors, a group of American rivals probed the more southern region.

Jedediah Smith and fourteen companions of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company approached the center of the Basin from the western side. In 1826, they had moved southward from the Great Salt Lake along the Wasatch Mountains to the Colorado River, which they followed into southern California. When Mexican authorities made it clear they were not welcome, Smith and two others started eastward in 1827 across the center of the Basin.

During that passage, they encountered successive mountain ranges—rugged uplands later named Shoshone, Toiyabe, Toquima, Monitor, Egan, Schell Creek, and Snake—and sighted many more. The southern part of the central Basin is an erratic sequence of towering, forested highlands with broad, apparently barren valleys in between.

Smith and his companions crossed the parched desert for about 300 miles toward the Snake Range by a route that many scholars have tried to reconstruct. The most dedicated historical sleuths believe the party must have gone through the Sacramento Pass (now the route of U.S. Highways 6 and 50) between Wheeler Peak and Mount Moriah). They barely survived the ordeal, apparently saved from death by helpful Native Americans, and eventually rejoined some of their companions near Bear Lake in the Wasatch Mountains.

When subsequent explorers probed westward south of the Great Salt Lake, several choices lay ahead. One of the most skillful scouts was Howard Egan, a Mormon who had been among the first settlers to arrive with Brigham Young in the Salt Lake valley in 1847. Egan, sometimes accompanied by two sons, was the first to document the various possibilities for crossing the Basin, with strong horses and sturdy men.

During the 1850s, several more small groups probed the central Basin in greater detail. By 1858, when Captain James H. Simpson received a commission from the U.S. Army to find a direct road from Camp Floyd, Utah, to central California, the approach had become more systematic. He assembled a team that included an artist-photographer, biologists, topographers and a geologist. The data recorded in his report were excellent, but it was completed just as the Civil War disrupted the national agenda. His records were not published until 1876.

By that time, many other observations were available in print, but Simpson left his name on one of the uplands, the Simpson Park Mountains. He identified the most prominent south-north tributary of the Humboldt River as the “Reese River,” in honor of a guide who scouted for his crew. And notably, the Egan and Simpson information helped the most famous mail carriers of nineteenth-century America.

THE PONY EXPRESS

In 1860, a new company promised to transport letters from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento in fewer than ten days. The Pony Express began offering its rapid mail service when geographical knowledge about the Basin was much improved but still sketchy. The riders and their ponies usually entered the Middle Corridor at Antelope Valley near the site of the present Goshute Indian Reservation.

The riders raced their steeds through a dozen mountain ranges and intervening valleys on their way to Carson City. The relay stations, where horses and riders could be changed, were usually 10 to 25 miles apart. This exciting experiment at rapid communication continued for only about eighteen months, but it left a rich legacy and a few crumbling rock buildings across the Corridor.

The Pony Express quickly became obsolete when the telegraph spanned the Basin in 1861–62. When the Clemens brothers, Orion and Samuel, rushed west in an Overland stagecoach during the summer of 1861, they arrived at a station on the Reese River and found a telegraph connection to Carson City, 180 miles farther west. The wire had been extended as far east as the Toiyabe mountains. Orion, the appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory, was able to tell Territorial Governor James W. Nye in Carson that he was on his way. The electronic revolution had made its first appearance in the central Basin.

The Overland Stage used approximately the same route as the Pony Express for several years during the 1860s, but it too became redundant and was finally abandoned when the Central Pacific railroad was completed in 1869.

THE TWO PASSAGES

Much later, in the twentieth century, the two routes established in the 1860s continued as the main passageways across the Great Basin. The Humboldt River corridor became U.S. Highway 40 and eventually, in the 1950s, Interstate 80 (the Eisenhower Highway). Its small variations in grade invited the heavy traffic of the age of gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.

Part of the central route defined by Egan, Simpson, and the Pony Express became Highway 50, currently promoted as the Lincoln Highway, or the Loneliest Road in America. Several of its passes are 7,000 feet high and offer the motorist many scenic variations of the Great Basin panorama at a slower pace than the accelerated traffic of I-80.

CHAPTER TWO

Nevada Territory and Early Statehood, 1861–1869, Unionville and Austin

When the members of the first Nevada territorial legislature met in Carson City late in 1861, they divided their new jurisdiction into nine counties. Defining such units in the western corner near Carson City and Virginia City was an easy task. Five promising little towns became county seats, looking forward to building courthouses and enjoying the other privileges that came with the launching of local governments.

The remaining part of the Territory sprawled over tens of thousands of square miles of the “Great East.” Nobody knew much about the vast expanse between the Pyramid Lake and the eastern and southern boundaries. In their ignorance, legislators hastily drew lines on a map and divided this zone into three layers—Esmeralda, Churchill, and Humboldt counties.

The three units covered more than two-thirds of the Territory. Esmeralda County does not concern us here because most of it is in the Mojave Desert rather than in the sagebrush zone.

Churchill County was supposed to have its seat at Buckland’s Station (a Pony Express and Overland Mail resting place) on the Carson River. This county had very few people, and its history before 1902 has little relevance to our narrative, except that within a year the eastern half was lopped off to create Lander County, with its theoretical seat at a place called Jacob’s Station or Jacobsville on the Reese River.

The third eastern county—Humboldt—stretched across the entire northeastern corner of the Territory and had its original seat at Unionville, an ephemeral mining camp that we will soon visit in the company of Samuel L. Clemens.

As mentioned, the first legislators of Nevada Territory knew almost nothing about the resources and possibilities of the “Great East.” However, Nevada’s representatives in Washington soon persuaded Congress to add two more vertical stretches of land, shifting the boundary more than 100 miles east, reducing Utah Territory, and south to the Colorado River at the expense of Arizona Territory. It was a landgrab enabled by ill-informed representatives working on totally ignorant members of Congress. County boundaries of the twenty-first century still reflect the hasty decisions of the 1860s.

UNIONVILLE

The earliest mining rush to the Humboldt region began in 1861 on the eastern slopes of the mountain range that borders the river. From the vantage of the territorial capitol in Carson City and the towns of the Comstock Lode, it was more than 100 miles away, back across the worst part of the Forty-Mile Desert. But rumors of rich ores were a magnet for restless young men who had failed to strike it rich in Virginia City.

Among the first excited greenhorns was Samuel L. Clemens, who had arrived from Missouri only a few weeks earlier with his brother, Orion, the appointed Secretary of Nevada Territory. After sizing up Carson City (then a tiny village) and the nearby regions of Lake Tahoe, Sam fell victim to the “gold and silver fever” that afflicted nearly all young men in the region.

As Clemens (who in the meantime had renamed himself Mark Twain) told the story later in Roughing It, he and three companions hiked across 150 miles of desert from Carson City to a place called Buena Vista Canyon where they expected to find nuggets of gold: “We had not less than thirty thousand ‘feet’ apiece in the ‘richest mines on earth’ as the frenzied cant phrased it—and we were in debt to the butcher. We were stark mad with excitement—drunk with happiness—smothered under mountains of prospective wealth—arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvelous canyon—but our credit was not good at the grocer’s.”

The cold winter and their ignorance of metallurgy soon defeated Sam and his partners, so they rushed back toward Carson City to search for other possible bonanzas in the Sierra Nevada. And the Buena Vista district was a disappointment to three or four generations of miners and speculators who followed Clemens.

Unionville continued to be the seat of government for Humboldt County until 1873, although the county government lacked the money to construct a proper courthouse. Elected offices shifted from place to place and in some years issued scrip to pay the bills. A weekly newspaper was published locally from 1863 until 1869. Surviving files have allowed historians to conduct postmortem inquiries to supplement Twain’s observations, but no mining production records survive from the territorial period. Production in later years was spotty at best. Mines recorded production only $2.6 million worth of ore during the next eighty years.

Unionville continues to be a tiny hamlet a century and a half after the mining excitement of the 1860s. The name “Buena Vista” reflected its setting in a canyon with a view eastward where the morning sun gilds the sagebrush with its first light and offers a serene backdrop to the valley. Those who remained in this place and their more Acadian successors planted orchards and gardens that flourished in the benign microclimate of the canyon. In the mid-twentieth century, it became a rustic retreat for urbanites seeking a quiet, remote second home.

AUSTIN

As Unionville’s mining prospects dimmed, a sibling farther inland beckoned. The town of Austin in the Toiyabe Mountains was established soon after Unionville, but its lifespan has been much fuller. Pony Express riders based at the Jacobsville station on the Reese River picked at the rocks in the nearby foothills during their off-duty hours. When they discovered silver-bearing outcroppings in a narrow ravine called Pony Canyon, eight miles east of their station, word spread as quickly as seeds in the wind. Miners rushed in, and three or four tiny towns sprang up in 1862.

The legislature in Carson City, in session at the time, quickly authorized a new county named Lander in honor of Frederick W. Lander, a wagon-road builder. It originally included the entire northeastern corner of the Territory.

Austin became the focal point for frenzied prospectors who fanned out into the “Great East.” The town experienced less gunslinging anarchy than some camps of the same era, and it never suffered a fateful bust, because it did not have a real boom. It thus avoided much of the extravagance that afflicted other mining centers in the 1870s. As the jumping-off point for several prospects farther south and east, Lander came to be called the “mother of counties.” Austin might by the same logic be dubbed the parent of new mining districts, since at least fifty more spawned farther inl...