Jews in Nevada

A History

John P. Marschall

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780874177480
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Jews have always been one of Nevada's most active and influential ethnic minorities. They were among the state's earliest Euro-American settlers, and from the beginning they have been involved in every area of the state's life as businessmen, agrarians, scholars, educators, artists, politicians, and civic, professional, and religious leaders. Jews in Nevada is an engaging, multilayered chronicle of their lives and contributions to the state. Here are absorbing accounts of individuals and families who helped to settle and develop the state, as well as thoughtful analyses of larger issues, such as the reasons Jews came to Nevada in the first place, how they created homes and interacted with non-Jews, and how they preserved their religious and cultural traditions as a small minority in a sparsely populated region.

1

Peddlers and Merchants

1850-1863

Small-time trading had been the lot of about 85 percent of Prussian Jews in early-nineteenth-century Europe. Although many European countries banned trade with non-Jews before emancipation, peddlers became an indispensable link between isolated farmers and urban suppliers, often bartering manufactured goods for agricultural products. Some engaged in brokering the sale of horses to the army. Although the petty traders were part of a Jewish mercantile network, they lived a marginal existence and were often reduced to begging. The peddlers, or Dorfjuden, were at the lowest rung of German Jewish society. Prussian law forbade Jews to change residences within the Polish Duchy of Poznán, but they were permitted to leave the country. The Jewish establishment considered eastern European migrants into “old” Germany “unwelcome strangers,” and they were among the first to depart for America in the 1840s.¹ The peddler quickly became a common figure throughout urban and rural America.

In the wake of the gold discovery in 1848 at Sutter's Mill at Coloma, California, Jews and Gentiles preferred to travel by ship for San Francisco via Cape Horn or the Isthmus of Panama, rather than overland. Although some Jews coming from Europe continued almost immediately by boat to California, many remained in eastern port cities or moved inland to save enough money for the next leg. The handful of Jews among the twenty-five thousand who went overland to California in 1849 likely passed through the area that later became Nevada.²

Peddling was an internship for young Jewish men who hoped one day to have their own store. Customarily, three stages of peddling characterized the fledgling immigrant: backpack, mule or horse pack, and, finally, horse and wagon. For these would-be merchants, the goal was usually San Francisco, first to connect with a supplier and then to head into the mining camps of the eastern Sierra Nevada or east into the desert to sell consumables to wagon trains going to California. A military officer crossing the Nevada desert in 1850 recalled, “There were several places on the Humboldt and Carson Rivers where whisky and flour were sold from a canvas tent or cloth house, but these traders packed their house on a mule and left when the emigration for that season was over.”³ Such was the custom of the itinerant Jewish peddler.

Successful peddlers had a San Francisco supplier, but their geographical focus was wherever good business opportunities could be found. During the 1850s, they appeared in virtually every mining camp, and Jewish peddlers in the Sierra Nevada may have numbered more than a hundred. Their occupation was dangerous: accounts of an attack on a peddler were common. For example, in 1857, near Grass Valley, California, two masked robbers accosted “Mr. Jacobson a peddler,” relieved him of $380 and a pack worth about the same, tied him to a tree, and threatened to kill him if he tried to escape or hail the soon-to-arrive Marysville stage. Nevada had its own incidents. Twelve years later, Stencil and Louison, two peddlers from Prussia, were robbed, murdered, and thrown into the Humboldt River. Elko's few Jews collected money for the bodies to be forwarded for burial to San Francisco.⁴

Some Measures of California Intolerance

The gold discovery of 1848 attracted adventurers of all nations and creeds, and the Far West proved to be a relatively tolerant haven for Germanic and Slavic Jews. Moreover, it has become commonplace in recent historiography of Jews in the West to note the lack of blatant antisemitism both on the frontier and in San Francisco. Attorney Henry J. Labatt, writing in San Francisco's Voice of Israel of 1856, boasted, “Nowhere in America is the Jew so well understood and so readily appreciated as in this State [of California].”⁵ Although his statement would be as applicable two decades later in Nevada, the California atmosphere was not free of anti-Jewish bias.

In the previous year, Labatt expressed outrage at state assembly speaker William W. Stow's effort to impose a special tax on Jewish merchants that was tantamount to a Jewish exclusion act for California. Stow hoped to bolster support for this legislation by pointing to the merchants' “desecration” of the Christian Sabbath with their open stores and markets. In the ensuing legislative debate, Stow's opponent noted that in many places Jews chose to close their stores on Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) and therefore should not be penalized by having to close two days a week. In an open letter to Stow, Labatt offered an articulate defense of Jewish rights as well as support for legislation outlawing business on Sunday.⁶ Although by all accounts an observant Jew, Labatt was willing to make an accommodation to the Christian Sabbath observance, knowing his coreligionists would likely stay open on Saturday to remain competitive.

The low level of antisemitism during gold rush days did not exclude the persistent use of the word Jew as an adjective to describe a peddler or store. Some used it as a national designation parallel to “Irish saloon,” and it carried whatever stereotypical baggage the speaker or hearer imputed to it.⁷ In a popular travel memoir, J. Ross Browne employed all of the exaggeration, understatement, and irreverence that would characterize the writings of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. He breezily referred to “Jew peddlers dripping wet,” depicting one of them in a line drawing with a sharp hooked nose.⁸ Doubtless, Browne expected no criticism from his East Coast readers, who, he assumed, shared his stereotype of the peddler.

Others criticized “the Jew store.” In 1852, regarding competition with Jewish merchants in Sonora, California, William Perkins complained, “The Jews have built large numbers of small swindling shops in the broad bed of the arroyo, as the ground was unocupied [sic], and…belongs to every one….The Jews receive very little sympathy from the community, for as their hand is against all men's pockets, their misfortunes only excite the mockery and risible faculties of the crowd.”⁹ Another complained of “Jew slop-shops” so small “that one half of the stock had to be displayed suspended from projecting sticks outside.” The proprietors were “unwashed-looking, slobbery, slippery individuals.” A Placerville chronicler remembered Jewish merchants as cheaters and “rascally traffickers.” He expected his readers to understand that this was how “Jews became wealthy and prominent merchants in various California towns.” Similar examples of Judeophobia were evident in the antebellum and Confederate South and in major midwestern and eastern cities in the 1850s. However, with few exceptions, such sentiments were not displayed in the relatively isolated desert camps east of the Sierra Nevada.¹⁰

Early Settlements in Western Utah Territory: Future Nevada

A popular trail to the California goldfields after 1849 followed the river named after Kit Carson and passed near what later became Nevada's capital. Except for the presence of a few hardy Mormon settlers, the valleys in this western portion of Utah Territory were dusty, forgettable way stations for peddlers and gold seekers heading for the latest California bonanza. A campsite, once called Nevada City and later named Dayton, grew up near an insignificant 1849 gold strike along the Carson River. The first identifiable Jewish resident in the area was Isaac Cohn. Born in Prussian Poland in 1823, he was packing freight from California to the area as early as 1850. Cohn was permanently settled at Dayton when he and Joseph Keller purchased the Old Pioneer Log Store in 1859 from Major William Ormsby. Cohn remained a fixture in Nevada until his death in 1897. Meanwhile, the settlement of Latter-day Saints at the foot of Kingsbury Grade in Carson Valley—first called Mormon Station and later Genoa—quickly overshadowed the Dayton tent city to the east.¹¹

Genoa became the seat of the newly created and expanding Carson County, which by 1856 extended north to the Oregon border. Factions competed to align the county more closely to Utah authorities, while anti-Mormons agitated for annexation to California. Meanwhile, relations between Mormons in eastern Utah and the federal government became so strained that President James Buchanan sent a military force under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston to establish order. In response, Brigham Young recalled all Mormons to Salt Lake City to defend Deseret against the advancing army. Over the course of 1857, hundreds of Mormons in the valleys of Carson County obediently returned to Salt Lake, and their neighbors of many ethnic backgrounds took over abandoned farms and homes at wholesale prices.

Genoa was the largest of the many stations on the way to the new gold discoveries along the American, Rubicon, and Yuba Rivers in the eastern Sierra Nevada. As county seat, it was the center not only of commercial activity but also of political action. On August 8, 1857, a group of citizens drafted a memorial to Congress requesting creation of a new territory separated from Utah. Pioneer Abram Curry crossed east over the Sierra Nevada and tried to speculate in property at Genoa. He found that the thousand-dollar selling price of a single lot was “firm” and, according to local lore, said, “I'll just go and build my own city.” In fall 1858, he and three partners purchased the Mankin Ranch for five hundred dollars and a few horses several miles north in what was becoming known as Eagle Valley. Curry is credited with naming the town Carson City. He divided the lots with his partners, Benjamin F. Green, Frank M. Procter, and J. J. Musser, but as one commentator noted, “The population of the valley was so scant at the time that all of them gathered at a dance would not occupy more than three sets.”¹²

That population included Bohemian-born Abraham Klauber. He had established roots as coproprietor of a store with fellow Jew Francis Mandelbaum at Volcano, a mining town in Amador County, California. When the nearby mines played out, he moved to Genoa in 1858 and soon earned an enviable reputation for liberality and fairness in a climate of high inflation. San Francisco Herald correspondent Richard N. Allen heralded the merchant's arrival. He noted that Klauber had brought in a large stock of goods and already reduced prices 75 percent but had quickly learned that not all gold ores taken in trade were of equal value. “Mr. Klauber, a trader here, has taken in a large amount of it at $12 per ounce, and finds himself taken in by the discovery that it is only worth eight or nine dollars.” Experiences such as these encouraged Klauber and his partner to insist on “cash only” transactions for discounted goods. In two years, his real estate was worth five thousand dollars with other taxable assets estimated at twenty-five thousand dollars.¹³ Klauber had gambled on the area's future, though the gold had been insignificant. That was soon to change.

The Rush to Washoe

The discovery of numerous but low-grade ore pockets in the high canyons thirty miles northeast of Genoa drew merchants and other adventurers to northern Nevada in what became known as “the rush to Washoe,” or the Comstock Lode. Maps of the 1850s identified the area as “Washo” after its inhabitants, the Hokan-speaking Native Americans. By 1858, about 150 miners were working the canyon above Dayton. On January 28, 1859, James “Old Virginny” Finney and others struck gold-silver ore near what is now Virginia City. A frenzy of speculation on Comstock strikes in San Francisco prompted the first in a series of drops in stock prices. Undeterred, however, were those hoping to buy low and sell high on the next cyclic rise. Claims disputes attracted lawyers from California, and merchants abounded as scarce staple goods brought inflated prices.¹⁴ The latter included relatives and friends of established Jewish businessmen in San Francisco, Nevada City, and Sacramento. A new rush was on, and the immigrant traffic from east to west was making a steady u-turn.

Thousands of gold seekers—soon to be silver seekers—poured into the valleys east of the Sierra Nevada and passed through Genoa and Carson City en route to the new bonanza. Right behind them were the peddlers, agents of established merchants, teamsters, carpenters, purveyors of distilled spirits, prostitutes, gamblers, and lawyers. One journalist described Carson City as “a mere accident; occupation of the inhabitants, waylaying strangers bound for Virginia [City]; business, selling whisky, and so dull at that, men fall asleep in the middle of the street going from one groggery to another; productions, grass and weeds on the Plaza.”¹⁵

It was, in fact, a town in progress. All around the city and particularly in the fast-forming business district on Carson Street were the sounds of hammer on nail, neighing horses, and boisterous teamsters—to say nothing of the whoops and hollers from the plentiful saloons. Prevailing westerlies kicked up clouds of dust except when the occasional rain and snow turned the roads into slop. An 1860 line drawing of Carson City depicted a collection of wooden places of business—some of them two-storied along streets separated by large vacant spreads crisscrossed with trails for wagons and buggies.

The Comstock was a larger and more populated version of Carson. The adventurers who poured into the Virginia City area after the winter storms of 1860 created a surreal landscape over the sagebrush mountainside. Occasionally, a “boiled shirt” dandy with a stovepipe hat rose above the citizenry. J. Ross Browne described them as “keen speculators,” “rough customers,” “Jew clothing-men [who] were setting out their goods and chattels in front of wretched-looking tenements; monte-dealers, gamblers, thieves, cut-throats, and murders…mingling miscellaneously in the dense crowds around the bars of the drinking saloons.”¹⁶

This was no place for families or the faint of heart. The Weekly Gleaner, edited by San Francisco rabbi Julius Eckman, carried under “Jewish News” advice from a Jew on the Comstock to future immigrants: “Those who can make a comfortable living in California had much better stay at home; those who cannot, will hardly do it here; but men of capital, who can make money anywhere, will find this a fair field. We want merchants, we want mills, we want ditches, and we want capital to work the mines.”¹⁷

Abraham Klauber capitalized on the influx. His large inventories brought in from California allowed him to sell a hundredweight of flour at a fraction of his competitors. “His cargoes are no sooner unloaded than all is sold,” wrote one journalist, “so that consumers have the alternative of paying twenty or thirty dollars a hundred to others, or waiting till more of Klauber's teams get in.” In addition to his general store, Klauber, with his Sacramento-based partner, Mandelbaum, operated the Wells Fargo Express Agency in Genoa. The two apparently invested more than one hundred thousand dollars there before Nevada became a territory.¹⁸

The Comstock discovery was one of several western mineral attractions after the California mines began to play out. Discoveries of gold on the Fraser River in British Columbia, in Arizona's Gila River, and at Colorado's Pikes Peak, all in 1858, drew their own rush of old forty-niners and new adventurers, as did Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming in 1860. None of these booms had the staying power of the Comstock, whose mineral production continued to climb for almost twenty years.

David H. Cohen was a Jewish immigrant who arrived by steamer from Germany at San Francisco in 1852. Though he could speak no English, he eked out a living as a miner in Jackson and Rabbit Creek in the Sierra Nevada before spending a fruitless six months on the Fraser River in British Columbia. In 1862, he was unable to find his own productive claim in the Virginia City area and moved to Austin, Nevada, to sell liquor. In 1865, he was mining in Montana at Alder Gulch, Virginia City, and Ophir City. By 1867, he had earned enough in mining and speculation for a trip to Germany to seek a wife. The couple returned to Austin and then moved to Schellbourne in White Pine County, where they were in business for six years. The growing family moved to Butte, Montana, where Cohen prospered as a tailor and general merchandiser. He then invested in an Idaho claim and lost heavily. He returned to Butte and ended up selling fruit and tobacco. Cohen exemplified the transiency and bad luck of many western miners and speculators and, more important, the relative stability of staying aboveground as a merchant.¹⁹

Civil War, Territory Status, and the Wandering Jew

South Carolina had seceded from the Union in December 1860, and six other Southern states quickly followed. With Southerners absent, Northerners in Congress,...