Nevada History

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Based on Chapters 7 and 8 as well as the Module materials you will write on 1, 2, and 3. Please remember to start a new paragraph when you start a new idea; paragraphs should not be longer than SIX sentences. Paragraphs longer than six sentences will lose points. 1. In at least 300 words, please write as a financial consultant who is advising a New York investor in 1915 on whether to invest in a Nevada mining operation. You will need to include: a. A brief history of mining in Nevada b. An evaluation of the stability of the mining industry in Nevada c. A brief history of how mine workers are treated in Nevada 2. In at least 300 words, please write as the wife of a church minister in Reno in 1915. Please describe how the following groups are living in Nevada in 1915: a. Women b. African Americans c. Native Americans d. Chinese Americans 3. In at least 300 words, please write as political reporter for the New York Daily News who is visiting Nevada in 1915. You want to explain to people back east: a. Why many Nevadans were Populists b. Why Nevada had a ″culture of corruption″ Please do not use outside sources or internal citations. Please do not use direct quotations.

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gold find in what became Searchlight. But by 1900 little had materialized, Nevada’s population had fallen from sixty thousand to forty-two thousand in twenty years, and critics discussed the merits of revoking statehood on the grounds that so small a population had no right to representation in Congress. The state immigration bureau tried to attract new residents with salesmanship—it called Nevada’s climate “the most delightful and salubri- ous in the known world”—but with little success.

Building a Ranching State

Nor did agriculture, which benefited from and contributed to the mining boom, end the depression. A brief livestock boom in the first half of the 1880s stirred hopes for a burgeoning ranching industry, but the number of

Mine developer Anson Phelps Stokes built his “castle,” modeled on an Italian tower, outside Austin in the 1890s. Molly Flagg Knudtsen helped save it from further decay, and it became part of the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Nevada–Reno Library.

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 11/13/2019 12:05 PM via COLLEGE OF SOUTHERN NEVADA AN: 976669 ; Green, Michael S..; Nevada : A History of the Silver State Account: s8860165

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cattle and sheep grew slowly, while their market value declined. Drought and other weather problems, especially blizzards between 1888 and 1890, only made matters worse.

Still, several large ranching families became important to Nevada’s economy and society. In the 1850s Henry Fred Dangberg arrived in Car- son Valley, H. N. A. “Hock” Mason in the valley named for him along the Walker River, and R. B. Smith, T. B. Smith, and two partners in the Sierra Nevada foothills in Smith Valley. Several others entered the Washoe Val- ley around Reno. Future governor Lewis Bradley worked his way from Mason Valley to Reese River and finally to Elko, and another governor, Jewett Adams, ran cattle and sheep in White Pine and Lincoln Counties. Elko-area rancher Jasper Harrell sold his operations in 1883 to two Texans, John Sparks and John Tinnan, whose cattle spread through northeastern Nevada; their ranching success helped elect Sparks governor in 1902.

Just as California mining corporations often dominated the Comstock Lode, California ranching operations became a presence in Nevada. Henry Miller and Charles Lux arrived from the San Joaquin Valley to buy water rights in Mason Valley and the Humboldt Basin. They eventually hired Hock Mason, bought up seventy thousand acres, and controlled grazing rights on hundreds of thousands more. But overgrazing combined with bad weather to devastate Nevada ranching: at one point Sparks lost more than half of his herd, and Mason lost almost all of his.

All of these ranchers served nearby railroad or mining towns and suf- fered the effects of market forces and drought, a constant threat in the Great Basin. They found other markets: by 1870 Nevada ranchers report- edly shipped thirty thousand animals to California’s butchers each year. But in the mid-1880s, cattle prices dropped, and the San Francisco market had no need for Nevada’s livestock, forcing ranchers to look east, increas- ing their dependence on railroads. Nevada’s farmers had that in common with their counterparts around the country, except others had even worse problems. Farmers and miners eventually decided to take political action.

Inflation and the Money Supply

During and after the Civil War, inflation and its effects worried politi- cal and financial leaders. To finance the war effort, the federal govern- ment issued bonds and, for the first time, printed paper money, called

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“greenbacks” for their color. With so much paper on the market, its value declined—but not that of gold. During Reconstruction Republicans passed a law to pay off war bonds with gold and, in 1875, added the Resumption Act to start retiring all greenbacks from circulation in 1879. These poli- cies sought deflation—the smaller the money supply, the greater the value of existing money, or specie. This policy benefited creditors and harmed debtors: if a loan of one hundred dollars made in inflationary times came due after deflation increased the value of currency, the repayment would be worth more than the original loan. Thus, the more money in circulation, the less its value, and the easier debtors found it to pay what they owed. But that meant the creditor who loaned the money would raise interest rates to make greater profits.

These issues pitted several groups against one another. Businessmen might be creditors (especially in the eastern United States) and debtors (likelier in the West), or verge on becoming either. Farmers and workers usually ended up in debt, but divided on what to do about it. Widespread political corruption during the Gilded Age limited their means and ability to act against policies they opposed. More important, their interests dif- fered: both wanted inflation to help with debts, but farmers sought it to increase the prices they received for their crops. Industrial workers nation- ally and in Nevada’s mines and mills had no desire to create higher prices for the food they needed to buy rather than growing it themselves.

Making the mix more combustible, farming changed during and after the Civil War. The Morrill Act of 1862 to start agricultural colleges and the government’s creation of the Department of Agriculture encouraged sci- entific farming and reduced the need for farm laborers. Many of Jefferson’s yeoman or subsistence farmers moved to the city for industrial jobs or con- centrated on cash crops and became dependent on the market. Meanwhile, the South sought to revive its economy after the devastation the Civil War caused and to retain its African American labor force. Plantation owners turned to sharecropping, meaning black farmers would continue to do the work, in return for a percentage of profits. But southern planters also relied on the market and aid from the government and bankers.

A debt spiral followed for the nation’s farmers. Expanding or retooling their farms required loans or liens on their crops from bankers and mer- chants who sought collateral: either their land or their next crop. When

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markets failed to yield profits or crop prices remained low, they lost their collateral or went deeper into debt in hopes of improving their lot. Thus, they wound up so indebted that they had no hopes of paying off their credi- tors for years, or they lost their farms. They blamed a variety of forces, but especially bankers and merchants.

The Railroad Problem

Farmers and ranchers around the country, including in Nevada, also blamed railroads. They depended on the transcontinental railroad and various feeder lines to bring their crops to market, besides carrying them and assorted freight. In Nevada those with grievances against the railroad included mining companies that also relied on the Union Pacific and Cen- tral Pacific, landowners who grazed cattle and sheep, and individual min- ers and ranchers.

Many Nevadans resented the state’s tax policies toward railroads, but short-haul/long-haul discrimination angered them above all. The Central Pacific charged to carry goods for the longer haul, even if the train dropped off the goods before reaching the more distant destination. In 1881 Rol- lin Daggett, a Territorial Enterprise editor elected to Congress with Bank Crowd support, made a famous speech accusing the cp of overcharging his constituents by $30 million in the past decade and citing evidence of the discrimination: from New York a carload of coal oil cost $300 to San Fran- cisco, $536 to Reno, and $716 to Winnemucca. Two years later departing governor John Kinkead, who also received backing from mining corpora- tions, urged the legislature to take action against the cp.

Their efforts proved fruitless at the federal and state levels, because the Central Pacific lobbied and curried favor with state legislators who, in turn, elected US senators and often rose to higher office. In Nevada the cp appointed agents who handled an assortment of duties, especially poli- tics. They worked with Henry Yerington, manager of the Bank of Califor- nia’s Virginia & Truckee Railroad, and his colleague Abner C. Cleveland, a White Pine rancher who tended to eastern counties. The Nevada-based group wanted taxes and regulations no more than the cp did and usually dealt with state matters, while the cp stressed national affairs. Both sides underwrote candidates and their campaigns—Yerington even described one county’s elected officials as “all friendly to us (and God knows they

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ought to be) and so we have Washoe in the hollow of our hand for many a year to come if desirable.” Then they lubricated the machinery as needed at Carson City and tried to control party conventions, which wrote platforms and nominated candidates who heeded them. When the 1891 legislature succumbed to pressure from ranchers and created a state board of asses- sors and equalization that increased taxes on railroads, lobbyists pressured the 1893 session into abolishing it. Reform-minded politicians learned their lesson.

The Power of Mining and Railroads: The Senate

Mining and railroad interests almost completely dominated Nevada poli- tics from statehood until well into the twentieth century. From the first ter- ritorial election in 1861 until the 1890s, Republicans controlled most federal and state offices. The combination meant that few Democrats who won office either proved more reform minded than the Republicans, who, after all, had no reason to want to change the status quo, or, more likely, had enough wealth to overcome the Republican advantage in voter registration and access to mining and railroad funds.

The first state legislature elected William Stewart and James Nye to the Senate in 1865. Stewart distinguished himself, at least with the cp and the Bank Crowd, with the national mining law and prorailroad measures and won a second term. So did Nye, who took stands for civil rights. But when his second term ended in 1873, Nye lacked an impressive record and finan- cial support and showed signs of senility. Crown Point mine co-owner John P. Jones outbribed William Sharon at the legislature to win and served five terms in the Senate, defending mining interests. At first, his independence frightened railroad operators, but his California investments—Jones joined with Stewart in mine deals and later developed Santa Monica—required him to get along with the Central Pacific.

As his reelection bid loomed in 1874, Stewart announced his retire- ment from politics to pursue opportunities in mining and law. The Bank Crowd had long been Stewart’s main Nevada supporters, and Sharon had made his ambitions known, so his declaration of candidacy proved unsur- prising. Adolph Sutro, who correctly saw Sharon and Stewart as enemies, announced his interest, began a newspaper to compete with Sharon’s Ter- ritorial Enterprise, claimed to belong to a new independent political party,

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and then backed out when he saw no hope. Sharon won, but his six-year term proved disastrous for Nevada: he voted less than 1 percent of the time and never introduced any legislation, even to help himself. He visited Nevada only while en route to San Francisco, where he lived.

Sharon also had an excuse. In 1875 the Bank of California collapsed due to the panic of 1873 and bad investments by founder William Ralston. Ralston deeded ownership to Sharon and admitted his culpability to the board of directors, which fired him as president. Then he died while swim- ming, due to a stroke or a suicide. Sharon returned to San Francisco, and he and partner D. O. Mills revived the bank and restored order. The bank’s success ultimately may have helped Nevadans more than Sharon’s effective- ness or lack of it on Capitol Hill.

After one six-year term, Sharon wanted more, but Nevadans had had enough. In 1880 Democrats found a candidate with deep-enough pock- ets to outspend any Republican: James Fair of the Bonanza Firm. He and his party emulated Republicans tied to the cp and Bank Crowd, spread- ing money around the state as campaign funds or bribes. Democrats swept Nevada for the first time, including the presidential race. Sensing an opportunity, Sutro tried to run as a reformer, promised to spend as much as necessary, and then hatched a plan to accuse Fair of buying the election and swear out warrants to arrest those he bribed—all to no avail. Fair won the six-year term and did almost as little as Sharon did.

By 1886, when Fair declared for reelection, Nevadans had wearied of poor representation and Stewart had tired of sitting on the sidelines. When Stewart announced his plans to run, the presence of Charles C. “Black” Wallace, the Eureka County assessor turned Central Pacific agent for Nevada, as his campaign manager signaled the extent of his support. John Mackay helped fund Stewart’s race, in part out of anger at Fair for divorc- ing his wife to marry his mistress, which offended Mackay’s Catholicism and decorum. Stewart’s return to the Senate in 1887 meant mining and rail- road interests retained power to choose officeholders, but at least Jones had a competent colleague and Nevadans had a full-time senator.

While Fair’s scandal curtailed his political career, a scandal involving Sharon launched another. Sharon’s mistress, Sarah Hill, claimed he prom- ised to marry her after his wife’s death. The case wound up in the Califor- nia courts, since both lived there, and seemed to favor Hill and her law- yer, David Terry, a longtime California politician and judge she married.

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Sharon’s attorney, Stewart, suggested his client claim Nevada residency to shift the matter to the federal courts, where appointed judges—including US Supreme Court justice Stephen J. Field, a onetime Gold Rush attor- ney—might prove more sympathetic. Eventually, Field’s rulings for his old friend Sharon prompted Terry to attack him, and Field’s bodyguard shot and killed Terry. By then, Sharon had died, and to maintain Nevada residency for the case, his son-in-law moved there and entered politics at Stewart’s suggestion. As fate would have it, Francis Newlands became a thorn in Stewart’s side.

The “Crime” of ’73 and the Decline in Nevada Silver

Referring to the “act of John Sherman smuggling the silver dollar out of the list of coins in the Mint Act of ’73,” Stewart wrote, “I felt it my duty to return to the Senate and do what I could to rectify the crime which was clandes- tinely committed without my knowledge.” Stewart had voted for the act, suggesting a complex bill or dishonesty. Granting Stewart’s dishonesty, the evidence leans toward the former. Sherman introduced the act in 1870 as part of a policy of deflation and to emphasize specie, especially gold. When it emerged from the Senate Finance Committee, which Sherman chaired, the Mint Act demonetized silver in favor of gold. Although some constit- uents sounded the alarm, Stewart remained quiet and even endorsed the gold standard in future Senate speeches.

How much the Mint Act of 1873 deepened the depression that devas- tated Nevada’s economy remains debatable. At the time, the Big Bonanza’s discovery began several years of prosperity, but the Comstock and other mining booms soon petered out, while the panic of 1873 sent the national economy into a tailspin. Silver prices fell more than 21 percent in the three years after the Mint Act passed, making it a scapegoat for miners, mining corporations, and politicians.

Nevadans and their allies tried to remonetize silver. In 1876 Richard “Sil- ver Dick” Bland, a congressman from Missouri who had practiced law in Nevada, introduced a bill to coin silver at a ratio of sixteen units of silver to one of gold, but settled for a Silver Commission to study the matter. Jones’s membership helped ensure a favorable report, but the best silver’s support- ers could do—the Bland-Allison Act, cosponsored by Bland and Senator William Allison of Iowa and passed over President Rutherford Hayes’s veto in 1878—bought two to four million dollars’ worth of silver monthly. In

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the 1880s, with silver lacking support in the two major parties—in 1885 President Grover Cleveland even suspended coinage at the Carson City Mint—Nevadans kept accusing the rest of the country of being out to get them. They also acted: in 1885 they and other states held a National Silver Convention to promote remonetization by setting up state silver groups. The Nevada Silver Association met only once, but in 1886, for the first time, both major parties in Nevada called for free silver coinage in their election platforms.

The census of 1890 reported the closure of the frontier—the event that inspired Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier hypothesis—but that year the West achieved new political status. For the first time since the 1870s, Republicans controlled the White House and Congress and hoped to keep it that way. Some of their actions reflected old allegiances and their decline: they tried and failed to pass a bill to enforce voting rights guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment, partly through the opposition of none other than Stewart, the amendment’s author. But Republicans granted statehood to several western territories, hoping, as Lincoln did with Nevada in 1864, to win votes. Washington, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota became states in November 1889, with Idaho and Wyoming following the next July—all heavily involved in mining or agriculture or both.

Western silver interests saw their opportunity. In November 1889 a National Silver Convention urged the return of free coinage. In 1890 Sher- man, the villain in the Crime of ’73, introduced a Silver Purchase Act: the Treasury Department would buy 4.5 million ounces per month at market prices. The measure passed, not because Republicans suddenly heeded Nevada’s pleas, but because western congressmen traded support for a tar- iff hike to pass the bill.

Then, in 1893, an economic panic resulted from stock speculation, infla- tion and credit problems, and overbuilt railroads unable to meet obli- gations. President Cleveland blamed the silver-purchase measure and persuaded Congress to repeal it. Nevada’s elected officials fought him hard—Stewart delivered a three-day speech, and Jones topped that with a seven-day effort that filled one hundred pages of the Congressional Record. But instead, Nevada wound up back where it had been, stuck in a deep recession and losing population.

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The Populist Movement

Some historians have argued that Populists sought to stop the forward march of capitalism and turn back the clock—in some cases displaying anti-Semitism in their criticism of those shaping the market. Others have called them radical reformers with a thoughtful critique of American soci- ety. As usual, the reality proved subtle and complex. The Populist move- ment evolved from several factors. In the late 1860s, unhappy that indus- trial capitalism increased their dependence on markets and consumers, farmers formed the Grange to promote unity as they went through debt, bankruptcy, and foreclosure. They sought state regulation of railroads, with mixed results, and federal programs to aid them; one of them, the Cooper- ative Extension Service, moved to the state level and continues in Nevada. Those seeking political action, especially against railroads and the crop- lien system, shifted from the Grange to Farmers Alliances, which began in 1875. By the late 1880s, these groups became more united, despite regional and racial differences.

In 1889 the alliances reconstituted themselves, with some support from the Knights of Labor in the industrial Northeast, as the People’s or Popu- list Party. Its members believed that the wealthy, especially in the railroad industry, controlled the Democratic and Republican Parties, necessitating a third party. In 1892 the members met in Nebraska, nominated James B. Weaver for president, and issued the Omaha Platform. They demanded a host of reforms: a graduated income tax, direct election of US senators rather than leaving it to the legislatures, eight-hour workdays, and even broader civil service reform than the Pendleton Act, passed in 1883 to pro- fessionalize the federal government.

Other provisions reverberated in the West. By seeking government ownership of railroads, the Populists hoped to eliminate short-haul/long- haul discrimination. Their proposed independent subtreasury would ware- house crops and require the government to pay them market value and then take responsibility for selling the rest. The Populists also sought to inflate the currency, reducing the debts they owed to bankers and mer- chants by having the government print money—which they would use to pay those debts. But the Populists saw a way to win western support they otherwise would have lacked in industrial mining areas by suggest- ing inflating the currency by remonetizing silver. Weaver won the electoral

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votes of four states that year, and three of them—Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada—depended on silver. The silver and Populist movements seemed to have met and merged.

Silver Clubs and the Silver Party

In 1892 George Nixon had just turned thirty-two. In the early 1880s he started as a railroad telegrapher in Nevada, and by 1886 he had orga- nized a bank, taken over several Humboldt County mines, and started the Winnemucca Silver State. As early as 1889, he suggested, “The friends of silver must place the interest of the metal above party, or better yet, organize a party.” Imitating the farmers’ movement, he called for Neva- dans to create silver clubs to promote mining issues. He set up the first one in April 1892; a week later Eureka followed, with former congressman Thomas Wren and future governor Reinhold Sadler as its leaders. The sil- ver-club movement spread, thanks partly to anger at the two national par- ties: Republicans tried to avoid offending anyone, and Democrats nomi- nated Cleveland, who backed the gold standard and sought repeal of the silver-purchase bill. In June the state’s silver clubs met in Reno, formed the Silver League, made plans to turn it into a political party, and called for remonetization. That September the Silverites met in Winnemucca, nomi- nated candidates for state offices, and endorsed Weaver’s election on the People’s or Populist platform.

Over the next decade, Nevada became a one-party state, with the Sil- ver Party supporting whichever national party showed any inclination to help it. In 1892 the first Silver convention endorsed the Populist platform and Stewart’s reelection; given his ties to the Central Pacific and that his campaign manager, C. C. Wallace, served as its Nevada agent, to call that a contradiction would be an understatement. Wise to Washington’s ways, Stewart had opposed the third-party movement as dangerous to Nevada and himself, but he and Wallace saw the light and helped organize the Silver Party, with the Central Pacific apparently reasoning that maintain- ing control of Nevada would be easier through infiltration rather than opposition—and, as historian Mary Ellen Glass put it, the railroad owners “allowed the politicians and the parties to say anything they pleased about the company and its practices. The important item was that [they] act cor- rectly when it was time to vote.” The Bank of California felt similarly: the Silverites supported Newlands’s successful first race for the House.

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The Silver Party’s influence and contradictions became more apparent as the 1890s unfolded. In 1894, seeking reelection, Newlands spoke at the Silver convention against government ownership of railroads, irking dele- gates, including Wallace, who discouraged him from voicing that position. Yerington, a Newlands ally and the lobbyist for the Bank of California and the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, broke with Wallace and the cp over their abandoning the Republican Party for the Silverites. That year a fourth party materialized, the People’s Party, claiming it wanted to lay the groundwork for a presidential campaign two years later and had no faith in the Silver Party as long as railroad executives approved of it and played a role in it. Yerington and the People’s Party would be disappointed: the Silver Party won a landslide victory in 1894, and candidates running under its banner dominated the ballot into the next decade. Yet the People’s Party’s message resonated with some voters: its candidates attacked railroad domination and won significant minority votes.

Silver Party leaders understood the need for national support. In July 1896 Stewart and Newlands hoped to form a national silver party. Before they could, young Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan electrified the Democratic National Convention by declaring that “we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify man- kind upon a cross of gold.” Prosilver Democrats stampeded the conven- tion, called for remonetization, and nominated Bryan for president. The People’s and Silver Parties ratified the choice. Bryan easily won Nevada but lost nationally to Republican William McKinley, and fusion in Nevada proved short-lived: in 1898 Silverites won every major office, but in a few cases by a small majority, and Republicans came within sixty-three votes of defeating Silverite Reinhold Sadler for governor.

The Battles for the Senate

The failure to fuse resulted not from policy but from battles between ambi- tious Silver Party leaders. By 1896 Senators Stewart and John P. Jones had served more than two decades. Younger politicians had ambitions and, granting Stewart’s cp support and Jones’s wealth, the money to satisfy them. In 1897 Silverites and Democrats seemed united behind Jones for a fifth term, but Nixon, who had formed an alliance with Newlands, ran on a platform of “home rule” and “Nevada for Nevadans,” suggesting the

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unpleasant truth: Jones lived in California. Jones won easily, due partly to support from Stewart and Wallace, who saw Newlands and Nixon as a threat.

The next election proved them right. As the 1899 legislature met, after winning reelection to his House seat and trying to lull the opposition, Newlands ran against Stewart. Stewart had a stronger record than Jones and support from the Central Pacific, but critics questioned his Nevada residency and fidelity to the silver movement, noted his advancing age, and resented his power over patronage in Nevada. Worse for Stewart, Yerington and the Bank Crowd backed Newlands.

The race grew ugly. Stewart and Wallace imported lobbyists and gun- slingers to provide physical intimidation if needed. Speaking in Carson City, Newlands sought to exert pressure by—with unintended irony— accusing Stewart and his backers of corruption designed to turn Nevada into a colony for California and demanding that Nevadans take control of their state and restore “integrity to the law-making and elective process.” The day after a test vote showed the assembly tied, Storey County’s W. A. Gillespie, reputedly a Newlands supporter, failed to show up, and Stewart won by one vote. One report accused Gillespie of accepting a bribe, while Sam Davis, the pro-Stewart editor of the Carson City Appeal, claimed Jones’s brother invited Gillespie to ride to Carson City and instead kid- napped him and kept him locked up at another Stewart supporter’s home in Empire.

Many Nevadans agreed that this election proved the need for reform. The previous legislature had passed a “purity of elections” law to improve reporting of contributions, but in 1899 lawmakers repealed it, realizing the Stewart-Newlands fight made it look ridiculous. That election inspired a law creating a preferential primary: Senate candidates would appear on the ballot, and voters could advise legislators, who would be wise to heed them or pay for it at their next election.

A Culture of Corruption

From the territorial period on, Nevadans appeared conscious of their state’s political corruption and interested in doing something about it. Sev- eral factors worked against real reform. Mining (like gaming later) bred transience, movement from one boom to another as each went bust, and

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thus reduced the chances of a population uniting behind change or united long enough to effect change. Also, the need for capital and transportation to make a mining economy function empowered mine and railroad own- ers more than workers and increased the state’s dependence on a particular industry. These factors combined to produce a small power elite without many or much to rule and thus a culture of corruption.

The case of Nevada’s first state treasurer, Eben Rhoades, exemplified the worst of the problem. He hired his brother as his deputy and spent a great deal of time in San Francisco, reportedly trying to sell state bonds, before dying there in 1869. Apparently, he committed suicide, and after his death auditors found Rhoades embezzled or had no record of more than $106,000 in state revenue. When Nevada tried to recover the money, the state Board of Examiners—the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state—claimed ignorance, as did those who “bonded” his salary (ensuring its payment and vouching for his good behavior), including Sharon and Territorial Enterprise editor Joe Goodman. Governor Henry Blasdel, a Vir- ginia City mine superintendent and Republican, had received a loan from Rhoades; the next governor, Lewis Bradley, a Democratic Elko rancher with few ties to Blasdel’s supporters, vetoed a bill to try to recoup some of the funds from the people who bonded Rhoades. According to one esti- mate, the state revenue loss, with accrued interest to the present, may have topped $300 million.

Yet Bradley stood up to mining interests. Ever since the Nevada Consti- tution mandated taxing net proceeds of mines, revenue measures caused controversy as too generous to mining or, the industry said, not generous enough. For example, the first state legislature’s Revenue Act of 1865 set property taxes at $2.75 per $100 of assessed valuation, but mining paid $1, with further deductions. In 1875, as Bradley’s second term began, legisla- tors approved changes in the tax structure that increased what corpora- tions would pay. Because it had to pay more than the Bank Crowd did, the Bonanza Firm questioned the law’s legality and refused to comply. In response, in 1876 both major parties vowed not to change the taxes, but the “Silver Kings” had learned from Sharon and his lobbyists, who viewed the tax hike similarly. The 1877 session passed a bill to cut the tax by about one-third. Bradley vetoed it, declaring that “it does not become the dignity of a State to be dictated to by a couple of non-resident corporations.” The

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Territorial Enterprise, co-owned by Sharon and Mackay, replied, “He is old and decrepit, and it would be cowardice to abuse or insult him. . . . But would to God that he was a young man that we might publish how much we wish that he was dead.”

In 1878, backed by ranching and eastern Nevada mining interests, Brad- ley sought a third term and lost to John Kinkead, who ran with support from Comstock corporations. Mackay and Fair and their allies agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in back taxes, but, at their request, the legislature passed and the governor signed a bill excusing penalties of more than $75,000 for their earlier refusal to pay. After the Nevada Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional as a “special act,” the Bonanza Firm asked the legislature to try again. This time Kinkead vetoed the bill as unconsti- tutional, and the US Supreme Court agreed. The mine owners finally paid their bill in 1883. Kinkead chose not to run again and faced a mini scan- dal: his uncle managed the Reno Savings Bank, whose owners included the state treasurer, who almost went to prison for shifting state funds to the bank.

The Legacy of Discrimination

Nevadans, like most Americans of the time, discriminated against people of color. From what an Elko observer called a policy of “no proscription” toward blacks in the 1870s, Elmer Rusco wrote of Nevada’s African Ameri- cans that “the economic decline that caused a drop in white population was evidently felt even more severely among the black population,” mani- fested in “more hostility toward them from the white community than had been the case earlier.” As the number of whites—especially middle-class whites—declined during the borrasca, African Americans’ economic sta- tus, already less secure than that of whites, fell even more noticeably. So did their social status: more derogatory language began appearing in the press, and by the early twentieth century several communities had become “sundown towns,” where authorities barred African Americans from living there or forced them to leave—as they did with other minorities.

The Chinese faced segregation, bias, and violence in many areas, espe- cially during economic troubles, which Nevada had in abundance. Poli- ticians appealed to voters by singling out the Chinese as a threat, partly on moral grounds, mainly as endangering white people’s jobs. After Vir- ginia City’s miners union blocked the Chinese from working on Virginia

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& Truckee Railroad construction in 1869, the legislature followed with a ban on Chinese labor on state projects. Future legislative sessions endorsed efforts to reduce immigration until the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited “skilled and unskilled labor employed in mining” from entering the United States. Meanwhile, as others did in the West, Neva- dans punctuated their opposition by creating anti-Chinese clubs from Carson City to Austin to Tuscarora; in 1878 some Reno residents ordered Chinatown emptied out within forty-eight hours and then rioted, but local authorities stepped in and the Chinese stayed. But the combination of the exclusionary law and Nevada’s economic decline reduced the Chinese pop- ulation enough to ease tensions.

Other tensions remained over Mormons. Few Mormons lived in Nevada late in the nineteenth century. In 1877, under Edward Bunker’s leadership, twenty-three Saints moved to southern Nevada as the “United Order” to farm near the Virgin River. They tried the kind of communal living that helped inspire the church’s founding and earlier utopian settlements. They ate, stored crops, and raised animals together. After about two years, that plan failed amid squabbling, but they continued on their own in their town, Bunkerville. In 1880 another group of Mormons settled five miles northwest, in Mesquite Flat, later the city of Mesquite.

Nevadans debated an expanded Mormon presence. In the 1880s, two decades after Congress approved the expansion that created Nevada’s pres- ent boundaries, Stewart led an effort to annex Idaho Territory’s southern tip to Nevada. Conflicts similar to those in Nevada in the 1850s broke out in Idaho between Mormons and non-Mormons. Stewart and other Neva- dans felt anti-Mormon legislation would aid their chances of capturing southern Idaho. In the spirit of the federal Edmunds Act of 1882, which banned polygamy, the 1887 legislature required any would-be voter to take an oath denying membership in the Mormon Church. A year later a Mor- mon resident of Panaca tried to vote and sued over his denial. Stewart said, “It would be very dangerous to allow the Mormons to vote in our State. The proposition to colonize and take possession of our State Government is seriously considered by the Mormon Church.” Instead, in 1888 the state high court held the law violated the Nevada Constitution’s definition of eli- gible voters. Nevada fared no better at the national level: Idaho Territory remained intact. In 1890 lds president Wilford Woodruff announced the end of church support for polygamy.

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These events fostered new Mormon communities. In the 1880s antipo- lygamy laws permitted the federal seizure of Mormon property, and some livestock wound up with an eastern Nevada company that then proved unable to account for some of it. After Utah became a state in 1896, as part of an attempt at redress, Mormons received the White River Valley Ranch, about 15,000 acres in southern White Pine and northern Nye Counties. In 1898 Mormons began farming the area and soon settled the towns of Lund and Preston.

The Debate over Native American Rights

Republicans and Democrats tried a variety of policies toward Native Ameri- cans in the nineteenth century, with disastrous results. The reservation system provided tribes with land, but Southern Paiutes along the Muddy River demonstrated the problem: they received nearly 2 million acres, mostly desert, but nearby settlers refused to leave the arable land and the federal government reduced the Moapa Reservation to about 1,000 acres. Ending the reservation system won support for several reasons: continuing Native efforts to stop encroachment and eliminate whatever power Native groups still enjoyed, the Euro-American desire for land, and the view of capitalism and traditional religion as superior to Native beliefs. The Dawes Severalty Act or General Allotment Act of 1887 granted Native Americans land—160 acres to a family head, 80 to a single person or orphan, 40 to minors—in hopes of ending the reservation system, encouraging assimila- tion, and opening land to whites. In 1898 the Curtis Act followed by trying to eliminate tribal courts and governments, subjecting Native Americans to the regular US government.

Stewart’s record displayed the contradictory impulses of Nevadans— indeed, Americans—on these issues. In addition to backing a national mining college, a national college to train teachers, and the Second Morrill Act of 1890 to expand the original measure of 1862, he won federal support for an Indian school for which the state and Ormsby County contributed land and money. It opened in December 1890 southeast of Carson City with thirty-seven students and remained Nevada’s only boarding school for Native Americans. It sought to teach them trades and assimilate them into American culture, but, before the school closed in 1980 and became a his- toric site, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia) allowed students to speak their Native languages and learn more about their culture.

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Yet even as he sought aid for the Washoe, Stewart tried to eliminate Northern Paiute title to the Walker River Reservation and part of the Pyra- mid Lake Reservation. These efforts resulted in part from rumors in the 1880s of mineral deposits on the Walker River Reservation; during the borrasca, Nevadans sought ore wherever it might exist. Nevadans wanted access to the Walker Reservation’s farming and lumber resources and hoped to use Pyramid Lake for commercial purposes rather than allowing Northern Paiutes to keep relying on it for fishing and thus their survival. Nor did Stewart object when his allies at a Bank of California subsidiary, the Carson & Colorado Railroad, tried to break a contract to provide free transportation to Walker River Paiutes in return for the right-of-way.

Native Americans also faced difficulties with whites in eastern Nevada. In 1873 those living near Ely heard about northern California’s Modoc War and feared that nearby Shoshone and Goshutes in the Snake and Spring Valleys planned to attack them. Their fear went unrealized, but in Septem- ber 1875 the White Pine War ensued when a Goshute killed a mining pros- pector and settlers responded by killing three Indians and then hanging the Goshute. The Bureau of Indian Affairs moved about 160 Shoshone and Goshutes north to Deep Creek, emptying the two valleys, which became open to grazing for white-owned ranches.

Native American Leaders

Few Native American reformers gained greater fame and importance than Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Paiute born around 1844 as Thocmentony, or “Shell Flower.” Her grandfather Captain Truckee and father, Chief Winnemucca, got along with white explorers and emigrants. Educated at the home of William Ormsby (later killed in the Pyramid Lake War against Northern Paiutes led by her cousin) and a Catholic school in California, she joined her family at the Malheur Reservation, set up on President Ulysses Grant’s orders for the Northern Paiutes and Bannock (Northern Paiutes liked this no better than the Western Shoshone, who expected to relocate to the Duck Valley Reservation near the Nevada-Idaho line in 1877). She taught in a local school and worked as an interpreter for the resi- dent Indian agent. But his replacement began refusing to pay the Northern Paiutes for their work and sold supplies intended for them. The Bannock rebelled, and although Winnemucca claimed they took her family and oth- ers hostage, they became part of a relocation near Yakima, Washington.

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During the war she helped her family escape from an enemy encampment and worked as a translator and scout for US Army officers, who developed great respect for her and her abilities.

These events made her a public figure. She began to lecture in Cali- fornia and Nevada on Native American issues and went to Washington, DC, in 1880, to meet with Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz on issues affecting Natives; as she put it, he made “promises which, like the wind, were heard no more.” Back in California, she married a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee and continued lecturing; they went east, where she spoke on her life in the West more than four hundred times, often condemning the reservation system. She began publishing articles, and reformers she

Few Native Americans worked harder to promote peace between their people and whites than Sarah Winnemucca on the left, next to her father, Chief Winnemucca; her brother, Natchez; and Captain Jim, another Northern Paiute chief, beside an unidentified boy. Courtesy of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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met in Boston helped her bring out Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, in 1883—the first book by a Native American woman. Back in Nevada, she built a school, Peabody’s Institute, near Lovelock to educate Native American children in their language and culture, but lack of sup- port and health problems forced her to join her family in Idaho, where she died of tuberculosis in 1891. She dedicated much of her life to Native rights and trying to work with whites to protect them—often to no avail. But she brought attention to major issues and demonstrated the ability of a woman and a Native American to fight for justice in a time when neither could eas- ily do so.

Another Northern Paiute had a far-reaching impact. Born circa 1856 in present-day Esmeralda County, Wovoka grew up in a white rancher’s fam- ily, took the name Jack Wilson, and learned English. Around 1870 Tävibo, a Mason Valley Northern Paiute, prophesied the earth would swallow up whites and dead Natives would return; Native Americans could speed these events by dancing in circles, singing religious songs, and seeking spiritual and moral renewal. In the late 1880s, Wovoka, sometimes reputed to be Tävibo’s son, had a similar vision, perhaps combining Native thought

Wovoka, the Northern Paiute who became widely known for the Ghost Dance, with his grandson Dennis Bender, possibly outside the Carson Indian School early in the twentieth century. Courtesy of Special Collec- tions, University of Nevada–Reno Library.

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with a form of Christian mysticism. Winnemucca dismissed his claims as “nonsense,” and when the Western Shoshone at the Duck Valley Reserva- tion held a Ghost Dance that attracted one thousand visitors, the crowd lost interest when no Indian messiah appeared. After this Ghost Dance religion spread in the West, the Lakota Sioux sent a delegation in 1889 to meet Wovoka and returned to their Dakota homes convinced of the com- ing millennium.

Cruel disappointment and violence followed. Wovoka hated war and the Sioux hoped to avoid it, but they believed that sacred or magic shirts would protect them from attack. When the Sioux conducted the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in 1890, the Seventh Cavalry saw it as an opportunity to disarm the group—and, historian Heather Cox Rich- ardson has argued, Republican politicians saw a way to demonstrate their commitment to opening western lands for mining and agriculture. The firing of a shot led to the massacre of three hundred Native Americans. Wounded Knee became a sacred place for Native American rights and a reminder of the injustices done to an entire people. Despite his pacifism, Wovoka lost some of his luster, although Native Americans and anthro- pologists continued to visit and learn from him until his death in 1932.

Women’s Rights

Sarah Winnemucca’s advocacy for her people sometimes obscures her role in promoting women’s rights. Other late-nineteenth-century Nevadans also supported women’s rights in a variety of ways, reflecting changes in the state: as mining and migration into the state subsided, the percentage of women approached half and average ages rose. Despite the folklore, few women worked as prostitutes, and most women who settled in Nevada worked to build a family life and a better community. The spread of Vic- torian values and the “cult of domesticity,” which emphasized the home as women’s sphere and their duty to play a civilizing role in their communities and the lives of their families, provided an avenue for them to try to shape policies that would improve morals and education. But Nevada women found this difficult to accomplish in so economically depressed a state.

Nevada became one of the first western states to discuss women’s suf- frage. In 1869, before Wyoming Territory approved it later that year, Assem- blyman Curtis Hillyer of Storey County introduced legislation to amend the state constitution to allow the vote. He reasoned, “The politics of the

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country is corrupt,” and women’s traditional role as tribunes of morality and civilization would elevate public discourse. The legislature agreed, but amending the Nevada Constitution requires two consecutive sessions to act. Despite the state’s first women’s suffrage convention at Battle Mountain and campaigning by women’s rights advocate Laura DeForce Gordon, the 1871 legislature said no. A significant turnover in membership and contro- versy that had grown since the previous vote apparently caused its down- fall. On several occasions, apparently believing Nevada’s suffering economy required them to do something, lawmakers came close to allowing a vote on amending the constitution. After the 1895 legislature approved a simi- lar measure, it failed in 1897 in a close vote, despite visits from Susan B. Anthony and the formation of the Nevada Women’s Equal Suffrage League.

Women found other outlets to improve Nevada society. Eliza Cook, one of Nevada’s first trained women doctors, practiced in Reno and, belonging to suffrage and temperance organizations, recalled that she “talked on both subjects when opportunity offered and made myself very objectionable at times, I’ve no doubt.” Mila Tupper Maynard supported suffrage from her position as a Unitarian minister in Reno, where she conducted classes on social reform and set up the Twentieth Century Club, which helped start her community’s first kindergarten and public library. Hannah Clapp and Eliza Babcock operated the Sierra Seminary, a private school in Carson City; after it closed, Clapp became one of the university’s first professors in Reno. There she worked for suffrage and helped educate Anne Martin, who would become Nevada’s most famous advocate of social reform.

Some Nevada women found an outlet through the written word. Mar- ried to editors Henry Mighels and then Sam Davis, Nellie Mighels Davis organized the first Red Cross in Nevada during the Spanish-American War and served as its first president, but achieved greater fame with the Carson City Morning Appeal, which she briefly published and wrote for, including as the only woman to cover the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight in 1897. Idah Meacham Strobridge grew up in Lassen Meadows between Winnemucca and Lovelock, but her husband and three sons died during blizzards in 1888–89. She left Nevada and began writing, publishing several books and becoming known as “the first woman of Nevada letters” for her folktales, short stories, and essays.

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Helen Stewart and Southern Nevada

After Mormon missionaries left Las Vegas, their old fort became a ranch. Octavius Decatur Gass had taken over the mission, by then a general store for miners like himself, and expanded his holdings to about a thousand acres by the mid-1870s. But Gass ran into problems: boundary changes cost him tax money and his political influence; he upset Mojave Desert military camps, which accused him of overcharging for his fruits, vegetables, and meats; and he kept suing southern California land baron Abel Stearns over ownership of tin mines in the Temescal Mountains. Constantly mortgag- ing his ranch finally cost him ownership of it in 1881—not typical of Popu- lists, but, like them, caught in his own debt spiral.

The ranch’s new owner, Archibald Stewart, a Pioche merchant, moved there with his wife, Helen, and their children. The Kiels, neighboring ranchers known for welcoming gunslingers, resented Stewart, whom they saw as having swindled their friend Gass. This mixture became combus- tible in the summer of 1884. A Stewart ranch hand went to work for the Kiels, insulting Helen Stewart as he left. Upon returning, her husband rode over to the Kiel Ranch. Two hours later she received a note from Conrad Kiel telling her to “take Mr. Sturd away he is dead.” One of the gunsling- ers shot him, claiming self-defense, although she remained convinced that they had ambushed him.

She faced a difficult situation, to say the least. With four children, a fifth on the way, her neighbors tied to her husband’s shooting, and little business experience, she stayed. Stewart operated the ranch, ran a roadside rest for travelers, and hoped someday to sell it to developers. She had to wait until 1902 and Senator William Andrews Clark of Montana, who paid fifty-five thousand dollars for her land and the water rights for his proposed rail- road from Los Angeles to Salt Lake. After that she remained active as Las Vegas grew around her, holding educational offices, studying local history, amassing a collection of Paiute baskets, and deeding ten acres of her land to the local Southern Paiutes for a colony where they still live in down- town Las Vegas. Thus did Helen Stewart strike a blow for women as a ranch owner, aid Native Americans, and help build what became Nevada’s largest city. For good reason, she became known as “the first lady of Las Vegas.”

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The Panic and the Unemployed

The panic of 1893 caused high unemployment and induced businesses to tighten their belts. Angry over the downturn and disparities in wealth, “General” Jacob Coxey proposed public works projects to provide jobs. Rebuffed by Congress, he organized an “Industrial Army” to march across the country to help unemployed workers bring attention to their plight. Urged to find a way to stop them, Governor Roswell Colcord dismissed concerns: “It would be madness for such an army to subsist while march- ing this sparsely settled State.” The Central Pacific hurried the approxi- mately 1,000-man “army” across Nevada in twenty-three cattle cars, but the unemployed miners and other laborers who tried and failed to join

Helen Jane Wiser Stewart reluctantly came to Las Vegas with her husband and stayed to raise a family, run a ranch, serve as postmaster, and ul- timately become the “first lady of Las Vegas.” Courtesy of Special Collections, Univer- sity Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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them in Reno paraded and demonstrated until the sheriff ordered them to leave town or go to jail. Coxey’s Army went on to Washington, DC, where authorities arrested him for marching on the White House lawn, ending the demonstrations.

The railroads they rode faced labor problems. In June 1894 Eugene Debs led an American Railway Union strike against Pullman, which made rail- road cars, and other companies. When President Grover Cleveland sent troops, about 250 soldiers took over railroad operations in Winnemucca, where demonstrations had been peaceful. In Wadsworth a crowd dam- aged some of the railroad equipment, and troops attacked strikers and their sympathizers. In Reno, by contrast, demonstrators threw eggs at the army. When Nevadans who objected to the federal soldiers asked Colcord to seek their removal, his negative reply prompted Nixon in the Silver State to encourage government ownership of railroads to avert any such future “expenditure of public force for private benefit.”

Federal involvement broke the strike, but Nevadans made their sym- pathies clear. Both Coxey’s Army and the Pullman strikers supported inflation and free silver, attacked Cleveland over the gold standard, and received aid in Nevada from several Silver Party leaders. The Silver Party’s advocacy of mining interests, rich and poor, helped its slate coast to victory in the elections that fall. Nationally and in Nevada, the demonstrations and the government response to them helped fire support for William Jennings Bryan’s presidential candidacy in 1896.

The Limits of Reform

As the role of Stewart and Newlands in the Silver and Populist movements and the difficulty in passing women’s suffrage demonstrated the limits of reform in Nevada, so did actions that stamped the state as immoral, even if it shared the prejudices of the time and permitted activities that have become common. In 1897 “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons wanted to fight for the world heavyweight boxing championship, but sev- eral states barred them from doing so because they viewed prizefighting as no more than organized mayhem. Granting that recent rule changes had eliminated some of the bloodiness, their struggling economy meant Nevadans could ill afford to be choosy and the match would bring them publicity and business. The legislation to permit the fight, which Fitzsim- mons won, proved controversial: church officials divided over its morality,

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and some critics directed anti-Semitism at Carson City businessman Al Livingston, one of its supporters. It also foreshadowed the future: Nevada legalized what other places would not and hoped those visiting the state to indulge in dubious behavior would like the place enough to move there and become taxpayers.

Gambling provided another means of generating revenue. Soon after statehood, the legislature tried to make it legal, at least partly because it went on anyway. But Governor Blasdel, a Methodist known as “the cof- fee and chocolate governor” for his opposition to serving alcohol at state functions, vetoed it in 1867 and 1869. The second time, lawmakers overrode him, and gambling remained legal for the rest of the century. But the state avoided interfering in local operations, letting local sheriffs regulate the games and collect the fees, which counties divided with the state. With box- ing and gambling, Nevada erected a system of limited regulation and rely- ing on outsiders for prosperity that came back to haunt it later and made clear that its commitment to moral reform depended on what its economy could afford—as it proved as the twentieth century began, Nevada’s econ- omy revived, and moral reform loomed on the horizon.

s u g g e s t e d r e a d i n g s

Canfield, Gae Whitney. Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

Davies, Richard O. The Main Event: Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2014.

Glass, Mary Ellen. Silver and Politics in Nevada, 1892–1902. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1970.

Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Hittman, Michael, and Don Lynch. Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca. Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, 1883. Reprint, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1994.

McArthur, Aaron. St. Thomas, Nevada: A History Uncovered. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013.

Paher, Stanley W. Las Vegas: As It Began—as It Grew. Las Vegas: Nevada Publications, 1971.

Patterson, Edna B., Louise A. Ulph, and Victor Goodwin. Nevada’s Northeast Frontier. Sparks, NV: Western, 1969.

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Pisani, Donald J. To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.

———. Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920. Law- rence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Richardson, Heather Cox. West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After

the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. ———. Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre. New York:

Basic Books, 2010. Roske, Ralph J. Las Vegas: A Desert Paradise. Tulsa, OK: Continental Heritage Press,

1986. Rusco, Elmer R. “Good Time Coming?”: Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century.

Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975. Smoak, Gregory E. Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian

Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Starrs, Paul F. Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.

Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

Taylor, Quintard, and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, eds. African American Women Con- front the West, 1600–2000. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.

Townley, John M. Alfalfa Country: Nevada Land, Water and Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Reno: University of Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station, 1981.

Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Wallace, Anthony F. C., ed. James Mooney, the Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Out- break of 1890. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Watson, Anita. Into Their Own: Nevada Women Emerging into Public Life. Reno: Nevada Humanities Committee, 2000.

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Young, James A., and B. Abbott Sparks. Cattle in the Cold Desert. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002.

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Like a new year, a new century marks a turning point. In American his- tory, the controversial election of 1800 prompted the first transfer of government power, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson; the more controversial 2000 election, with Al Gore’s popular-vote lead and George W. Bush’s Electoral College victory, took place in the shadow of y2k and concerns about computers upending civilization. By contrast, the 1900 presidential election seemed quiet—William Jennings Bryan disappointed Nevada Silverites, losing again to Republican William McKinley—but the twentieth century’s first decades brought different responses to change throughout the United States and the world. Nevada evolved similarly. Its government and political system changed in important ways, but it did so amid an economic revival created by a mining boom in the south-central and eastern portions of Nevada that reshaped the state’s society and culture in almost every way.

Births of the Booms

As 1900 arrived, Nevada’s two-decade depression continued, and pros- pectors searched and hoped. In the San Antonio Mountains southwest of Belmont, one story says, Western Shoshone Tom Fisherman led miner, rancher, and attorney Jim Butler to a new bonanza. According to legend— and perhaps some reality—a windstorm that May 19 forced Butler to seek shelter. His quest to find his burro, which had wandered away, led him to an outcropping of gold and silver, but he had no funds to assay it. He turned to county recorder Wilson Brougher and Belmont lawyer Tasker Oddie, a New Yorker representing mining investor Anson Phelps Stokes. Also short of money, Oddie traded part of his interest in the ore to local

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science teacher Walter Gayhart in return for an assay. A month later, Gay- hart reported 640 ounces in silver and $200 in gold per ton. Not until August 25, after finishing with clients and harvesting, did Butler return to the site and file claims for himself and his two partners—and apparently he acted only at the behest of his wife, Belle, who discovered the largest Butler claim and ran their ranch.

Their new camp, Tonopah, never approached Virginia City in impor- tance or wealth (production peaked at $9 million in 1914), but it ended Nevada’s two decades of depression. Just as mining booms begat other towns—Virginia City and Austin had been “mother camps,” for exam- ple—Tonopah fostered other booms and boomtowns. Late in 1902 Jim Butler and Tom Kendall grubstaked prospectors Harry Stimler and Wil- liam Marsh in exchange for a percentage of what they found. On Decem- ber 4, in the Columbia Mountains about thirty miles south of Tonopah, they found gold—and Fisherman, who may have been related to Stimler’s Shoshone mother, probably led them there. Additional exploration, espe- cially in January 1904, gave birth to Goldfield. That year Frank “Shorty” Harris and Ernest Cross found gold in southern Nye County’s Amargosa Valley, just east of Death Valley. This area became the Bullfrog District, home of the mining boomtown of Rhyolite and a nearby freighting center, Beatty.

Butler’s original find led to about a hundred discoveries and, with them, the creation of numerous boomtowns that served, as nineteenth-century towns did, as hubs for mining and ranching hinterlands. Cattlemen located gold north of Tonopah at an old camp, Manhattan, in 1905, and the popula- tion reached about four thousand in a year—until the San Francisco earth- quake also shook investors and delayed development, although the camp revived and produced into the 1920s. Almost concurrently, gold discoveries to the north triggered another mining town, Round Mountain, which gen- erated $1 million by 1909, while other short-lived camps sprang to life near Tonopah and Goldfield. Like their predecessors, they boasted large num- bers of saloons (one in Rawhide rented floor space as beds) as well as news- papers, schools, and community organizations. Tonopah and Goldfield residents suffered through a great deal of disease, due partly to unsani- tary conditions, yet Tonopah in particular became civilized more speedily than other, earlier, camps, with more families moving in and wives forming clubs and societies.

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Births of the Booms

A New Century, a New Boom

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Also in 1900 eastern Nevada joined in the revival. In 1870 White Pine’s Robinson District yielded low-grade copper, but that exploration proved brief due to minimal demand and a lack of transportation and technology. By the late 1890s investors expressed renewed interest, thanks to the need for electric wiring created by Thomas Edison inventing the dc generator and George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla perfecting the ac, a techno- logical change perhaps as influential in its time as computers and cellular phones in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, young miners Edwin Gray and Dave Bartley tried their luck. Grubstaked by a gro- cer, they filed two claims near Ely, tunneled into the mountain, found cop- per on all sides at 145 feet down, and kept going deeper. The rush to Ely and the surrounding area would follow, but not right away.

The Discoverers

The early days of Nevada’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century mining booms revealed a series of similarities and differences. The latter’s founders generally emerged with more substantial funds, and capital traveled dif- ferent routes to central and eastern Nevada than it did to the Comstock, although it produced similar results. In October 1902 Gray and Bartley optioned their Ely claims for $150,000 in stock to Eureka and Palisade Railroad owner Mark Requa, son of a Comstock mining engineer. Requa took over another company, incorporated the Nevada Consolidated Cop- per Company in November 1904, and won backing from eastern investors. He also prompted competition from the Guggenheim family, which had entered western mining with Colorado lead and silver and expanded into copper there and in Arizona until, by the late 1910s, they controlled three- quarters of the world’s silver, copper, and lead production. They obtained a site for water and a smelter, incorporated the Cumberland-Ely Copper Company, and helped finance construction of Requa’s planned Northern Nevada Railway. But the Guggenheims eventually took over Requa’s com- pany. Requa may have expected to play a role in managing their White Pine claims; he proved mistaken.

The Guggenheims acted much as the Bank Crowd did in Virginia City. They took over Requa’s railroad and mining claims. Just as William Sha- ron ordered studies of the Comstock and responded to a downturn, the Guggenheims spent $4 million on preparation and continued as the panic of 1907 choked off investment and reduced stock prices. No ore shipped

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out of the district until August 1908, but staggering results followed: pro- duction skyrocketed from nearly $625,000 in 1908 to $6.5 million in 1909. The Guggenheims later incorporated Kennecott Copper, which controlled most White Pine production into the 1980s. Just as Comstock gold and sil- ver profits went west to San Francisco, White Pine copper earnings traveled to other company holdings in Utah and Arizona and back east to finance a family of investors and philanthropists.

Tonopah fed off local ownership and outside development. Butler and Oddie filed every claim they could but realized they lacked the capital, time, or personnel to work them. When San Francisco investors, suspicious of speculating in Nevada due to so many recent failures there, declined their overtures, Tonopah’s founders developed the lease system, enabling them to retain ownership, employ miners to handle the work, and share the profits. Butler and Oddie granted each lessee one hundred feet of the vein and fifty feet on each side and received 25 percent of the revenue pro- duced, ensuring employment for others and profits for themselves.

Finally, Butler and Oddie attracted buyers. The publicity about their leasing system drew interest from outside investors, led by Philadelphia’s Brock family, whose members controlled numerous eastern businesses,

Tonopah’s discovery in 1900 revitalized Nevada’s economy and created a boomtown where few Nevadans had previously lived or traveled. Courtesy of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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including coal mining. In July 1901, a year after the discovery, Butler and Oddie sold their portions for more than $300,000, but their lives took dif- ferent trajectories. Whereas Butler concentrated on other businesses and held on to his money, Oddie felt he sold too low and too soon, but went to work for the new investors and made hundreds of thousands of dollars on stock transactions. Then he lost his fortune in mining speculation and the panic of 1907 and ran for governor because he needed the job—and won. The Brocks incorporated the Tonopah Mining Company and followed in the footsteps of earlier Nevada mine owners such as the Bank Crowd and Bonanza Kings. They vertically integrated, adding milling and water companies and banks to their holdings, but for additional reasons: private water companies sought to serve homes and local businesses rather than mines, and they needed power lines run from California to be able to build modern mills.

The Bullfrog District resembled such earlier booms as Hamilton and Treasure Hill: intense but brief. Because Bullfrog, Rhyolite, and nearby camps materialized after Tonopah and Goldfield, which proved Nevada had come back to life, the rush began quickly. In 1905 miner E. A. “Bob” Montgomery incorporated the Montgomery-Shoshone company and soon sold most of it to Charles M. Schwab, president of US Steel and an investor and a stock speculator in the Tonopah area (and no relation to the modern broker). But its mines and others soon petered out, leaving mostly ghost towns and ghosts: old buildings and, most notably in Rhyolite, a house made of bottles, which the local saloon industry, always a beneficiary of mining capital, helped supply. One of Rhyolite’s buildings housed the law offices of William Morris Stewart, who moved there after leaving the Sen- ate in 1905 and even became a member of the local school board.

Goldfield and Wingfield

Like Tonopah, Goldfield operated at first under the leasing system. One lease, the Hayes-Monnette, generated a carload of ore worth nearly $575,000. This had two effects: the Monnettes took their profits out of Nevada and put them into what became Bank of America, and outside investment in Goldfield’s one-hundred-plus mining companies became inevitable. Nevadans George Nixon and George Wingfield became the catalysts and beneficiaries. After investigating the region, and busy with a US Senate seat he had won in 1905, Nixon provided capital. Wingfield, an

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Arkansas native, did most of the work. A cowboy, gambler, and saloon- keeper who lived in Winnemucca and Golconda before arriving in Tonopah in 1901, he moved around central Nevada, investing in mines, manipulating and speculating in stock, and looking for luck to strike. In 1906 Wingfield moved on to Goldfield and bought the Jumbo, Red Top, and Mohawk mines. He and Nixon incorporated what historian Sally Zan- jani has called “the economic juggernaut that dominated the district”: the Goldfield Consolidated Mines Company, capitalized at $50 million and the first Nevada mining firm on the New York Stock Exchange, complete with financing from legendary Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch (who had a Nevada link through marriage to the Olcoviches, a pioneer Jewish family in Carson City).

Nixon and Wingfield became the early-twentieth-century equivalents of the Bank Crowd. They bought additional properties throughout the year and, by early 1907, owned almost every producing mine in Goldfield. Then they vertically integrated with a vengeance, especially in banking and milling. Wingfield oversaw a one-hundred-stamp mill that used the “all- sliming” technique, which relied more heavily on cyanide and improved production and profits. Within two years Nixon and Wingfield bought out the Brocks and took over Tonopah.

Wingfield’s takeover involved even more than that. In 1909 he and Nixon dissolved their partnership so that Nixon could concentrate on banking and Wingfield on mining. Wingfield said, “I have took over every- thing.” That year his company generated $10 million in gold and $7 million in stock dividends. But after Nixon’s death in 1912, despite Governor Tasker Oddie’s description of him as having “a wonderfully strong and pleasing personality, an iron nerve, unexcelled business ability and integrity and an intimate knowledge of the general condition and needs of the State,” Wingfield declined the offer of an appointment as his successor, claiming responsibilities in and to Nevada. He then bought out Nixon’s widow and ended up owning most of the major mines outside of the White Pine cop- per boom, most of the state’s leading banks, large ranches in northern and central Nevada as well as several California enterprises, and several hotels.

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Boomtown Life

The twentieth-century boomtowns resembled and diverged from their earlier counterparts. With any mining discovery, a district soon followed with a recorder, and the local saloon usually became the central meeting place—Wyatt Earp owned one saloon in Tonopah, the Northern. Unlike the Comstock, originating in mostly ungoverned western Utah territory, Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely, and other towns began in existing counties and thus had some form of government in place. These factors contributed to the earlier arrival of families and such institutions as schools, churches, and public libraries, first in tents and then in wood buildings; if the boomtown survived, brick structures followed quickly. Town boards concentrated on problems ranging from sanitation to imposing monthly $5 licensing fees for prostitutes. Most of the communities also included tennis courts, and Searchlight reported a bowling alley. Social events sometimes depended on class and status: at the peak of his wealth and influence in Tonopah, Oddie held a dance party three hundred feet down in his Mizpah Mine, while miners often participated in drilling competitions, often as part of bigger community-wide celebrations, that allowed them to display their prowess, speed, and strength.

Journalism in early 1900s Nevada never competed with the Territorial Enterprise’s brilliant staff of the 1860s and 1870s. While editors and pub- lishers in Nevada’s largest city, Reno, promoted civic betterment and influ- enced policy in the Nevada State Journal and the Reno Evening Gazette, mining-camp editors served a different but still important function. Their information contributed to the boom-and-bust cycle, depending on their accuracy and, sometimes, the editors’ involvement in the industry, stock speculation, and politics. One of the era’s leading editors, Frank Garside, owned several mining-camp newspapers, including Tonopah’s, and later published Las Vegas’s largest daily. Arthur Buel spent three years as an edi- torial cartoonist in Tonopah before moving on to Reno for three years and then to a long career in northern California newspapers.

The populations of Tonopah and Goldfield both shot above ten thou- sand, although the lack of a census until 1910 leaves such numbers open to debate. Within two years of its founding, Tonopah boasted an estimated three thousand residents, thirty-two saloons, a church, a school, and two weekly newspapers; Goldfield grew rapidly, too. As with the Comstock, not

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only investors and entrepreneurs but also attorneys flocked to the region. From the Klondike came Key Pittman, who practiced law, mined, and entered politics. George Bartlett arrived from Eureka, spent two terms in Congress during the boom, and became a US attorney and a judge, enjoy- ing ties to Wingfield throughout his career. Son of an Irish immigrant sheepherder, Pat McCarran moved down after representing Reno in the assembly for a term and became Nye County district attorney and, eventu- ally, an almost constant annoyance to Wingfield and Pittman.

Humboldt and Elko County always relied more on railroads and ranch- ing than on mining, but the rebirth of Nevada mining prompted a popu- lation influx, more markets for livestock, and the urbanization that always accompanied discoveries. Tuscarora generated half of Elko County’s nineteenth-century mining production, and investment spiked in 1907, but that year’s national depression ended that effort. That year, northwest of Elko, a gold discovery led to the founding of Midas, a platted town site, and about two thousand residents within a year; it went through ups and downs, prospering again from 1915 into the early 1920s. A gold discovery in the western Bull Run Mountains led to Edgemont, a large mill, and sub- stantial production until an avalanche destroyed most of the area in 1917.

Goldfield became not just a boomtown but a community with mining at the center of it. Miners often participated in parades like this one as a relief from their work. Cour- tesy of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Jarbidge grew to more than fifteen hundred amid rumors of gold in 1910 but went through on-and-off development over the next decade. Near Winnemucca discovery of several ores led to the founding of Golconda in 1898 and a decade of production, but it became more famous for its celebri- ties: Wingfield invested in the boom and befriended a young mining engi- neer named Herbert Hoover, who later became a friend of Mark Requa, the early Ely promoter and, during World War I, a member of Hoover’s staff in the US Food Administration.

New Railroads and Towns: The Rise of Las Vegas

Mining developments in southern and central Nevada enticed Nevadans such as Nixon and Requa as well as outside investors. In 1902 Senator Wil- liam Andrews Clark, a Montana copper baron who had just invested in Ely, bought Helen Stewart’s acreage and water rights in the Las Vegas Valley for his proposed San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. He planned to transport his copper to California markets and overseas, especially with the spread of electricity and the accompanying need for copper wire. Edward Henry Harriman, the New York stockbroker running the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific (sp), planned the Oregon Short Line along the same route, also attracted by the burgeoning southern California market. Con- struction began on both lines, at times yards apart, with brawls between the workers ensuing. Finally, the two companies merged; split ownership, with Clark responsible for the railroad’s operations; and completed con- struction. Shortly thereafter, on May 15, 1905, officials auctioned off a town site, now the heart of downtown Las Vegas.

While Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely, and others relied mainly on mining, and mining officials even created company towns, Las Vegas resembled the nineteenth-century railroad towns, especially those the Central Pacific cre- ated. Like Carlin, Lovelock, and Wadsworth, Las Vegas served as a railroad division point—a storage facility, a repair center and housing spot for train crews, and a shipping and transportation depot for those in the hinterland who sent resources to it, obtained others from it, and connected through it to national and international markets. The railroad made Las Vegas func- tion almost as a company town and, from its beginnings, as a twenty-four- hour community catering to travelers and railroad workers. The railroad’s subsidiary, the Las Vegas Land & Water Company, largely controlled local utilities and services, thanks to its water rights, prompting entrepreneurs to

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dig their own wells outside of the town site, leading to considerable waste. The railroad also limited activities in town: it barred liquor sales outside of one block, but exempted hotels, prompting saloon owners to compete by installing brothels, which operated on Block 16 until World War II. The railroad affected the economy in other ways: flooding along various parts of the line virtually shut down Las Vegas on several occasions for lack of employment and supplies.

As in the mining towns, and in earlier incarnations, power prompted dissent and civic responses. J. T. McWilliams had been a railroad surveyor before trying to start a competing town site west of the tracks. Because McWilliams lacked water rights and the capital to take on the Clark and Union Pacific interests, most residents moved to the new town. After a fire all but leveled Ragtown, as it became known for its canvas buildings, late in 1905, McWilliams alternately worked for and annoyed the railroad while trying to develop nearby Lee Canyon into a recreational and tour- ist area. Yet the railroad’s presence also promoted a sense of permanence, so early Las Vegans set out to build a community. In 1911 Helen Stewart helped start the Mesquite Club, a women’s organization still involved in community education and civic activities, and businessmen created the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which promotes the town and eventually bridged the gap between established community members and businesses that struck them as catering to vice.

Thanks to the railroad, Las Vegas wound up playing a role similar to Reno: central hub for a mining hinterland. The boom to the north and the railroad construction that built Las Vegas encouraged nearby mining in the town’s early years. Searchlight, founded as a mining district in 1898, com- peted with Las Vegas for population but declined after 1908. Although it had ties to Las Vegas, Searchlight boasted its own nearby ranches, attracted eastern investment, and enjoyed a decade of growth that resembled most significant Nevada mining areas. Potosi revived, becoming Nevada’s top zinc producer during the 1910s. Goodsprings had been known for lead, gold, and zinc, but production quadrupled with the railroad’s completion, which eased transportation. Eldorado Canyon stirred again, with the town of Nelson platted nearby.

Like Reno, Elko, Winnemucca, and other northern towns, Las Vegas owed its growth to railroad building—as do other early-twentieth-century communities (see map on page 104). The central and eastern Nevada

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boomtowns would have prospered less without railroads. Serving the new rushes, the Carson & Colorado stirred to life and benefited Southern Pacific coffers—Collis Huntington bought it cheap in the late 1890s—but not politically, as the railroad’s influence declined in Nevada. The sp also emulated the cp in creating communities along its tracks. During a rebuild- ing phase in the early 1900s that altered the direction of its tracks, the sp bought ranches in the Truckee Meadows to replace its older or obsolete repair shops at Wadsworth. Just as the up and Clark created a town site in Las Vegas, the sp set up a town for its shops just east of Reno and named it for Governor John Sparks. The doubling of Reno’s population from 1900 to 1910 demonstrated the impact of the revival of mining and railroad build- ing outside their immediate areas.

The economic revival prompted new construction. The v&t’s expan- sion south from Carson City—expected to extend into California—went through Carson Valley. The Dangbergs, the area’s leading ranching family, proposed and planned a town along the tracks and named it for Minden, the German town from which H. F. Dangberg came. The Western Pacific Railroad, created in 1903, extended from California through northern Washoe County to Winnemucca, paralleling the sp until crossing into Utah at Wendover; it later built a branch line to Reno. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, one of the nation’s largest lines, entered Searchlight from Barn- well, one of its sidings in southern California—and managed to offend locals by employing hundreds of Mexicans in helping to build it. When the train stopped operating, the Searchlight residents who used the ties to build homes included the parents of Harry Reid, later a US senator.

Labor Problems: Goldfield

Although nineteenth-century miners tried to counter companies’ efforts to control them or increase profits at their expense, the twentieth-century boom led to greater labor strife. In 1905 the Western Federation of Miners (wfm) helped start the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union that stressed “industrial unionism” over the American Federation of Labor’s “craft unionism.” For unknown reasons, iww members became known as Wobblies. Critics claimed iww stood for “I Won’t Work” and expressed concern over the iww’s beliefs: that workers should unite as a class, capital sought to divide labor, and the wage system should be abolished.

Although the wfm organized miners in 1903 in Searchlight, causing

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a mostly unsuccessful strike, Goldfield marked the iww’s first foray into large-scale organizing in Nevada. In 1904 the afl and wfm tried to start unions there. In 1906 organizer Vincent St. John won iww membership from local workers ranging from dishwashers to teamsters. The union held a radical parade, and St. John announced, “We will sweep the capitalist class out of the life of this nation and then out of the whole world.” By 1907 new arrivals from Cripple Creek, Colorado, site of recent organizing and violence, bolstered the wfm and iww.

Yet mine owners refused to concede easily and won support from other local businessmen affected by the iww’s actions. Not only did they form a Goldfield Business Men’s and Mine Operators’ Association to work together, but Wingfield also decreed two new policies, both for profits and in response to the panic of 1907, which temporarily dried up capital invest- ment. One sought to stop “high-grading,” a practice through which miners smuggled valuable gold out of the mines in their work clothes, by putting security guards in the changing rooms. The other replaced paychecks with scrip, effectively making Goldfield a company town.

Violence contributed to and resulted from the controversy. In Novem- ber the shooting of St. John prompted him to leave Goldfield to become a national iww leader. But earlier in 1907, another shooting had more lasting effects. Restaurant owner John Silva’s killing led to the arrest, trial, and con- viction of organizers Morrie Preston and Joseph Smith. The fairness of the trial raised suspicions and fitted a pattern that other labor radicals faced throughout the West: their convictions followed a failed attempt to con- vict iww leader “Big Bill” Haywood of murder in Idaho, Utah executed Joe Hill in 1915 after a dubious trial, and San Francisco organizer Tom Mooney received a life sentence on doubtful bombing charges in 1916. In Nevada future efforts, especially by Preston (as a prisoner the Socialist Labor Party’s choice for president, the only Nevadan ever to be a national par- ty’s nominee), to win pardons failed amid rumors that Wingfield intimi- dated members of the pardons board. Nearly eighty years later, in their book The Ignoble Conspiracy, historians Sally Zanjani and Guy Louis Rocha concluded that Preston shot Silva in self-defense and Wingfield allies may have perjured themselves. The state pardons board responded by post- humously pardoning Preston and Smith.

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Goldfield and Labor: Long-Term Effects

At the time, though, the combination of events, culminating in a general strike on November 27 and the closure of local mines, gave the mine own- ers their chance to break unionizing efforts in Goldfield. They asked Gov- ernor John Sparks to request federal troops; the longtime rancher owed Wingfield for loans and complied. He wired President Theodore Roosevelt that amid “unlawful combinations and conspiracies . . . the constituted authorities of the State of Nevada are now and continue to be unable to protect the people.” Roosevelt responded with soldiers on December 6. Mine owners cut wages one dollar a day and soon began recruiting non- union workers from out of state. The mines reopened in January.

These events had long-term ramifications. Suspicious, Roosevelt sent an investigating committee that reported no need for federal troops. The presi- dent told Sparks that he would remove the troops unless Nevada created its own police force, which it did in a special session the governor quickly called. The army left in March, and the state police stepped in. The min- ers gave up and returned to their jobs. Up for reelection to the Senate that fall, Francis Newlands worked behind the scenes to help Sparks pass the bill while seeking to maintain labor support and unity in the Democratic Party. That fall a majority of the legislators seeking reelection lost, paying the price for aiding mine owners such as Wingfield, whom the Goldfield labor troubles established as the dominant player in Nevada politics.

One problem for Wingfield refused to go away. Nye County district attorney Pat McCarran criticized the federal intervention and the state police force’s creation. That increased Wingfield’s enmity, which McCar- ran originally earned by representing his wife, May, in a divorce that included charges that Wingfield suffered from a venereal disease (McCar- ran lost the case anyway). When Wingfield tried to silence him with the offer of a judgeship, McCarran not only declined it but also ran futilely for Congress against one of the magnate’s allies and then unsuccessfully chal- lenged other Wingfield-backed candidates in US Senate races during the 1910s. This relationship would affect Nevada in years to come, as McCarran warred against Wingfield and the political establishment.

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Company Towns

Surrounded by towns dependent on mining or railroads, the Guggenheims went one step further. Ely had survived since the late 1870s, but barely. As the county seat, it remained the center of White Pine County, but, as it did in other states, the copper company wanted more control over its work- force. The Guggenheims built three company towns: Ruth near the mine, Kimberly to the west, and, more than twenty miles north, McGill, named for a longtime rancher whose land the company bought to build a smelter. Guggenheim executives served as the local government.

On the one hand, workers and their families found much about company- town life appealing. Because residents paid no taxes, they received munici- pal services free or at reduced rates. The company provided low-cost medi- cal services, including a hospital in nearby East Ely, and a variety of com- munity events. Historian Russell Elliott, who grew up in McGill, called the company “a benevolent although slow-moving landlord,” since it built row houses that resembled modern suburban developments and maintained them and the residential streets. It also provided schools for the children of miners and other laborers.

On the other hand, control could be absolute. With no local govern- ment, residents had no say. Because they designed the towns to ensure sobriety and stability, the companies regulated behavior, including approval of saloons (McGill originally had only one) and pool halls where employ- ees could sign over their paychecks to ensure payment of debts. The com- panies segregated immigrants—mainly from Japan, Greece, and Austria- Hungary—but also tried to foster assimilation. Despite the company’s efforts, workers still found ways to amuse themselves in what Elliott called “fringe” towns such as Ragdump and Steptoe City outside of McGill as well as Riepetown between Ruth and Kimberly. White Pine County commis- sioners generally allowed drinking, prostitution, and gambling to flourish in those hamlets—foreshadowing how a federal company town, Boulder City, interacted with a nearby open city, Las Vegas.

Strikes and violence rarely upset labor peace in White Pine before 1912. That September miners struck at Guggenheim copper facilities in Bingham, Utah, partly over an attempt to start a chapter of the Western Federation of Miners. They won a wage hike, but the family refused to recognize the union. In October the wfm called sympathy strikes at other Guggenheim

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properties, and workers at Ruth and McGill walked out. Nevada Con- solidated Copper Company responded by bringing in thirty armed men as guards (said the company) or as strikebreakers (according to the min- ers). The new arrivals killed two strikers and wounded others. Mine offi- cials called on Governor Tasker Oddie, who arrived, tried to work out a settlement, and finally declared martial law. The state police arrived, swore in a posse, and disarmed both sides. Finally, the strike ended, the miners returned to work, and a local grand jury refused to indict the accused mur- derers. The strikers called for arresting two company managers as acces- sories, but Oddie wrote that he “compelled the withdrawal of the warrants charging the managers of the Company with murder, as I knew they were not guilty.”

While these events helped shape how Nevadans viewed labor and unions, the copper towns may have had greater technological and environ- mental effects. Although a few used it on the Comstock, the Guggenheims introduced large-scale open-pit mining to Nevada, a far cry from the tun- neling common around the state. Open-pit mining involved a large hole or burrow, made possible by advances in equipment and transportation; one in the Ruth area went one thousand feet down and a mile across. The use and constant improvement of open pits meant low-grade ores became more profitable than they had been through costlier tunneling. Historian Gerald Nash called it “a technological breakthrough . . . hardly less impor- tant for the mining industry in the twentieth century than the develop- ment of the factory system was for the industrial revolution of the nine- teenth century.”

Transportation and Technology

Just as reaching Virginia City required an arduous journey, the new boom- towns sat almost literally in the middle of nowhere. Just as Comstock transportation evolved from freighting to V-flumes to railroads, Tonopah’s founders started by digging out two tons of ore and shipping them by wagon to Austin before it went on to Salt Lake City. Freight routes to Car- son & Colorado Railroad stations (from Tonopah to Sodaville, where one conductor told train passengers, “Change for all points in the world,” and from Goldfield to Candelaria) eased the difficulty of moving ore to market and reduced the market for freighting companies, just as the v&t Railroad limited the need for them in Virginia City.

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Outside investors seeking profits in Nevada had a similar effect. South- ern California’s growth helped inspire construction of a road to Salt Lake. But so did the Tonopah-Goldfield boom, prompting Clark’s Las Vegas & Tonopah, which ran to Beatty and Goldfield, linking the Los Angeles area to Nevada mining, though less profitably than San Francisco in the previous century. Arriving in Nevada in the 1860s, Francis Marion Smith found wealth by mining borax, a compound used in detergent, in Min- eral and Esmeralda Counties. He used mules to move his goods to market and later promoted 20 Mule Team Borax, but also built the Tonopah & Tidewater and Bullfrog & Goldfield Railroads. The Brocks backed a line linking Tonopah and Goldfield to the Carson & Colorado, and thus to the Southern Pacific and San Francisco. The Guggenheims helped Requa set up the Northern Nevada Railway, which went through Steptoe Valley to meet the sp at the newly created Elko County town of Cobre—Spanish for “copper.” Yet these entrepreneurs may have missed an opportunity: Russell Elliott observed that a line from the Tonopah-Goldfield area to Ely would have united the two mining regions and “in so doing . . . redirected the entire economic structure of the state.” But geography probably played a role: north–south mountain ranges made it difficult to build a northeast– southwest line.

Appropriately for a new century, Nevada mining also relied on a new vehicle: the automobile. Trucks began hauling ore around 1913, the same year the state started requiring automobile licenses: a minimum fee of $1.88, with future fees based on the car’s horsepower. Before those changes cars had begun competing with railroads and stage lines to connect major Nevada towns, prompting laws setting speed limits: four in Tonopah and six in Goldfield, whose officials stipulated that “vehicles drawn by horse, at all times, have the right of way.” Running for governor in 1910, Oddie cam- paigned almost entirely by car, saw the need for better roads, and, when he could, followed through.

The mining boom made no real contribution to these technological advances, and the Comstock Lode had indeed been more innovative than its successor in central and eastern Nevada. But mine and mill operators adopted new techniques and adapted to different circumstances. Univer- sity of Nevada professor Robert Jackson had begun using cyanide to help extract metals at Washoe Lake, and the process worked its way to Tonopah and Goldfield. Those areas also started using a sliming process: grinding

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the ore as much as possible until it approximates slime, improving the abil- ity to extract ore. But like the mercury used earlier, cyanide polluted the Carson River, causing long-term environmental problems.

Speculation and Society

Speculators preyed on nineteenth-century investors, and the twentieth- century boom proved little different—but at times more colorful. Shortly after veteran schemer George Graham Rice arrived in Goldfield in 1904, his stock promotions sank a local bank. Then he and two friends invented a mining district, Rawhide, turned it into a boomtown, and publicized it by holding an ostentatious funeral for horse-racing gambler Riley Grannan. A fire destroyed Rawhide, and, unlike Virginia City after its blaze, it never recovered. But Rice went on to quintuple the stock value of a failed Ely copper mine before his arrest for mail fraud. Rice went to prison and wrote a book, My Adventures with Your Money, before disappearing.

Rice also worked closely with Tex Rickard, whose success led him to much bigger things. Rice and Rickard promoted the Battling Nelson–Joe Gans boxing championship match in Goldfield in September 1906, and Rickard expanded on that and other fights to go to New York as a pro- moter and build the original Madison Square Garden. Rickard’s success in boxing, then considered uncivilized, reflected how the boom resembled its forebears in another way: towns developed parallel societies. Gold- field’s saloons topped one hundred in 1906, but the capital pouring into central and eastern Nevada led to stone and brick buildings, schools, and churches, many of them taller than in earlier boomtowns. Residents sought entertainment both proper and improper, with a new twist: movie theaters. Hotels provided more luxury than anything envisioned on the Comstock. Tonopah’s Mizpah offered steam heat and the town’s first elevator, while the Goldfield Hotel, complete with crystal chandeliers and the latest fire escapes, allegedly opened with champagne flowing down the front steps— and Wingfield co-owned both of them.

The south-central and eastern Nevada mining regions also drew a large number of immigrants, but from different groups than earlier booms. Again they ended up segregated residentially, and not just in the com- pany towns, where Guggenheim officials segregated them. Whereas the Irish had been the most prominent immigrant group in Comstock shafts, Greeks and Italians formed the backbone of miners’ unions in several

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towns, while Goldfield proved more heterogeneous and Caucasian than usual in mining communities. As in Virginia City and its environs, women trailed men in arriving, and fewer entered the sex trade than leg- end and myth suggest; they varied from waitresses to schoolteachers, but those who became prostitutes encountered the same unhappiness as oth- ers throughout the West: about one-third of the prostitutes who died in Goldfield committed suicide, usually around age twenty-one, about the average in mining country.

The Inevitable Decline

Russell Elliott, the boom’s preeminent historian, called it “the touch of the decay that was inevitable in these isolated mining booms once the ore petered out.” Small mining camps rose and fell quickly, often inside five years. Rhyolite’s estimated population of eight thousand in 1908 plummeted by 1920 to fourteen—still better than several other early-twentieth-century camps. Goldfield’s production began falling after a 1910 peak of more than $10 million until, a decade later, it generated only about $350,000, and the population of perhaps ten thousand around 1906 had dipped to nearly five thousand in 1910 and a little more than fifteen hundred by 1920. If others dropped like a stone, Tonopah coasted downhill, benefiting from wartime silver needs and the Pittman Silver Act of 1918, which set a minimum price of a dollar an ounce, but still gradually losing population and production. Tonopah and Goldfield benefited from their status as county seats and eventually the highways that went through them, but by 1920 their glory days had ended.

White Pine had better luck. Between 1908 and 1920, its revenues fell just short of the production from Tonopah and Goldfield combined, and Nevada ranked fifth among states in copper production. The Guggenheims still prospered from the district for decades afterward, although the Ely area, too, would suffer a decline.

The twentieth-century mining boom not only revived Nevada but also changed it significantly. Nevada’s connections to California deepened through its southern and central boomtowns, while eastern Nevada became more closely tied to Salt Lake City and Utah’s copper towns. Although few major political figures started out in White Pine, the south-central axis produced or influenced many of Nevada’s key politicians to the present. They would affect how the state functioned and Nevada’s relationship with

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the federal government, which evolved just as the mining boom reshaped the state—and reshaped the state in different ways.

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Brown, Mrs. Hugh. Lady in Boomtown: Miners and Manners on the Nevada Frontier. Palo Alto, CA: American West, 1968.

Coles, Kathleen, and Victoria Ford, eds. Nevada Mining Oral History Project. Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 2008.

Douglass, William A., and Robert A. Nylen, eds. Letters from the Nevada Frontier: Cor- respondence of Tasker L. Oddie, 1898–1902. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004.

Elliott, Russell R. Growing Up in a Company Town: A Family in the Copper Camp of McGill, Nevada. Reno: Nevada Historical Society, 1990.

———. Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom: Tonopah-Goldfield-Ely. 1966. Reprint, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1988.

Fleming, Jack. Copper Times: An Animated Chronicle of White Pine County, Nevada. Seattle: Jack Fleming, 1987.

Goin, Peter, and C. Elizabeth Raymond. Changing Mines in America. Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places, 2004.

Hall, Shawn. Preserving the Glory Days: The Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Nye County, Nevada. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999.

Jones, Florence Lee, and John F. Cahlan. Water: A History of Las Vegas. 2 vols. Las Vegas: Las Vegas Valley Water District, 1975.

Limbaugh, Ronald H. Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010.

Lingenfelter, Richard E. Bonanzas & Borrascas: Copper Kings and Stock Frenzies, 1885– 1918. Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2012.

McCracken, Robert D. A History of Beatty, Nevada. Tonopah, NV: Nye County Press, 1992.

———. A History of Tonopah, Nevada. Tonopah, NV: Nye County Press, 1990. Olds, Sarah E. Twenty Miles from a Match: Homesteading in Western Nevada. Reno:

University of Nevada Press, 1990. Patterson, Edna B., and Louise A. Beebe. Halleck Country, Nevada: The Story of the

Land and Its People. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1982. Raymond, C. Elizabeth. George Wingfield: Owner and Operator of Nevada. Reno: Uni-

versity of Nevada Press, 1992. Read, Effie O. White Pine Lang Syne: A True History of White Pine County, Nevada.

Denver: Big Mountain Press, 1963. Reid, Harry. Searchlight: The Camp That Didn’t Fail. Reno: University of Nevada Press,

1998. Whitely, Joan Burkhart. Young Las Vegas, 1905–1931: Before the Future Found Us. Las

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un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

180 | n e v a d a

Zanjani, Sally S. The Glory Days in Goldfield, Nevada. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002.

———. Goldfield: The Last Gold Rush on the Western Frontier. Athens: Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 1992.

Zanjani, Sally S., and Guy Louis Rocha. The Ignoble Conspiracy: Radicalism on Trial in Nevada. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986.

un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

| 181 |

P rogressives “caught the Populists in swimming,” Kansas editor Wil- liam Allen White said, “and stole all of their clothing except the frayed underdrawers of free silver.” While some Populists became Pro- gressives as the twentieth century began, the two groups of reformers dif- fered in key ways. Nevada’s Progressives proved the rule and the exception. Although many involved in the fight for silver joined the Progressives, both movements underscored the same problem for Nevadans: how reform minded they could be when their economy depended on the boom-and- bust cycle of mining, whom to ally themselves with regionally and nation- ally to achieve their economic goals, and whether those goals fitted with Progressivism.

The Origins of Progressivism

Like the Populists, Progressives reacted to social issues—corporate expan- sion, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corrupt politics— but in different ways. Generally, while Populists advocated that government take over industries such as railroads, Progressives preferred to regulate them. Populists hoped to control and even harness industrialization; Pro- gressives wanted to embrace and use it to promote scientific management of the government, economy, and environment, but divided on whether to allow large business or, like the Populists, encourage small producers. Rural Populists and urban Progressives saw cities differently, although they felt similarly about the evils of the corruption and social inequality in them.

How Populists and Progressives viewed all but nonwhite males sug- gested their contradictions. Both struggled with racism, especially as immigration from the East (southern and eastern Europe) and West

Making Progress

9 Co py ri gh t © 2 01 5. U ni ve rs it y of N ev ad a Pr es s. A ll r ig ht s re se rv ed . Ma y no t be r ep ro du ce d in a ny f or m wi th ou t pe rm is si on f ro m th e pu bl is he r, e xc ep t fa ir u se s pe rm it te d

un de r U. S. o r ap pl ic ab le c op yr ig ht l aw .

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