Devils Will Reign: How Nevada Began

Chapter 7: Devils Reign, 1858

[92] n 1857 a twenty-one-year-old Rhode Island farm boy arrived on the eastern slope. Peleg Brown was not an important man. Indeed, he tried hard not to be important, lest he attract the attention of frontier roughs who might covet his land and stock or ambitious men who might see him as a rival. Nonetheless, the letters he wrote to his family in Rhode Island tell us much about life on the eastern slope as experienced by an ordinary settler who was neither a Mormon apostle, a hardened frontiersman, a gold rush gambler, nor an aspiring politician. Notations indicate that the letters often took a month or more to reach their destination, “dew cours of mail,” in Peleg ’s phrase. Peleg Brown’s letters commence when he was still a schoolboy at a Greenwich boarding school. From the outset, they reveal that spelling was not a subject at which he excelled and that he was restless and disinclined to academic studies (“I am very sory to say that I am sick of staying in this place”). Though obviously a convivial young man devoted to his family and friends, he was also susceptible to the lure of the West, which he represented to his sister Lydia as a business proposition having nothing to do with gold: “I think there is a gred deel better chance for an young man that is just startin in life in some of these western states than at home.” His father apparently agreed and gave a substantial loan (with interest) for the undertaking. Letters and census records indicate that Peleg’s older brother Joshua had made two Devils Reign, 1858 7 j J I earlier trips to California, one in 1851–1852 and the other in 1854– 1856. Together with Joshua, Peleg started forth in January 1857 and did a bit of sightseeing on the way, walking up the Capitol steps at Washington, D.C., with his dog, Roam, at his heels. By April they were buying stock in Kentucky. They planned to sell their cattle for a high price in California, telling the family to direct their mail to Sacramento . Then they would return home to Rhode Island as rich men. Simple as that, and the whole venture should take only about a year. In April Peleg wrote that they had not yet “deamed it safe to venture,” with a late, cold spring and feed scarce for their herd of 203 cattle. This was not a large herd for the 1850s, which included a band of 10,000 sheep on the California trail.1 When they finally deemed it safe to venture, Peleg evidently passed through the waterless deserts and other rigors of the trail without undue di∞culty, but the journey left him with an abiding fear and distrust of Mormons. In a letter written soon after his arrival on the eastern slope, he related that two Mormons leading a band of one hundred Indians had extorted $150, horses, and blankets from the wagon train they accompanied on the flimsy pretext that these were needed to make a treaty with the Indians. He also harbored a recurrent fear that the Mormon Avenging Angels, the Danites, might attack and steal his stock. As yet unknown to Peleg, the day he wrote— September 11—was one that justified his apprehensions about Mormons in the bloodiest way. It was the date of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.2 They arrived as the Mormons of the eastern slope were preparing to depart and selling their fine ranches for “a mear trifle.” This opportunity brought a sudden change of plans. Peleg thought the eastern slope “splendid country for cattle” and found beef prices as high as could be expected in California. When early snows threatened, bringing the herd safely over the mountains that they now saw rising so steeply thousands of feet from the valley floor seemed a perilous proposition. Joshua bought three ranches totaling one thousand acres and a stone Devils Reign, 1858 [93] devils will reign [94] house from the Mormons in Washoe Valley for $250 and two more in the Truckee Meadows. He soon departed for the East by sea to bring his wife and children and another herd of stock, while Peleg stayed with the cattle and the ranches, slightly amazed to find himself where he was (“Little did I think . . . that I would ever write to you from...