Nevada's Historic Buildings: A Cultural Legacy

Chapter 1. A Territory of Humble Beginnings

11 Early trappers and explorers crossed what would become Nevada during the 1830s and 1840s. The cliché of the westward movement , as summarized by Frederick Jackson Turner in his renowned frontier thesis, would have farmers follow the pathfinders, from the Atlantic, across the country, to the Pacific Ocean. The Great Basin and the Upper Mojave Desert, however, enjoyed a different history.1 There, rugged mountains and vast deserts did not attract many interested in agriculture. The lands lying between the deserts of the Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Nevada were first penetrated by mountain men and fur traders in the 1820s. Military adventurers and a handful of California-bound emigrants explored the region in the 1830s and 1840s, blazing trails as they progressed through the Great Basin’s desert wastes. These trails were followed by the next wave of emigrants to traverse the region. This group, composed primarily of gold-seeking “forty-niners,” was interested, like those who had preceded them, more in making their fortunes in California than in settling in the arid deserts lying east of the Sierra Nevada. A few followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as Mormons, settled around Las Vegas Springs in the A Territory of Humble Beginnings 1 12 Nevada’s Historic Buildings 1850s. At the same time, Mormons and others arrived at the eastern foot of the Sierra. In both areas, the newcomers hoped as much to capitalize on the overland trade as to cultivate the area’s too often uncooperative soil. A smattering of other farmers and ranchers tried their luck, but most who braved the harsh environment between the Great Salt Lake and Carson Valley traversed the region as quickly as possible on their way to California. The patterns of the area’s early development departed, therefore , from the norm and stamped the future Silver State with an identity uniquely its own.2 The region’s character was a creation of place and process or, as Turner would put it, of “land and people.”3 Less than a decade elapsed between the founding of the western Great Basin’s first Euro-American settlements and the emergence of its first industrial cities. This rapid leap from rugged frontier settlements to modern industrial communities imparted an ephemeral quality to Nevada’s mining towns. These seemingly precarious outposts of nineteenth-century industrial society were engulfed by vast stretches of wilderness. This juxtaposition of land and people made the Nevada landscape seem more foreboding and omnipresent than the “tamed” lands that harbored the nation’s other nineteenth-century industrial and agricultural communities. In Nevada, nature assumed an eternal and omnipotent tone, whereas its newly established settlements appeared immature and vulnerable. Perhaps due to this dichotomy, society in the Great Basin assumed a youthful air. Unlike the “mature” communities that developed slowly in other regions of the country, society in Nevada did not take itself too seriously . This aspect of the state’s character—its acceptance of the precariousness of the human condition and the timelessness of the land—became its strength and, ultimately, its destiny. Youthful experimentation, play, and innovation are central to the state’s character, and out of these qualities Nevada’s legendary “freewheeling” morality, cultural ambivalence, and openness to strangers of all types would emerge. A key to understanding Nevada’s character can be found, then, in its A Territory of Humble Beginnings 13 early mining camps. Gold and silver strikes spawned mining throughout the territory. By the time Nevada became a state in 1864, boomtowns were scattered across its landscape, a phenomenon that set it apart from much of the rest of the United States. Although these industrial enclaves distinguished early Nevada from other frontier regions, the contemporary view generally asserted that the place had little other use. The great English explorer Richard F. Burton expressed a popular sentiment when he largely condemned the Great Basin in 1860. “All was desert: the bottom could [not] be called basin or valley: it was a fine silt, thirsty dust in the dry season , and putty-like mud in the spring and autumnal rains. The hair of this unlovely skin was sage and greasewood: it was warted with sand-heaps; in places mottled with bald and horrid patches of salt soil, whilst in others minute crystals of salt, glistening like diamond-dust in the sunlight, covered tracts of moist and oozy mud.”4 In...