St. Thomas, Nevada: A History Uncovered

Foreword

ix To some, the story of St. Thomas is a cautionary tale about water in the Southwest—or, rather, the lack of water. The followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (lds) who settled at the confluence of the Virgin and Muddy Rivers in 1865 knew a thing or two about the importance of water. After traveling for weeks in wagons across an unforgiving desert, that trickle of water, flowing constant in summer and winter, must have looked like a mirage. And so they built a life there. It was a hard life, by all accounts. There was no air-conditioning and little shade from the scorching summers of southern Nevada. Walking from cistern to cistern in the ruins of St. Thomas, it is evident water made life there possible. But water—too much water—also put an end to St. Thomas. The town never had more than a few hundred residents, even before construction began on the Hoover Dam, originally named the Boulder Dam, in 1931. A massive team of Depression-era engineers and builders set out to construct a forty-eight-million-dollar hydroelectric dam and massive reservoir to tame the mighty Colorado River and distribute its life-giving waters throughout the Southwest. The reservoir—Lake Mead—would extend more than one hundred miles back from the great dam and wipe St. Thomas off the map. The Gentry Hotel, with its curved facade and second-story balcony, would soon be underwater. So would the schoolhouse, the rows of cottonwoods the settlers planted for shade, and the car repair shop where bachelors would Foreword senator harry reid x Foreword by Senator Harry Reid crowd around the town’s first radio to listen to the news. A few residents refused to leave until the waters were lapping at their doorsteps. In the end, however, they all moved on. The town would rise again, though. When a mighty drought began early in the twenty-first century, the bones of St. Thomas peeked out from below the water. Concrete foundations, tree stumps, and the steps of the old schoolhouse emerged. In fact, a ghost town that had once been seventy feet below the middle of a lake was now a mile or more from the water’s edge. Some called the reemergence in 2002 a reminder of the harsh character of the desert, of the delicate balance of nature that makes life possible in inhospitable lands. After all, the residents of St. Thomas were not the first to abandon the valley. Nearly a thousand years ago, the Anasazi tribe left after living there for more than a thousand years. Their population had grown too quickly, and the land could no longer support them. The history of St. Thomas holds lessons about sustainability, stewardship of the land, and the value of water in the desert. St. Thomas has more to teach us as well. The town also emerged from beneath the water once in the 1950s and again in the mid-1960s. In those days, there were reunions among the bones of buildings. Men and women who were only children when the lake took their homes gathered again to recall the faith that brought their parents and grandparents to the desert in the first place. They recalled the community they had built despite the harsh weather and the history they shared despite the town’s short life span. The lessons they took from the loss of St. Thomas—and from its reemergence—were not about water. They were about community. When St. Thomas emerged in 2002, however, there was no one left to remember that community. Almost everyone who ever lived in St. Thomas is dead. There will not be any more reunions. And that is a different kind of cautionary tale. When I wrote my history of Searchlight, Nevada—the tiny hard-rock mining town where I grew up—I did twenty interviews or more with elderly residents, gathering stories from the early days of the last century. By the time I finished the book, seven of them were dead. It is a simple reality that eventually, no matter how long you live, you will lose your history if you do not write it down. St. Thomas was an lds community, and lds are unusually good at writing down history. The records of St. Thomas are therefore relatively detailed. Foreword by Senator Harry Reid xi Searchlight...