the lexicon
The useful column here is not the word — it is whether the word is real. A great deal of what reads as Western English was invented by novelists and screenwriters, and much of the rest is Spanish worn down by English mouths. So every term carries a flag: 54 attested in period documents, 1 literary invention, 3 screen invention.
The rule the volume runs on: nothing is stated in its own voice unless it resolves to an attested entry. The myth vocabulary is not banned — it appears inside quotation marks, or in a chapter explicitly about the myth, which is exactly where it belongs.
bonanza
Sp. “fair weather”
A body of rich ore. Everybody knows this one.
borrasca
Sp. “storm”
Barren rock. A mine in borrasca is paying nothing. Nobody uses it, and it is the one that does the work.
A Comstock mine was in bonanza or in borrasca, and the stock moved on which word was in the paper that morning. The register’s twenty-per-cent survival rate for ore towns is borrasca, restated in arithmetic — and the fact that English kept the good half of the pair and dropped the other is the whole myth problem in two words.
Great Basin cowboy
Sp. vaquero
The word is the whole argument. Nevada's cowboy is a Spanish word worn down in English mouths.
braided rawhide rope, often 60 ft
Sp. la reata
wrap the rope round the horn and let it slip
Sp. dar la vuelta, 'give it a turn'
Opposed to 'hard and fast', the Texas method of tying off. Men lose thumbs to the dally.
bitless bridle used on a young horse
Sp. jáquima
the rawhide noseband of a hackamore
Sp. bozal
the string of saddle horses for an outfit
Sp. remuda
same as remuda, Great Basin usage
Sp. caballada
Prefer 'cavvy' over 'remuda' for northern Nevada; 'remuda' is the Texas word.
unclaimed range horse
Sp. mesteño
rough, unbroken
Sp. bronco, 'coarse'
leather leg armour; chinks are the short Basin version
Sp. chaparreras
quirt attached to closed reins
Sp. ramal
the strap and girth that hold a saddle
Sp.
originally the gathering of cattle, not the show
Sp. rodear, 'to surround'
The spectacle sense is later. Garcia founded the Elko Rodeo in 1912.
uncontrolled run of stock
Sp. estampida
stock pen
Sp.
unbranded animal, hence an unaffiliated person
Samuel Maverick, Texas rancher
to understand
Sp. sabe
to leave quickly
Sp. vamos
jail
Sp. juzgado, 'courthouse'
jail
Sp. calabozo
hired gunman
20th-century popular usage
Not period. Contemporaries wrote 'shootist', 'gunman', 'pistoleer', or simply named the man. Verify earliest citation before using even in quotes.
greeting
stage and screen
'Howdy' is genuine; the pairing is costume.
two men facing each other in the street
Wister 1902, then film
Essentially invented. Real killings were ambushes, back rooms and drunken arguments.
exclamation
20th-century entertainment
mean-tempered
worn-down 'ordinary'
vermin, animal or person
worn-down 'vermin'
suppose, judge
standard English of the period
Genuine, but overused in pastiche until it reads as costume. Ration it.
a body of rich ore
Sp. bonanza, 'fair weather'
barren rock; a mine in borrasca is paying nothing
Sp. borrasca, 'storm'
The essential pair. A Comstock mine was in bonanza or in borrasca, and the stock moved on the word.
a vein in place, as opposed to placer gravel
English
loose ore fragments that indicate a lode uphill
English
the outcrop where a lode reaches surface
English
test of ore value per ton
English
visible gold in the pan
English
ground worth working
English
supplies advanced against a share of the find
English
interlocking timber cube supporting a wide soft ore body
Deidesheimer, Comstock, 1860
horizontal working / inclined shaft / worked-out chamber / entry driven from the hillside
Cornish and English mining
a miner pocketing rich ore
English
A live issue at Goldfield; change rooms were introduced to stop it and were a grievance in the 1907 strike.
fraudulently seeding a claim with ore
English
mine spirit whose knocking warns of collapse
Cornish bucca / Welsh bwca
having gone west and learned what it cost
American, 1840s
The single most characteristic period phrase. Wry, exhausted, never triumphant.
a party and its equipment; later a ranch or crew
English
the Missouri town where the crossing began
English
the midday halt to rest stock
English
a claimed shortcut, usually worse
English
Hastings Cutoff, Applegate, Lassen. In diaries the word carries suspicion.
where a Great Basin river ends
English
first in time, first in right
western water law
The rule that killed Metropolis. Seniority, not proximity.
water covering an acre one foot deep
engineering
the volume a decree allows per acre
irrigation law
the structure controlling a ditch's take
English
the man who walks the canal and enforces the schedule
English
The most under-written job in western history. He is where the decree meets the water.
deeded land that qualifies a permittee for federal range
Taylor Grazing Act, 1934
The rule that ended itinerant Basque herding without ever mentioning Basques.
what a basin can produce indefinitely
Nevada water administration
a basin where rights on paper exceed the water in the ground
Nevada State Engineer
the Basque boardinghouse
Basque
aspen carvings; arborglyphs
Basque
improvised sung verse
Basque
Rules rather than vibes, so prose written for this volume can be checked against them.
State extremity flatly. Never raise the volume to match the event.
Period diaries and letters record death, ruin and thirst in the same register as the weather. The flatness is the emotion.
Lost two oxen at the sink. Grass all eaten. Made eighteen miles.
Prefer the measured noun to the adjective: miles, feet, head, bushels, dollars, dates.
Almost every surviving first-person source is an account of some kind. Armijo's diary is a numbered list of camps.
Not 'a vast desert' but 'forty miles, no water'.
Use the working word, not the general one. Cavvy, not horses. Borrasca, not a bad year.
Trade vocabulary is the fastest signal of authenticity and the hardest to fake. It also encodes the thing the general word hides.
The mine went into borrasca in '81.
The comic register escalates without ever changing tone.
Twain and De Quille built the Comstock's humour on absolute straight-facedness. Signalling the joke kills it.
Escalate the facts; leave the sentence rhythm alone.
Newspaper voice inverts the diary voice — superlatives, world records, certainty.
Mining-camp papers were read by shareholders. Boosterism was the business model. Quote it as evidence of a market, not of a fact.
'The richest strike in the history of the world' means somebody was selling stock.
Do not render accent phonetically.
Eye-dialect is a literary construction, and in western writing it was applied almost exclusively to Mexicans, Chinese, Black and Native speakers. It is a device for marking someone as other. Report what was said.
Write what he said, in his words, spelled normally.
Attribute action to the named person and their office, never to 'the government' or 'the times'.
This is the volume's whole argument. Passive voice is where accountability goes to die.
Not 'the water was diverted' but 'Derby Dam diverted it, under an act Newlands wrote'.
on eye-dialect
The no-eye-dialect rule is not squeamishness. Phonetic accent spelling in western writing was applied almost exclusively to Mexican, Chinese, Black and Native speakers, while white speakers got normal orthography no matter how they actually talked. It is a marking device. Leaving it out is an accuracy decision, not a polite one.