What was left when the silver went

1870s onward

As the mining camps emptied, cattle and then sheep spread across the public domain. Nobody owned the range and nobody regulated it: you ran stock on federal land, for free, in whatever numbers you could hold. Cattle outfits claimed ground by controlling the water, which in the Great Basin is the same as controlling everything.

why it is Nevada’s This is the economy that carried Nevada through fifty years with no boom, and it is the first industry in the state’s history that was not extractive and not transient. It also explains the map: an operation needs thousands of acres here, so the land was worked without ever being bought.

The Homestead Act’s 160-acre unit was useless in the Great Basin; the Desert Land Act and Stock-Raising Homestead Act raised it to 640 and that was still far short of a viable outfit.

1880s–1950s

Basques from both sides of the Pyrenees came first for the California gold, failed at it like most people did, and moved into sheep. Sheep were the one business a man with no land and no capital could enter: buy a band, run it on the public domain, own nothing. The settled cattle outfits called them tramp herders and meant it as an accusation — that they used the range without holding any of it.

why it is Nevada’s The charge was true and it was the whole point. Landlessness was the business model, and it worked precisely because Nevada’s land had never been claimed. Nevada and Idaho hold the densest Basque population in the country to this day, and the Basque hotels of Elko and Winnemucca — boarding house, dining room, hiring hall, bank — exist because the men they served had no address.

Documented in Saitua, Basque Immigrants and Nevada’s Sheep Industry, 1880–1954. Senator Pat McCarran — himself a sheep rancher — sponsored legislation from 1950 that brought over 1,100 Basque herders in by 1954.

association formed July 1879; the killings 18 August 1879

Eureka in the 1870s was the state’s second largest mining town and its smelters ran on charcoal. Hundreds of Italians and Italian-speaking Swiss came out of the Alpine provinces with a specific skill — burning logs slowly in an oxygen-starved mound — and were called carbonari. They were more than fifteen per cent of Eureka’s population, over a thousand of them, paid less than half a miner’s wage and routinely cheated because they had no English. In July 1879 they organised at Celso Tolli’s saloon as the Eureka Charcoal Burners Protective Association and struck: 25 cents a bushel up to 30, paid in cash, with open teamsters’ receipts. On 18 August a posse under Deputy Sheriff J. B. Simpson rode to the Fish Creek camp with warrants of doubtful validity and killed five men — three Italians and two Swiss Italians — wounded six and took prisoners. No lawman was hurt. The Italian and Swiss consulates in San Francisco protested. The coroner’s inquest found the posse had acted in the line of duty, nobody was charged, and the companies then cut the price of charcoal further.

why it is Nevada’s A labour massacre in this state, forty-five years before the Culinary Union, with an inquest that cleared everyone and a wage cut as the epilogue. And it belongs beside the piñon: charcoal is precisely what those trees were being cut for. The row in Chapter I about the food supply being consumed and the groves felled for the smelters has a second half here — the men doing the felling were themselves at the bottom of the same economy, killed for asking five cents, by a posse whose warrants were doubtful and whose conduct was found lawful. The forest, the people who lived on it, and the people cutting it down were all being spent by the same smelter.

Eureka Charcoal Burners Protective Association, July 1879; the Fish Creek killings of 18 August 1879 — five dead, six wounded, no officer injured; consular protests; coroner’s inquest finding line of duty; no charges. Silvio Manno, Charcoal and Blood (University of Nevada Press, 2016) is the full account.

railroad labour from 1868; the exclusion referendum 1879

Chinese labour built the Central Pacific’s crossing of the state — the line down the Truckee and along the Humboldt that every northern town sits on. They worked the Comstock, ran laundries, gardens and stores, and held a quarter in Virginia City. In 1879 Nevada put an exclusion question to its voters. The Comstock also had a standing practice of exhuming Chinese dead and shipping the remains home for reburial.

why it is Nevada’s The page had a hole here that needed naming: the exhumation detail appears in the spiritualism row without ever saying whose bodies they were. So here it is. The people who built the corridor this entire volume is organised around were, within a decade of finishing it, the subject of a statewide vote about whether they could stay — and their dead were the one population on the Comstock whose remains were systematically taken back out of Nevada. Everyone else who died here is still here.

Chinese labour on the Central Pacific across Nevada from 1868; the 1879 statewide exclusion referendum; the practice of exhumation and repatriation of remains, documented across the western camps. ⚠ This row is thinner than it should be and is a known gap rather than a finished account — population figures, the Virginia City quarter, and the anti-Chinese expulsions of the 1880s all need proper sourcing before this stands as more than a marker.

Elko from 1893; the World's Fair saddle 1904; the company bought back 1978

Guadalupe Santiago Garcia was born in Sonora in 1864, raised in San Luis Obispo, and apprenticed under a master saddler. In 1893 he arrived in Elko with his wife Saturina and two suitcases of bits, spurs, reatas and rawhide headstalls, and had to move to a bigger building inside a year. By 1904 G.S. Garcia Harness and Saddlery was one of Elko’s largest employers with a mail-order catalogue running since 1899 offering, in its own phrase, everything for the vaquero. His saddle took the gold medal at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904 and again at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905. The hands are named in the record: Alsalio Herrera on the silver, John Estrada and Mike Morales on the bit and mouthpiece, Domingo Aguilar braiding a calfskin headstall and reins no thicker than a quarter inch.

why it is Nevada’s Set into the pommel were twenty-dollar gold pieces bearing Theodore Roosevelt and John Sparks. Three years later those same two men arranged the troop deployment at Goldfield that produced the Nevada State Police — and Roosevelt himself later rode on the saddle while it toured the country. They were on the pommel before they were on the telegram. And look at who made the object that would define American cowboy craft for a century: Mexican hands, all of them, in Elko. The lineage is not a metaphor either — Garcia died in 1933, the business went to Salinas and then to Reno, and in 1978 Doug and Paula Wright, who own J. M. Capriola in Elko, bought the Garcia company and brought it home. Capriola had been one of Garcia’s apprentices before opening his own shop on Commercial Street in 1929. The bits are still made to the original mouthpiece and cheekpiece patterns, still by Mexican craftsmen, and Garcia’s old building reopened in 2018 as the Cowboy Arts and Gear Museum. A continuous chain of title from a Sonoran immigrant to a shop you can walk into.

the note said the third portrait as “Nevada’s first governor William Nye”

Garcia born Sonora 1864, Elko from 1893; gold medals St Louis 1904 and Portland 1905; Elko Rodeo founded 1912; died 1933; Garcia Bit and Spur to Reno 1957; bought by the Wrights of J. M. Capriola 1978. ⚠ The Nye attribution is a propagated error worth killing: James W. Nye was TERRITORIAL governor, and Nevada’s first STATE governor was Henry Blasdel. Several accounts repeat “first governor William Nye” and both halves of that are wrong.

1954 onward

Marlboro was a filtered brand marketed to women and failing. In 1954 Leo Burnett’s agency attached it to a cowboy, and it became the most masculine product in America. That campaign fixed the modern image of the cowboy more firmly than any film. Several of the men who modelled it died of smoking-related illness.

why it is Nevada’s Separate the two pictures and the volume’s argument closes. The vaquero look — flat-brimmed hat, silver, the long rope, the horse made over six years — is the older one and it is real, and it is Californio. The cigarette cowboy is an advertising construction with a launch date and an agency. And it is the same trick this page has been documenting from the first chapter: a working culture, in this case largely Mexican, photographed, stripped of its origin, and sold back as American self-reliance — this time with a product attached, and a body count in the models.

Marlboro repositioned by Leo Burnett in 1954; the brand had previously been marketed as a women’s filtered cigarette. Deaths of several campaign models from smoking-related illness are documented.

continuous, from Californio practice

The Great Basin stock tradition is buckaroo — the word is vaquero, worn down by English mouths — and it descends from Californio practice, not Texan. Long rawhide reata, hackamore, and a bridle horse made slowly over years rather than months, with its own gear and its own silver. Texas ran a shorter rope and a faster-made horse because Texas worked brush and trailed cattle north. J. M. Capriola in Elko still makes the equipment.

why it is Nevada’s The most American-looking thing in northern Nevada is Mexican in lineage, and the word itself is the receipt. Which lands directly on the myth chapter: the cowboy the Westerns built is the Texas one, and the tradition actually practised on this ground came up the other way, out of Alta California, from people the same films cast as the antagonists. Nevada’s cattle culture is a Spanish-language inheritance that arrived before the Americans did and outlasted the mines.

Buckaroo from vaquero; Californio descent of Great Basin practice; the reata/hackamore/bridle-horse progression against the Texas rope-and-saddle tradition. Capriola has operated in Elko since the early twentieth century.

at least ten boardinghouses in the 1920s–30s; the fire 15 August 1948

Reno had at least ten Basque boardinghouses in the twenties and thirties, clustered on Lake and East Second — one block from the train depot on Commercial Row, and consequently next to the old red-light district, because cheap lodging by a depot attracts everything else that wants to be by a depot. The Santa Fe at 235 Lake took its name in the mid-1920s; Jean Pierre Etcheberry took the lease in 1931 and he and his wife Marie ran it until his death in 1943. A fire swept Lake Street on 15 August 1948 and killed five people; the current brick building opened in 1949 with twenty-two rooms, family-style dining and a barber shop. Louis and Lorraine Erreguible opened Louis’ Basque Corner at Lake and Fourth in 1967 and ran it for forty-four years.

why it is Nevada’s What the boardinghouse actually was is in one detail: lockers in the basement, where herders stored their possessions between seasons. A man with no fixed address needs somewhere to leave his things. So the building was a mailing address, a bank, an English class, a hiring hall and a left-luggage office wearing a restaurant’s clothes — the whole institutional apparatus a landless workforce was otherwise denied, privately supplied, one block from the train. And set this against the arborglyph row, because they are the same population and the same loss running at two speeds. The carvings are dying on the mountain because aspens do not last a century. The boardinghouses died downtown because the block got cleared — at least five of them, on the block bounded by Lake, Center and Commercial. Two archives of one people, both going, and only the one at the university is being saved on purpose.

Santa Fe building 1913, hotel under several names including the Colombo; Etcheberry lease 1931, Marie Etcheberry with Martin Esain after 1943; Lake Street fire 15 August 1948, five dead; rebuilt 1949. Louis’ Basque Corner opened 1967 in the 1906 Lincoln Hotel building — and was never a herders’ boardinghouse, which is a distinction routinely lost. ⚠ The Santa Fe’s restaurant closed in July 2020, reopened October 2023 as a pintxos bar, and a further closure was announced in December 2024 — that address has changed hands repeatedly, so check what is open before sending anyone. The sign has been preserved.

born about 1844; the book 24 October 1883; died 1891

Thocmetony, granddaughter of Truckee and daughter of Chief Winnemucca, born near the Humboldt Sink around 1844 — the year Frémont came through. She worked as an interpreter and scout for the army, and guided and interpreted during the Bannock War of 1878, after which her people were force-marched in winter to the Yakama reservation in Washington. She then took the case east: something approaching three hundred lectures, an audience with President Hayes, and in October 1883 a book — Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, edited by Mary Peabody Mann. On the royalties she opened a school for Paiute children near Lovelock in 1884 and taught in their own language until it closed in 1887. She died in 1891.

why it is Nevada’s The first book published in English by a Native American woman, and it is about this ground. Everything Chapter I of this page asserts about the seasonal round, and everything the disease row argues about the food supply being eaten rather than the people being infected, she wrote down first — from inside it, as testimony rather than reconstruction. Her statue is one of Nevada’s two in the National Statuary Hall. The state that removed her people sends her to Washington to represent it.

Published 24 October 1883; the first book written in English by a Native American woman and among the earliest ethnohistorical works by any Native author. Her school ran from 1884 near Lovelock. Nevada placed her statue in the National Statuary Hall in 2005.

late 1800s to the 1980s

Basque herders alone in the ranges for months carved into aspen bark: names, dates, hometowns, sayings, poems, politics, drawings. Roughly 25,000 have been documented across the Great Basin and probably as many again have never been recorded — in the Ruby Mountains, the Santa Rosa Range, the Pine Forest Range, and on Peavine Mountain directly above Reno. Since 2023 UNR, Boise State and CSU Bakersfield have run an Arborglyph Collaborative to record them.

why it is Nevada’s This is the rarest class of source there is, and Nevada has more of it than anywhere: a written archive made by the only people present, about their own experience, in their own language — by men who frequently could not write English and would never have been asked for an account. Everywhere else on this page the record was made by whoever had a printing press. Here the record was made by the labourer, on the job, and nobody edited it. And it is dying on a clock: aspens live about a century, so the earliest carvings are already gone and researchers estimate 70 to 80 per cent of northern Nevada’s arborglyphs have been lost. This is the only entry on the page where the evidence is actively disappearing while the page is being written.

~25,000 documented, with estimates of a comparable number unrecorded; 70–80% of northern Nevada’s believed already lost. The Jon Bilbao Basque Library at UNR holds the Earl Collection — 130 rubbings taken from the 1970s — and the Mallea-Olaetxe Lertxunmarrak Collection. ⚠ Counts and loss estimates are researcher estimates over an incompletely surveyed landscape, not a census. Ranges are named here; specific carving locations are not, for the same vandalism reason that keeps rock art off this page’s map.

set aside 1859; executive order 19 March 1874; the railroad deal 1881; to the present

Land along the Walker was set aside for Indian purposes as early as 1859, among the first in Nevada, and Grant formalised the reservation by executive order on 19 March 1874. In 1881 the Carson & Colorado Railroad wanted to cross it, and the crossing was negotiated between Carl Schurz, Secretary of the Interior, and Henry Yerington of the railroad. The General Allotment Act arrived in 1887 and did there what it did everywhere. Wovoka — born in Mason Valley, the vision of 1889 — lived nearly forty years past Wounded Knee under the name Jack Wilson, died in 1932, and is buried in the cemetery at Schurz. Today the tribe runs a market, a smoke shop, and year-round fireworks sales out of a building finished in 2010.

why it is Nevada’s Four things, one argument about who decides what happens on a piece of ground. First the names: Schurz and Yerington sit twenty-five miles apart on the same road, and both are named for the two men who agreed to run track across other people’s land. Neither name belongs to anyone who lived there — a cabinet secretary and a railroad executive each took a town off the map as his fee. Second the lake, falling for a century from upstream irrigation until the salinity broke the fishery, so the trout eaters lost the trout. Third the grave: the most consequential religious figure Nevada has produced lies about a mile from the fireworks stand, and his actual teaching was to live peaceably, work, not lie or steal, and dance — the militancy attached as it travelled east onto the Plains. And fourth the fireworks, which is the sharpest of the four. Nevada regulates fireworks by county and most aerial product is illegal in most of the state; reservation land is federal trust land and is not subject to state fireworks law. So this page’s whole thesis goes one jurisdiction deeper. Nevada sells what America prohibits. Schurz sells what Nevada prohibits. The boundary was drawn to contain these people and to take the rest, and it is now the only economic instrument the allotment era left them — used in precisely the way the state itself has always used a state line. The fireworks stand is not a novelty. It is a sovereignty claim with a price list.

Land set aside from 1859; executive order 19 March 1874; Carson & Colorado crossing negotiated 1881 between Interior Secretary Carl Schurz and Henry Yerington; Dawes Act 1887. Wovoka died 1932, buried at Schurz. Fireworks building completed 2010; reservation trust land is outside state fireworks and tobacco-tax regimes. The Yerington Paiute Tribe is separate and federally recognised — Colony 1916, Campbell Ranch 1936, about 1,653 acres, organised under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act with a constitution ratified 1937.

2016

The Walker River and Pyramid Lake tribes sued the state in federal court to get polling places on their own land, having previously had to drive excessive distances to vote. They won. Early voting in the first two days exceeded the tribe’s entire turnout in 2012. Vinton Hawley, who chaired the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada, led it.

why it is Nevada’s The page needed this row badly. Between the Ghost Dance and the 1990 water settlement it had almost nothing, which made the Native chapters read as though they ended in 1890 — the exact narrative shape this whole project exists to refuse. Two days of early voting beating four years of prior turnout is not a story about enthusiasm. It is a measurement of how much of the gap was distance, which is to say how much of it was a decision somebody made about where to put a building.

Federal civil rights suit, 2016, brought by the Walker River and Pyramid Lake tribes against the state over polling place locations; led by Vinton Hawley of the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada.

Peace Policy from 1869; Code of Indian Offenses 1883

Under Grant’s Peace Policy from 1869 the federal government assigned Indian agencies to Christian denominations to administer — Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and the rest each allotted their share. Catholics, holding older missions and considering themselves shortchanged, founded the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions in 1874 to fight for theirs. Then in 1883 the Code of Indian Offenses established Courts of Indian Offenses, which punished the practices of medicine men.

why it is Nevada’s Read that against Chapter I and the line is straight. The office described in the puha row — dreamed, unsought, held by men and women, the antelope charmer and the healer and the one held lethally to account — was made a punishable offence by administrative rule in 1883, the same year Sarah Winnemucca published. And note what the rule is not: it is not a trial. What Massachusetts prosecuted as witchcraft in a colonial court in 1692, with evidence and a jury and, eventually, an apology, Washington handled two centuries later as a regulation, with no proceeding to acquit anyone and nothing to overturn. The Ghost Dance suppression that ends at Wounded Knee in 1890 is the same policy reaching its end point. Denominations were competing for jurisdiction over Native people as a matter of federal policy, and the practice they were displacing had already been made illegal.

Grant’s Peace Policy from 1869 allocating agencies by denomination; Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions founded 1874; Code of Indian Offenses 1883 establishing Courts of Indian Offenses with provisions against the practices of medicine men.

the Comstock decades

The Cornish who dominated Comstock hard-rock work were largely Methodist. The Irish working beside them were Catholic. The split ran through hiring, marriage and burial, and it is still legible in the buildings and the ground — Father Manogue’s St. Mary in the Mountains on one side, the Cornish chapels on the other.

why it is Nevada’s The Comstock is remembered through its bonanza kings, and the census counts its labour badly. The sacramental registers of that parish are the best surviving record of the Irish, Cornish, Mexican and Italian men who actually cut the rock — which means the most reliable demographic source for the richest silver strike in the hemisphere is a set of baptism and burial books. And the men carrying the Knockers down the shaft were the Methodist half of that split, which is a useful corrective to treating the folklore as generically “miners’ superstition.” It had a denomination and a home county.

Cornish Methodist and Irish Catholic labour on the Comstock; Patrick Manogue, a former miner, at St. Mary in the Mountains, later bishop. Diocese of Reno archives hold the sacramental registers — listed in the repositories table below.

Wodziwob at Walker River, 1870; Wovoka at Mason Valley, 1889

Wodziwob, a Northern Paiute at Walker River, began preaching a round dance in 1870 that would bring back the dead and the game. It spread west and faded. Then in 1889 Wovoka — a Northern Paiute of Mason Valley, known to settlers as Jack Wilson — had a vision and began the second Ghost Dance. That one crossed the Rockies and reached the Plains, where it acquired the ghost shirt, believed to stop bullets. It ended at Wounded Knee in December 1890.

why it is Nevada’s The single most consequential religious movement in Native North America started twice, twenty years apart, in two Nevada valleys — and neither is where anybody thinks it happened. And the thread back is direct: belief that a man could be made arrow-proof, and after firearms bullet-proof, is reported for the Northern Paiute and the Gosiute well before 1889. The ghost shirt did not appear out of nowhere on the Plains in 1890. It was already here, in the Basin, in the theory of puha — and it had already been tested against cavalry rifles through four years of the Snake War.

Wodziwob’s 1870 movement at Walker River; Wovoka’s vision and the 1889–90 Ghost Dance out of Mason Valley; Wounded Knee 29 December 1890. The invulnerability belief is reported in the Great Basin ethnography independently of, and earlier than, the Plains ghost shirt. **And this one row is not dependent on ethnography at all: Wovoka’s own words survive as the Messiah Letter, dictated and transcribed in James Mooney’s Bureau of American Ethnology report of 1896, and it is public domain.** It is the only Nevada Native religious text of the period in the speaker’s own framing rather than an observer’s — which makes it the strongest-sourced entry in this chapter and the one that should be read before any of the rows above it.

1892–1902

Nevada did not argue about free silver inside the national parties — it left them. The Silver Party ran the state for a decade, took the governorship and the congressional seats, and made restoration of silver coinage the whole of its platform.

why it is Nevada’s A state so narrowly built that a single monetary decision made in Washington in 1873 produced its own third party twenty years later, and that party won. It is the clearest measure of how completely Nevada was one commodity.

The Silver Party held statewide office through the 1890s. It faded once the 1900 strikes made the argument moot.