A basis line you can walk into

22 places and what each can actually settle, 8 primary texts named individually because the non-Anglo record is thin enough that it has to be named rather than searched for, and 19 works of western writing coded rather than listed.

repositories

Repository	Where	Access	What it can settle
Special Collections and University Archives, University of Nevada, Reno	Reno	onsite	Goldfield 1907-08 from the governor's own desk, including Roosevelt's telegram of 7 February 1908. The water-rights spine from filing to decree.
GLO survey plats and field notes (BLM General Land Office Records)	Online, free, searchable by township and range	online	What was actually on the ground at the moment of survey, township by township, statewide. THE most valuable single source for this volume — it would let the site-logic layer be derived from period record rather than assigned by hand, which is the one weakness that finding carries.
BLM Nevada PLSS and land status	Online — shapefiles and a live map service	online	Resolves the legal descriptions in every deed, mining claim and water right onto actual ground — and draws the ~80% federal figure instead of asserting it.
Nevada Division of Water Resources open data	Online — ArcGIS Hub, updated daily	online	Whether a basin is over-appropriated — settled from the state's own filings rather than quoted from someone who says so. The row this volume most needs to stop citing second-hand.
Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology open data	Reno / online	online	Where the ore actually was, and which historical map layers exist for a given township.
USGS National Map — 3DEP lidar and the National Hydrography Dataset	Online	online	Trail ruts and abandoned ditch alignments that are invisible on imagery. The instrument for testing a route claim rather than repeating one.
Buckaroos in Paradise (American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)	Paradise Valley, Humboldt County — digitised, online	online	What buckaroo work actually looked like, from every voice in one valley at once. The deepest single record set for this material, and free.
Jon Bilbao Basque Library	Reno	onsite	The sheepherding decades in the herders' own hand. Roughly 25,000 arborglyphs documented across the Basin; 70-80% of northern Nevada's are already gone.
Oral History Program, University of Nevada, Reno	Reno	request	Twentieth-century recollection where no written record was kept.
Washoe County Library newspaper archive	Reno	card	The 1920 Gazette line on reducing Pyramid Lake to an alkali flat. Search 1920 for Pyramid Lake + alkali.
Chronicling America (Library of Congress)	online	online	Comstock-era press, at no cost. Coverage thins after the early 1960s.
Nevada State Library, Archives and Public Records	Carson City	card	Statutes as enacted, including the 1908 State Police act.
Nevada Historical Society	Reno	onsite	Almost anything the university lacks for the north.
Nevada State Museum	Carson City	onsite	The silver chapter as object rather than description.
W.M. Keck Earth Science and Mineral Engineering Museum, Mackay School of Mines	Reno	onsite	What the ore became.
Fourth Ward School Museum	Virginia City	onsite	The town at its peak, and what the district designation preserved.
Diocese of Reno archives; St. Mary in the Mountains	Reno / Virginia City	request	Irish, Cornish, Mexican and Italian labour on the lode — the population the census counts badly and the bonanza histories omit.
Truckee-Carson Irrigation District	Fallon	request	Farm-by-farm delivery — the nearest thing to a project ledger.
National Archives, Record Group 115 (Bureau of Reclamation)	Denver	request	What the engineers wrote to each other while the lake fell.
Churchill and Lyon county assessor and recorder	Fallon / Yerington	request	Who actually held the irrigated land, without asking anyone's permission.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs	online	online	Publishable high-resolution imagery, free.
USGS Photographic Library	online	online	Mining districts as surveyed rather than as advertised. Underused.

the primary texts

Diary of the expedition to the Californias1830Memoir
Antonio Armijo
Left Abiquiu 7 November 1829 with sixty men; scout Rafael Rivera detached near present-day Mesquite, was gone thirteen days, and rejoined at the mouth of Las Vegas Wash on 7 January 1830. Sent from Santa Fe 14 May 1830, published in the Registro Oficial del Gobierno, Mexico City, 19 June 1830. Hafen and Hafen translation. The only Mexican-era text crossing Nevada ground.
Roughing It1872Memoir
Mark Twain
Took the pen name at the Territorial Enterprise, Virginia City, February 1863. Literature first, evidence second.
The History of the Big Bonanza1876Contemporary press
Dan De Quille (William Wright)
Twain's colleague at the Territorial Enterprise. The insider technical account, and the better of the two Comstock books.
Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims1883Native testimony
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins
Northern Paiute, writing within twenty years of the Snake War. The one contemporary account from inside.
The Messiah Letter, in The Ghost-Dance Religion1896Native testimony
Wovoka, transcribed by James Mooney
Wovoka's own words as dictated. Public domain. The only Nevada Native religious text of the period in the speaker's framing.
The City of Trembling Leaves1945Memoir
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
The Reno novel. Belongs against the divorce-trade chapter.
Sweet Promised Land1957Memoir
Robert Laxalt
His father Dominique came at sixteen, sent out with a dog and three thousand sheep. Pairs with the arborglyph collections.
Tribal histories (Numu, Newe, Nuwuvi, Wa She Shu)1976Native testimonycontested
Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada
Tribally authored histories, mid-1970s. Verify titles and dates before citing.

the songs

The one archive the losing side owned

Every other source here has a patron. Camp newspapers were read by shareholders in San Francisco, so boosterism was a product with a buyer. Court records belong to the state. Memoirs are written for reputations. A ballad has no owner and no press — it circulates by being sung.

And songs break the idea that a source is a text. A corrido has ten variants and no canonical version. A bertso exists only in the moment it is performed. A Ghost Dance song survives inside a federal ethnographer’s transcription — the artefact is a translation of something the translator did not sing. So basis cannot mean the text; it has to mean the attestation, and that is a scale:

1fixed text, named author, dated
2fixed text, contested attribution
3variant field, no canonical text — a collector's authority
4performance only — a witness's report

And the grade turns out to be a property of the collector, not of the song.Not one of these is findable on its own terms — Mooney, Paredes, Arhoolie, the Western Folklife Center, the UNR Basque Library. Each survived because somebody institutional wrote it down. So the useful move is not to hunt songs but to take a collector’s whole catalogue, because the grade travels with them.

Song	Year	For whom	Harm from	Over?	Grade	What it shows
Ghost Dance songs (Northern Paiute, Washo, Pit River)sung by the dancers; transcribed by James Mooney	1896	prior	institution	ongoing	3	Mooney went to Wovoka in Nevada and recorded the song lyrics of seven tribes, with a dedicated section on the Paiute, Washo and Pit River, published in 1896 as part 2 of the fourteenth annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology. The Library of Congress holds wax cylinders whose translations key to that report. This is the SUNG HALF of the Messiah Letter, which is already the best-sourced Native text in this volume — and note the shape of the artefact: a federal ethnographer's transcription and English gloss of something he did not sing. The survival and the distortion arrive in the same object.
El Corrido de Gregorio Cortezanonymous; ten variants collected by Américo Paredes	1901	prior	institution	ongoing	3	Variants appeared as early as 1901 — the SAME YEAR as the shooting. That is the row's whole weight: the ballad and the newspaper account were competing in real time, not one answering the other decades later, which is the position this volume keeps finding is missing everywhere else. The trigger is a mistranslation, and it is attested independently of Paredes: the deputy's interpreter did not distinguish caballo from yegua, Cortez had traded a mare, so his denial about a horse was truthful and the sheriff heard only the no. ⚠ AND THE MAN REMAINS CONTESTED ON HIS OWN MERITS — the historian Richard Mertz interviewed acquaintances who said Cortez and his brothers had been involved in horse theft in the 1880s. Keep that in. A row that resolves the ballad's dispute by making its subject innocent has just done the thing this volume exists to refuse.
Labour songs at GoldfieldIWW singers; the Little Red Songbook	1909	everyone	institution	closed	2	⚠ ADMITTED AS CONTESTED AND ON THIN GROUND, deliberately. The 1906–07 Goldfield troubles are described as the point of the IWW's greatest power in any labour market, ended by federal troops in December 1907. The Little Red Songbook — old folk songs and hymns fitted with new words, which is the whole technique — first appeared in 1909, TWO YEARS AFTER. So the link is thematic, not evidentiary, until somebody finds what Goldfield strikers actually sang. It is in the file so the gap is visible rather than filled; delete it or replace it, but do not let it quietly become a claim.
Home Means NevadaBertha Raffetto	1932	settler	nature	closed	1	Written 1932, adopted by the Legislature in 1933 — and Raffetto is said to have sung it 187 times in three months before it went to the Legislature carrying a file of endorsements. A song that becomes law by statute. Set it against the Ghost Dance songs sung in the same state four decades earlier and preserved only because a federal ethnographer wrote them down, and you have the cleanest pair on the institution axis this volume holds: one song ADOPTED by the state, one song SURVIVING the state, and the difference is not quality.
El Paso · Feleena (From El Paso) · El Paso CityMarty Robbins	1959	settler	individual	closed	1	The anomaly, and the reason it earns a row. Robbins sits squarely in the myth tradition — settler, individual, closed — and then does something the tradition almost never does: seven years after the 1959 song he writes Feleena's own, from her life, at length, and ten years after that a third about a man on a plane remembering the first. A PERSPECTIVE SHIFT EXECUTED FROM INSIDE THE WINNING ACCOUNT, with nobody forcing it. That is rarer than a counter-ballad and, for a volume about whose account survived, more interesting — because the corrido had to be sung by the other side, and this did not.
Bertsolaritza in NevadaBasque bertsolaris; a competition at Gardnerville since 1988	1988	everyone	institution	ongoing	4	Improvised sung verse, composed in the moment and often never written down — attestation grade 4 by construction, because the artefact is the performance. An annual competition has run at Gardnerville since 1988; Jesus Goñi lives in Reno; four bertsolaris took a National Heritage Award in 2003; and Elko's 2018 Cowboy Poetry Gathering ran under the theme 'Basques Buckaroos: Herding Cultures of Basin, Range and Beyond', where a champion sang that Nevada is the eighth province of Basque country. 🔴 AND HERE IS THE FINDING: there are no Basque sheepherders left in the American West, and the bards still sing sheepherding topics. THE SUBJECT IS EXTINCT AND THE FORM IS NOT. Set that beside the arborglyphs dying with the aspens and you have the same people keeping two archives at two speeds — one on a tree, one in a voice, and only the voice is still being added to.

The losing side is not silent. It is unwritten.

Not one of these was missing from the record because nobody made it. A corrido circulated in cantinas the year of the shooting. Songs were sung in a Nevada round dance. Verses were improvised at a sheep camp and gone by morning. They are thin in the record because the medium deposited nothing a records office collects — and the archive cannot tell that apart from silence.

Which is a correction this layer makes to the rest of the volume, not an addition to it. A row marked settled may be settled because nobody contested it, or settled because the contest was sung. Those are different facts, and the schema on 159 rows cannot currently tell them apart.

preservation lagn = 5

Honour arrives once the threat expires — except it doesn't

reading itHollow circle: the event, or the practice at its height. Filled circle: the year an institution transcribed, honoured or adopted it. The line between them is the wait. Solid gold means the thing still cost somebody something when it was preserved; dashed blue means the threat had expired.

predictedThat institutions preserve counter-traditions once those traditions stop costing anything — so the dashed spans, the ones where the threat had already died, should be the long ones.

foundMean wait where the threat had expired: 30y. Where it was still live: 22y. The predicted direction, and worthless, because the two clearest cases point the wrong way and the chart shows it: the shortest wait in the set belongs to Ghost Dance songs at 6 years — a federal ethnographer transcribing a movement his own government had just broken — and the longest belongs to Corrido de Gregorio Cortez at 57 years, the one entry where the threat demonstrably had not expired.

⚠ n = 5. Counts rather than percentages throughout — a percentage implies a precision 5 rows do not have. The falsifier was written before the count and named the likelier mechanism — who happened to be doing fieldwork when — which is what the chart actually shows. Kept rather than deleted, and not repaired by dropping the row that breaks it.

⚠ These rows were verified in a different session that named its sources, and could not be re-verified here. Named sources beat unsourced claims and are not the same thing as independent confirmation — treat them as carried, not confirmed. Each row in lib/nevada-music.ts names the exact archive that would settle it.

the shelf, coded

Look for a bad man, or look for a signature

The literature is evidence in this volume, not commentary on it, because every one of these works takes a position on the same three questions: who the West is for, where the harm comes from, and whether it is over. The myth tradition answers settler, individual, closed. The counter-tradition answers everyone or prior, institution, ongoing. That single split is why two books about the same valley feel like different planets.

A work coded individual is telling you to look for a bad man. A work coded institution is telling you to look for a signature. This volume argues for the second reading throughout — the telegram, the decree, the superintendent — so the coding is not neutral and is labelled as the editorial position it is. Counted: 14 institution, 4 individual, 1 nature.

Work	Year	For whom	Harm from	Over?	Note
The Leatherstocking TalesJames Fenimore Cooper	1841	settler	individual	closed	Invents the frontier hero before the frontier reached the Basin. Natty Bumppo is the template every later cowboy is cut from.
Roughing ItMark Twain	1872	settler	individual	ongoing	Comic and deflationary. The Comstock as absurd rather than epic — the only major early account that refuses the heroic register. He mined at Aurora and Unionville; both are in this volume's register and both are dead.
The History of the Big BonanzaDan De Quille	1876	settler	institution	ongoing	Twain's colleague at the Enterprise. The technical insider account, and the better source of the two.
Report on the Lands of the Arid RegionJohn Wesley Powell	1878	everyone	institution	ongoing	Told Congress the West could not be settled on the eastern model, and proposed organising it by watershed with land units sized to the water. Ignored. Newlands' model won instead.
Life Among the PiutesSarah Winnemucca Hopkins	1883	prior	institution	ongoing	Northern Paiute, within twenty years of the Snake War. The only contemporary account from inside — and it names agents and agencies rather than fate.
The VirginianOwen Wister	1902	settler	individual	closed	The founding Western. Invents the walkdown and the code, and makes private force honourable. Dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt — who five years later supplied it at Goldfield.
The Land of Little RainMary Austin	1903	prior	institution	ongoing	The desert written as sufficient rather than deficient — a place with its own working economy of scarcity, not a failed version of somewhere wetter. She also fought the Owens Valley water grab, the same mechanism as Newlands from the California side. The direct antidote to the wasteland framing.
Riders of the Purple SageZane Grey	1912	settler	individual	closed	Mass-market consolidation of Wister's formula. The version that reached everyone.
The Grapes of WrathJohn Steinbeck	1939	everyone	institution	ongoing	The gloom is about TENURE, not landscape: they reach abundance and are locked out by title. Preceded by his 1936 San Francisco News migrant-camp reportage, so there is a documentary layer to check the novel against. Banned in Kern County, the county it depicts — a contested source, which is a stronger position than a neutral one.
The Ox-Bow IncidentWalter Van Tilburg Clark	1940	everyone	institution	ongoing	The anti-Western, by a Nevadan who taught at UNR. A vigilance committee hangs three men and is wrong. Reads directly against the vigilance-committee tradition.
Beyond the Hundredth MeridianWallace Stegner	1954	everyone	institution	ongoing	Powell's defeat told as the founding error of western settlement. The book that makes aridity a political subject rather than a weather report.
Sweet Promised LandRobert Laxalt	1957	everyone	institution	ongoing	His father Dominique, sent out at sixteen with a dog and three thousand sheep. Pairs with the arborglyph collections — the same men, one of whom got a book.
With His Pistol in His HandAmérico Paredes	1958	prior	institution	ongoing	The border ballad tradition, and the Texas Rangers from the other side. The first serious counter to Webb.
House Made of DawnN. Scott Momaday	1968	prior	institution	ongoing	Kiowa. Won the Pulitzer and opened the modern Native literary canon.
CeremonyLeslie Marmon Silko	1977	prior	institution	ongoing	Laguna Pueblo. Uranium mining, the bomb and ceremony in one structure — the Test Site chapter's literary counterpart.
Blood MeridianCormac McCarthy	1985	settler	nature	closed	The single largest source of the modern 'West as metaphysical horror' register. Coded agent=nature DELIBERATELY: it dissolves institutional responsibility into cosmic violence — nobody signs anything in that book. It belongs in the volume and it should never be cited as history.
Cadillac DesertMarc Reisner	1986	everyone	institution	ongoing	The definitive water book. Reclamation as an engine that outlived its justification. Direct background to Newlands and Orr Ditch.
The Legacy of ConquestPatricia Nelson Limerick	1987	prior	institution	ongoing	New Western History. The West as a place with a continuous history of conquest, not a process that closed in 1893. The direct refutation of Turner.
Where I Was FromJoan Didion	2003	everyone	institution	ongoing	California's ideology of self-reliance financed end to end by federal money — land grants, water projects, defence contracts. Nevada is the purer case: 80% federal land, a reclamation project, a dam, a test site, and a self-image of being left alone. If this volume takes one epigraph, it is this argument.