Order 2072766: Nevada history

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Like a new year, a new century marks a turning point. In American his- tory, the controversial election of 1800 prompted the first transfer of government power, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson; the more controversial 2000 election, with Al Gore’s popular-vote lead and George W. Bush’s Electoral College victory, took place in the shadow of y2k and concerns about computers upending civilization. By contrast, the 1900 presidential election seemed quiet—William Jennings Bryan disappointed Nevada Silverites, losing again to Republican William McKinley—but the twentieth century’s first decades brought different responses to change throughout the United States and the world. Nevada evolved similarly. Its government and political system changed in important ways, but it did so amid an economic revival created by a mining boom in the south-central and eastern portions of Nevada that reshaped the state’s society and culture in almost every way.

Births of the Booms

As 1900 arrived, Nevada’s two-decade depression continued, and pros- pectors searched and hoped. In the San Antonio Mountains southwest of Belmont, one story says, Western Shoshone Tom Fisherman led miner, rancher, and attorney Jim Butler to a new bonanza. According to legend— and perhaps some reality—a windstorm that May 19 forced Butler to seek shelter. His quest to find his burro, which had wandered away, led him to an outcropping of gold and silver, but he had no funds to assay it. He turned to county recorder Wilson Brougher and Belmont lawyer Tasker Oddie, a New Yorker representing mining investor Anson Phelps Stokes. Also short of money, Oddie traded part of his interest in the ore to local

A New Century, a New Boom

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science teacher Walter Gayhart in return for an assay. A month later, Gay- hart reported 640 ounces in silver and $200 in gold per ton. Not until August 25, after finishing with clients and harvesting, did Butler return to the site and file claims for himself and his two partners—and apparently he acted only at the behest of his wife, Belle, who discovered the largest Butler claim and ran their ranch.

Their new camp, Tonopah, never approached Virginia City in impor- tance or wealth (production peaked at $9 million in 1914), but it ended Nevada’s two decades of depression. Just as mining booms begat other towns—Virginia City and Austin had been “mother camps,” for exam- ple—Tonopah fostered other booms and boomtowns. Late in 1902 Jim Butler and Tom Kendall grubstaked prospectors Harry Stimler and Wil- liam Marsh in exchange for a percentage of what they found. On Decem- ber 4, in the Columbia Mountains about thirty miles south of Tonopah, they found gold—and Fisherman, who may have been related to Stimler’s Shoshone mother, probably led them there. Additional exploration, espe- cially in January 1904, gave birth to Goldfield. That year Frank “Shorty” Harris and Ernest Cross found gold in southern Nye County’s Amargosa Valley, just east of Death Valley. This area became the Bullfrog District, home of the mining boomtown of Rhyolite and a nearby freighting center, Beatty.

Butler’s original find led to about a hundred discoveries and, with them, the creation of numerous boomtowns that served, as nineteenth-century towns did, as hubs for mining and ranching hinterlands. Cattlemen located gold north of Tonopah at an old camp, Manhattan, in 1905, and the popula- tion reached about four thousand in a year—until the San Francisco earth- quake also shook investors and delayed development, although the camp revived and produced into the 1920s. Almost concurrently, gold discoveries to the north triggered another mining town, Round Mountain, which gen- erated $1 million by 1909, while other short-lived camps sprang to life near Tonopah and Goldfield. Like their predecessors, they boasted large num- bers of saloons (one in Rawhide rented floor space as beds) as well as news- papers, schools, and community organizations. Tonopah and Goldfield residents suffered through a great deal of disease, due partly to unsani- tary conditions, yet Tonopah in particular became civilized more speedily than other, earlier, camps, with more families moving in and wives forming clubs and societies.

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Also in 1900 eastern Nevada joined in the revival. In 1870 White Pine’s Robinson District yielded low-grade copper, but that exploration proved brief due to minimal demand and a lack of transportation and technology. By the late 1890s investors expressed renewed interest, thanks to the need for electric wiring created by Thomas Edison inventing the dc generator and George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla perfecting the ac, a techno- logical change perhaps as influential in its time as computers and cellular phones in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, young miners Edwin Gray and Dave Bartley tried their luck. Grubstaked by a gro- cer, they filed two claims near Ely, tunneled into the mountain, found cop- per on all sides at 145 feet down, and kept going deeper. The rush to Ely and the surrounding area would follow, but not right away.

The Discoverers

The early days of Nevada’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century mining booms revealed a series of similarities and differences. The latter’s founders generally emerged with more substantial funds, and capital traveled dif- ferent routes to central and eastern Nevada than it did to the Comstock, although it produced similar results. In October 1902 Gray and Bartley optioned their Ely claims for $150,000 in stock to Eureka and Palisade Railroad owner Mark Requa, son of a Comstock mining engineer. Requa took over another company, incorporated the Nevada Consolidated Cop- per Company in November 1904, and won backing from eastern investors. He also prompted competition from the Guggenheim family, which had entered western mining with Colorado lead and silver and expanded into copper there and in Arizona until, by the late 1910s, they controlled three- quarters of the world’s silver, copper, and lead production. They obtained a site for water and a smelter, incorporated the Cumberland-Ely Copper Company, and helped finance construction of Requa’s planned Northern Nevada Railway. But the Guggenheims eventually took over Requa’s com- pany. Requa may have expected to play a role in managing their White Pine claims; he proved mistaken.

The Guggenheims acted much as the Bank Crowd did in Virginia City. They took over Requa’s railroad and mining claims. Just as William Sha- ron ordered studies of the Comstock and responded to a downturn, the Guggenheims spent $4 million on preparation and continued as the panic of 1907 choked off investment and reduced stock prices. No ore shipped

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out of the district until August 1908, but staggering results followed: pro- duction skyrocketed from nearly $625,000 in 1908 to $6.5 million in 1909. The Guggenheims later incorporated Kennecott Copper, which controlled most White Pine production into the 1980s. Just as Comstock gold and sil- ver profits went west to San Francisco, White Pine copper earnings traveled to other company holdings in Utah and Arizona and back east to finance a family of investors and philanthropists.

Tonopah fed off local ownership and outside development. Butler and Oddie filed every claim they could but realized they lacked the capital, time, or personnel to work them. When San Francisco investors, suspicious of speculating in Nevada due to so many recent failures there, declined their overtures, Tonopah’s founders developed the lease system, enabling them to retain ownership, employ miners to handle the work, and share the profits. Butler and Oddie granted each lessee one hundred feet of the vein and fifty feet on each side and received 25 percent of the revenue pro- duced, ensuring employment for others and profits for themselves.

Finally, Butler and Oddie attracted buyers. The publicity about their leasing system drew interest from outside investors, led by Philadelphia’s Brock family, whose members controlled numerous eastern businesses,

Tonopah’s discovery in 1900 revitalized Nevada’s economy and created a boomtown where few Nevadans had previously lived or traveled. Courtesy of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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including coal mining. In July 1901, a year after the discovery, Butler and Oddie sold their portions for more than $300,000, but their lives took dif- ferent trajectories. Whereas Butler concentrated on other businesses and held on to his money, Oddie felt he sold too low and too soon, but went to work for the new investors and made hundreds of thousands of dollars on stock transactions. Then he lost his fortune in mining speculation and the panic of 1907 and ran for governor because he needed the job—and won. The Brocks incorporated the Tonopah Mining Company and followed in the footsteps of earlier Nevada mine owners such as the Bank Crowd and Bonanza Kings. They vertically integrated, adding milling and water companies and banks to their holdings, but for additional reasons: private water companies sought to serve homes and local businesses rather than mines, and they needed power lines run from California to be able to build modern mills.

The Bullfrog District resembled such earlier booms as Hamilton and Treasure Hill: intense but brief. Because Bullfrog, Rhyolite, and nearby camps materialized after Tonopah and Goldfield, which proved Nevada had come back to life, the rush began quickly. In 1905 miner E. A. “Bob” Montgomery incorporated the Montgomery-Shoshone company and soon sold most of it to Charles M. Schwab, president of US Steel and an investor and a stock speculator in the Tonopah area (and no relation to the modern broker). But its mines and others soon petered out, leaving mostly ghost towns and ghosts: old buildings and, most notably in Rhyolite, a house made of bottles, which the local saloon industry, always a beneficiary of mining capital, helped supply. One of Rhyolite’s buildings housed the law offices of William Morris Stewart, who moved there after leaving the Sen- ate in 1905 and even became a member of the local school board.

Goldfield and Wingfield

Like Tonopah, Goldfield operated at first under the leasing system. One lease, the Hayes-Monnette, generated a carload of ore worth nearly $575,000. This had two effects: the Monnettes took their profits out of Nevada and put them into what became Bank of America, and outside investment in Goldfield’s one-hundred-plus mining companies became inevitable. Nevadans George Nixon and George Wingfield became the catalysts and beneficiaries. After investigating the region, and busy with a US Senate seat he had won in 1905, Nixon provided capital. Wingfield, an

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Arkansas native, did most of the work. A cowboy, gambler, and saloon- keeper who lived in Winnemucca and Golconda before arriving in Tonopah in 1901, he moved around central Nevada, investing in mines, manipulating and speculating in stock, and looking for luck to strike. In 1906 Wingfield moved on to Goldfield and bought the Jumbo, Red Top, and Mohawk mines. He and Nixon incorporated what historian Sally Zan- jani has called “the economic juggernaut that dominated the district”: the Goldfield Consolidated Mines Company, capitalized at $50 million and the first Nevada mining firm on the New York Stock Exchange, complete with financing from legendary Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch (who had a Nevada link through marriage to the Olcoviches, a pioneer Jewish family in Carson City).

Nixon and Wingfield became the early-twentieth-century equivalents of the Bank Crowd. They bought additional properties throughout the year and, by early 1907, owned almost every producing mine in Goldfield. Then they vertically integrated with a vengeance, especially in banking and milling. Wingfield oversaw a one-hundred-stamp mill that used the “all- sliming” technique, which relied more heavily on cyanide and improved production and profits. Within two years Nixon and Wingfield bought out the Brocks and took over Tonopah.

Wingfield’s takeover involved even more than that. In 1909 he and Nixon dissolved their partnership so that Nixon could concentrate on banking and Wingfield on mining. Wingfield said, “I have took over every- thing.” That year his company generated $10 million in gold and $7 million in stock dividends. But after Nixon’s death in 1912, despite Governor Tasker Oddie’s description of him as having “a wonderfully strong and pleasing personality, an iron nerve, unexcelled business ability and integrity and an intimate knowledge of the general condition and needs of the State,” Wingfield declined the offer of an appointment as his successor, claiming responsibilities in and to Nevada. He then bought out Nixon’s widow and ended up owning most of the major mines outside of the White Pine cop- per boom, most of the state’s leading banks, large ranches in northern and central Nevada as well as several California enterprises, and several hotels.

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Boomtown Life

The twentieth-century boomtowns resembled and diverged from their earlier counterparts. With any mining discovery, a district soon followed with a recorder, and the local saloon usually became the central meeting place—Wyatt Earp owned one saloon in Tonopah, the Northern. Unlike the Comstock, originating in mostly ungoverned western Utah territory, Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely, and other towns began in existing counties and thus had some form of government in place. These factors contributed to the earlier arrival of families and such institutions as schools, churches, and public libraries, first in tents and then in wood buildings; if the boomtown survived, brick structures followed quickly. Town boards concentrated on problems ranging from sanitation to imposing monthly $5 licensing fees for prostitutes. Most of the communities also included tennis courts, and Searchlight reported a bowling alley. Social events sometimes depended on class and status: at the peak of his wealth and influence in Tonopah, Oddie held a dance party three hundred feet down in his Mizpah Mine, while miners often participated in drilling competitions, often as part of bigger community-wide celebrations, that allowed them to display their prowess, speed, and strength.

Journalism in early 1900s Nevada never competed with the Territorial Enterprise’s brilliant staff of the 1860s and 1870s. While editors and pub- lishers in Nevada’s largest city, Reno, promoted civic betterment and influ- enced policy in the Nevada State Journal and the Reno Evening Gazette, mining-camp editors served a different but still important function. Their information contributed to the boom-and-bust cycle, depending on their accuracy and, sometimes, the editors’ involvement in the industry, stock speculation, and politics. One of the era’s leading editors, Frank Garside, owned several mining-camp newspapers, including Tonopah’s, and later published Las Vegas’s largest daily. Arthur Buel spent three years as an edi- torial cartoonist in Tonopah before moving on to Reno for three years and then to a long career in northern California newspapers.

The populations of Tonopah and Goldfield both shot above ten thou- sand, although the lack of a census until 1910 leaves such numbers open to debate. Within two years of its founding, Tonopah boasted an estimated three thousand residents, thirty-two saloons, a church, a school, and two weekly newspapers; Goldfield grew rapidly, too. As with the Comstock, not

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only investors and entrepreneurs but also attorneys flocked to the region. From the Klondike came Key Pittman, who practiced law, mined, and entered politics. George Bartlett arrived from Eureka, spent two terms in Congress during the boom, and became a US attorney and a judge, enjoy- ing ties to Wingfield throughout his career. Son of an Irish immigrant sheepherder, Pat McCarran moved down after representing Reno in the assembly for a term and became Nye County district attorney and, eventu- ally, an almost constant annoyance to Wingfield and Pittman.

Humboldt and Elko County always relied more on railroads and ranch- ing than on mining, but the rebirth of Nevada mining prompted a popu- lation influx, more markets for livestock, and the urbanization that always accompanied discoveries. Tuscarora generated half of Elko County’s nineteenth-century mining production, and investment spiked in 1907, but that year’s national depression ended that effort. That year, northwest of Elko, a gold discovery led to the founding of Midas, a platted town site, and about two thousand residents within a year; it went through ups and downs, prospering again from 1915 into the early 1920s. A gold discovery in the western Bull Run Mountains led to Edgemont, a large mill, and sub- stantial production until an avalanche destroyed most of the area in 1917.

Goldfield became not just a boomtown but a community with mining at the center of it. Miners often participated in parades like this one as a relief from their work. Cour- tesy of Special Collections, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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Jarbidge grew to more than fifteen hundred amid rumors of gold in 1910 but went through on-and-off development over the next decade. Near Winnemucca discovery of several ores led to the founding of Golconda in 1898 and a decade of production, but it became more famous for its celebri- ties: Wingfield invested in the boom and befriended a young mining engi- neer named Herbert Hoover, who later became a friend of Mark Requa, the early Ely promoter and, during World War I, a member of Hoover’s staff in the US Food Administration.

New Railroads and Towns: The Rise of Las Vegas

Mining developments in southern and central Nevada enticed Nevadans such as Nixon and Requa as well as outside investors. In 1902 Senator Wil- liam Andrews Clark, a Montana copper baron who had just invested in Ely, bought Helen Stewart’s acreage and water rights in the Las Vegas Valley for his proposed San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. He planned to transport his copper to California markets and overseas, especially with the spread of electricity and the accompanying need for copper wire. Edward Henry Harriman, the New York stockbroker running the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific (sp), planned the Oregon Short Line along the same route, also attracted by the burgeoning southern California market. Con- struction began on both lines, at times yards apart, with brawls between the workers ensuing. Finally, the two companies merged; split ownership, with Clark responsible for the railroad’s operations; and completed con- struction. Shortly thereafter, on May 15, 1905, officials auctioned off a town site, now the heart of downtown Las Vegas.

While Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely, and others relied mainly on mining, and mining officials even created company towns, Las Vegas resembled the nineteenth-century railroad towns, especially those the Central Pacific cre- ated. Like Carlin, Lovelock, and Wadsworth, Las Vegas served as a railroad division point—a storage facility, a repair center and housing spot for train crews, and a shipping and transportation depot for those in the hinterland who sent resources to it, obtained others from it, and connected through it to national and international markets. The railroad made Las Vegas func- tion almost as a company town and, from its beginnings, as a twenty-four- hour community catering to travelers and railroad workers. The railroad’s subsidiary, the Las Vegas Land & Water Company, largely controlled local utilities and services, thanks to its water rights, prompting entrepreneurs to

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dig their own wells outside of the town site, leading to considerable waste. The railroad also limited activities in town: it barred liquor sales outside of one block, but exempted hotels, prompting saloon owners to compete by installing brothels, which operated on Block 16 until World War II. The railroad affected the economy in other ways: flooding along various parts of the line virtually shut down Las Vegas on several occasions for lack of employment and supplies.

As in the mining towns, and in earlier incarnations, power prompted dissent and civic responses. J. T. McWilliams had been a railroad surveyor before trying to start a competing town site west of the tracks. Because McWilliams lacked water rights and the capital to take on the Clark and Union Pacific interests, most residents moved to the new town. After a fire all but leveled Ragtown, as it became known for its canvas buildings, late in 1905, McWilliams alternately worked for and annoyed the railroad while trying to develop nearby Lee Canyon into a recreational and tour- ist area. Yet the railroad’s presence also promoted a sense of permanence, so early Las Vegans set out to build a community. In 1911 Helen Stewart helped start the Mesquite Club, a women’s organization still involved in community education and civic activities, and businessmen created the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which promotes the town and eventually bridged the gap between established community members and businesses that struck them as catering to vice.

Thanks to the railroad, Las Vegas wound up playing a role similar to Reno: central hub for a mining hinterland. The boom to the north and the railroad construction that built Las Vegas encouraged nearby mining in the town’s early years. Searchlight, founded as a mining district in 1898, com- peted with Las Vegas for population but declined after 1908. Although it had ties to Las Vegas, Searchlight boasted its own nearby ranches, attracted eastern investment, and enjoyed a decade of growth that resembled most significant Nevada mining areas. Potosi revived, becoming Nevada’s top zinc producer during the 1910s. Goodsprings had been known for lead, gold, and zinc, but production quadrupled with the railroad’s completion, which eased transportation. Eldorado Canyon stirred again, with the town of Nelson platted nearby.

Like Reno, Elko, Winnemucca, and other northern towns, Las Vegas owed its growth to railroad building—as do other early-twentieth-century communities (see map on page 104). The central and eastern Nevada

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boomtowns would have prospered less without railroads. Serving the new rushes, the Carson & Colorado stirred to life and benefited Southern Pacific coffers—Collis Huntington bought it cheap in the late 1890s—but not politically, as the railroad’s influence declined in Nevada. The sp also emulated the cp in creating communities along its tracks. During a rebuild- ing phase in the early 1900s that altered the direction of its tracks, the sp bought ranches in the Truckee Meadows to replace its older or obsolete repair shops at Wadsworth. Just as the up and Clark created a town site in Las Vegas, the sp set up a town for its shops just east of Reno and named it for Governor John Sparks. The doubling of Reno’s population from 1900 to 1910 demonstrated the impact of the revival of mining and railroad build- ing outside their immediate areas.

The economic revival prompted new construction. The v&t’s expan- sion south from Carson City—expected to extend into California—went through Carson Valley. The Dangbergs, the area’s leading ranching family, proposed and planned a town along the tracks and named it for Minden, the German town from which H. F. Dangberg came. The Western Pacific Railroad, created in 1903, extended from California through northern Washoe County to Winnemucca, paralleling the sp until crossing into Utah at Wendover; it later built a branch line to Reno. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, one of the nation’s largest lines, entered Searchlight from Barn- well, one of its sidings in southern California—and managed to offend locals by employing hundreds of Mexicans in helping to build it. When the train stopped operating, the Searchlight residents who used the ties to build homes included the parents of Harry Reid, later a US senator.

Labor Problems: Goldfield

Although nineteenth-century miners tried to counter companies’ efforts to control them or increase profits at their expense, the twentieth-century boom led to greater labor strife. In 1905 the Western Federation of Miners (wfm) helped start the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical union that stressed “industrial unionism” over the American Federation of Labor’s “craft unionism.” For unknown reasons, iww members became known as Wobblies. Critics claimed iww stood for “I Won’t Work” and expressed concern over the iww’s beliefs: that workers should unite as a class, capital sought to divide labor, and the wage system should be abolished.

Although the wfm organized miners in 1903 in Searchlight, causing

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a mostly unsuccessful strike, Goldfield marked the iww’s first foray into large-scale organizing in Nevada. In 1904 the afl and wfm tried to start unions there. In 1906 organizer Vincent St. John won iww membership from local workers ranging from dishwashers to teamsters. The union held a radical parade, and St. John announced, “We will sweep the capitalist class out of the life of this nation and then out of the whole world.” By 1907 new arrivals from Cripple Creek, Colorado, site of recent organizing and violence, bolstered the wfm and iww.

Yet mine owners refused to concede easily and won support from other local businessmen affected by the iww’s actions. Not only did they form a Goldfield Business Men’s and Mine Operators’ Association to work together, but Wingfield also decreed two new policies, both for profits and in response to the panic of 1907, which temporarily dried up capital invest- ment. One sought to stop “high-grading,” a practice through which miners smuggled valuable gold out of the mines in their work clothes, by putting security guards in the changing rooms. The other replaced paychecks with scrip, effectively making Goldfield a company town.

Violence contributed to and resulted from the controversy. In Novem- ber the shooting of St. John prompted him to leave Goldfield to become a national iww leader. But earlier in 1907, another shooting had more lasting effects. Restaurant owner John Silva’s killing led to the arrest, trial, and con- viction of organizers Morrie Preston and Joseph Smith. The fairness of the trial raised suspicions and fitted a pattern that other labor radicals faced throughout the West: their convictions followed a failed attempt to con- vict iww leader “Big Bill” Haywood of murder in Idaho, Utah executed Joe Hill in 1915 after a dubious trial, and San Francisco organizer Tom Mooney received a life sentence on doubtful bombing charges in 1916. In Nevada future efforts, especially by Preston (as a prisoner the Socialist Labor Party’s choice for president, the only Nevadan ever to be a national par- ty’s nominee), to win pardons failed amid rumors that Wingfield intimi- dated members of the pardons board. Nearly eighty years later, in their book The Ignoble Conspiracy, historians Sally Zanjani and Guy Louis Rocha concluded that Preston shot Silva in self-defense and Wingfield allies may have perjured themselves. The state pardons board responded by post- humously pardoning Preston and Smith.

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Goldfield and Labor: Long-Term Effects

At the time, though, the combination of events, culminating in a general strike on November 27 and the closure of local mines, gave the mine own- ers their chance to break unionizing efforts in Goldfield. They asked Gov- ernor John Sparks to request federal troops; the longtime rancher owed Wingfield for loans and complied. He wired President Theodore Roosevelt that amid “unlawful combinations and conspiracies . . . the constituted authorities of the State of Nevada are now and continue to be unable to protect the people.” Roosevelt responded with soldiers on December 6. Mine owners cut wages one dollar a day and soon began recruiting non- union workers from out of state. The mines reopened in January.

These events had long-term ramifications. Suspicious, Roosevelt sent an investigating committee that reported no need for federal troops. The presi- dent told Sparks that he would remove the troops unless Nevada created its own police force, which it did in a special session the governor quickly called. The army left in March, and the state police stepped in. The min- ers gave up and returned to their jobs. Up for reelection to the Senate that fall, Francis Newlands worked behind the scenes to help Sparks pass the bill while seeking to maintain labor support and unity in the Democratic Party. That fall a majority of the legislators seeking reelection lost, paying the price for aiding mine owners such as Wingfield, whom the Goldfield labor troubles established as the dominant player in Nevada politics.

One problem for Wingfield refused to go away. Nye County district attorney Pat McCarran criticized the federal intervention and the state police force’s creation. That increased Wingfield’s enmity, which McCar- ran originally earned by representing his wife, May, in a divorce that included charges that Wingfield suffered from a venereal disease (McCar- ran lost the case anyway). When Wingfield tried to silence him with the offer of a judgeship, McCarran not only declined it but also ran futilely for Congress against one of the magnate’s allies and then unsuccessfully chal- lenged other Wingfield-backed candidates in US Senate races during the 1910s. This relationship would affect Nevada in years to come, as McCarran warred against Wingfield and the political establishment.

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Company Towns

Surrounded by towns dependent on mining or railroads, the Guggenheims went one step further. Ely had survived since the late 1870s, but barely. As the county seat, it remained the center of White Pine County, but, as it did in other states, the copper company wanted more control over its work- force. The Guggenheims built three company towns: Ruth near the mine, Kimberly to the west, and, more than twenty miles north, McGill, named for a longtime rancher whose land the company bought to build a smelter. Guggenheim executives served as the local government.

On the one hand, workers and their families found much about company- town life appealing. Because residents paid no taxes, they received munici- pal services free or at reduced rates. The company provided low-cost medi- cal services, including a hospital in nearby East Ely, and a variety of com- munity events. Historian Russell Elliott, who grew up in McGill, called the company “a benevolent although slow-moving landlord,” since it built row houses that resembled modern suburban developments and maintained them and the residential streets. It also provided schools for the children of miners and other laborers.

On the other hand, control could be absolute. With no local govern- ment, residents had no say. Because they designed the towns to ensure sobriety and stability, the companies regulated behavior, including approval of saloons (McGill originally had only one) and pool halls where employ- ees could sign over their paychecks to ensure payment of debts. The com- panies segregated immigrants—mainly from Japan, Greece, and Austria- Hungary—but also tried to foster assimilation. Despite the company’s efforts, workers still found ways to amuse themselves in what Elliott called “fringe” towns such as Ragdump and Steptoe City outside of McGill as well as Riepetown between Ruth and Kimberly. White Pine County commis- sioners generally allowed drinking, prostitution, and gambling to flourish in those hamlets—foreshadowing how a federal company town, Boulder City, interacted with a nearby open city, Las Vegas.

Strikes and violence rarely upset labor peace in White Pine before 1912. That September miners struck at Guggenheim copper facilities in Bingham, Utah, partly over an attempt to start a chapter of the Western Federation of Miners. They won a wage hike, but the family refused to recognize the union. In October the wfm called sympathy strikes at other Guggenheim

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properties, and workers at Ruth and McGill walked out. Nevada Con- solidated Copper Company responded by bringing in thirty armed men as guards (said the company) or as strikebreakers (according to the min- ers). The new arrivals killed two strikers and wounded others. Mine offi- cials called on Governor Tasker Oddie, who arrived, tried to work out a settlement, and finally declared martial law. The state police arrived, swore in a posse, and disarmed both sides. Finally, the strike ended, the miners returned to work, and a local grand jury refused to indict the accused mur- derers. The strikers called for arresting two company managers as acces- sories, but Oddie wrote that he “compelled the withdrawal of the warrants charging the managers of the Company with murder, as I knew they were not guilty.”

While these events helped shape how Nevadans viewed labor and unions, the copper towns may have had greater technological and environ- mental effects. Although a few used it on the Comstock, the Guggenheims introduced large-scale open-pit mining to Nevada, a far cry from the tun- neling common around the state. Open-pit mining involved a large hole or burrow, made possible by advances in equipment and transportation; one in the Ruth area went one thousand feet down and a mile across. The use and constant improvement of open pits meant low-grade ores became more profitable than they had been through costlier tunneling. Historian Gerald Nash called it “a technological breakthrough . . . hardly less impor- tant for the mining industry in the twentieth century than the develop- ment of the factory system was for the industrial revolution of the nine- teenth century.”

Transportation and Technology

Just as reaching Virginia City required an arduous journey, the new boom- towns sat almost literally in the middle of nowhere. Just as Comstock transportation evolved from freighting to V-flumes to railroads, Tonopah’s founders started by digging out two tons of ore and shipping them by wagon to Austin before it went on to Salt Lake City. Freight routes to Car- son & Colorado Railroad stations (from Tonopah to Sodaville, where one conductor told train passengers, “Change for all points in the world,” and from Goldfield to Candelaria) eased the difficulty of moving ore to market and reduced the market for freighting companies, just as the v&t Railroad limited the need for them in Virginia City.

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Outside investors seeking profits in Nevada had a similar effect. South- ern California’s growth helped inspire construction of a road to Salt Lake. But so did the Tonopah-Goldfield boom, prompting Clark’s Las Vegas & Tonopah, which ran to Beatty and Goldfield, linking the Los Angeles area to Nevada mining, though less profitably than San Francisco in the previous century. Arriving in Nevada in the 1860s, Francis Marion Smith found wealth by mining borax, a compound used in detergent, in Min- eral and Esmeralda Counties. He used mules to move his goods to market and later promoted 20 Mule Team Borax, but also built the Tonopah & Tidewater and Bullfrog & Goldfield Railroads. The Brocks backed a line linking Tonopah and Goldfield to the Carson & Colorado, and thus to the Southern Pacific and San Francisco. The Guggenheims helped Requa set up the Northern Nevada Railway, which went through Steptoe Valley to meet the sp at the newly created Elko County town of Cobre—Spanish for “copper.” Yet these entrepreneurs may have missed an opportunity: Russell Elliott observed that a line from the Tonopah-Goldfield area to Ely would have united the two mining regions and “in so doing . . . redirected the entire economic structure of the state.” But geography probably played a role: north–south mountain ranges made it difficult to build a northeast– southwest line.

Appropriately for a new century, Nevada mining also relied on a new vehicle: the automobile. Trucks began hauling ore around 1913, the same year the state started requiring automobile licenses: a minimum fee of $1.88, with future fees based on the car’s horsepower. Before those changes cars had begun competing with railroads and stage lines to connect major Nevada towns, prompting laws setting speed limits: four in Tonopah and six in Goldfield, whose officials stipulated that “vehicles drawn by horse, at all times, have the right of way.” Running for governor in 1910, Oddie cam- paigned almost entirely by car, saw the need for better roads, and, when he could, followed through.

The mining boom made no real contribution to these technological advances, and the Comstock Lode had indeed been more innovative than its successor in central and eastern Nevada. But mine and mill operators adopted new techniques and adapted to different circumstances. Univer- sity of Nevada professor Robert Jackson had begun using cyanide to help extract metals at Washoe Lake, and the process worked its way to Tonopah and Goldfield. Those areas also started using a sliming process: grinding

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the ore as much as possible until it approximates slime, improving the abil- ity to extract ore. But like the mercury used earlier, cyanide polluted the Carson River, causing long-term environmental problems.

Speculation and Society

Speculators preyed on nineteenth-century investors, and the twentieth- century boom proved little different—but at times more colorful. Shortly after veteran schemer George Graham Rice arrived in Goldfield in 1904, his stock promotions sank a local bank. Then he and two friends invented a mining district, Rawhide, turned it into a boomtown, and publicized it by holding an ostentatious funeral for horse-racing gambler Riley Grannan. A fire destroyed Rawhide, and, unlike Virginia City after its blaze, it never recovered. But Rice went on to quintuple the stock value of a failed Ely copper mine before his arrest for mail fraud. Rice went to prison and wrote a book, My Adventures with Your Money, before disappearing.

Rice also worked closely with Tex Rickard, whose success led him to much bigger things. Rice and Rickard promoted the Battling Nelson–Joe Gans boxing championship match in Goldfield in September 1906, and Rickard expanded on that and other fights to go to New York as a pro- moter and build the original Madison Square Garden. Rickard’s success in boxing, then considered uncivilized, reflected how the boom resembled its forebears in another way: towns developed parallel societies. Gold- field’s saloons topped one hundred in 1906, but the capital pouring into central and eastern Nevada led to stone and brick buildings, schools, and churches, many of them taller than in earlier boomtowns. Residents sought entertainment both proper and improper, with a new twist: movie theaters. Hotels provided more luxury than anything envisioned on the Comstock. Tonopah’s Mizpah offered steam heat and the town’s first elevator, while the Goldfield Hotel, complete with crystal chandeliers and the latest fire escapes, allegedly opened with champagne flowing down the front steps— and Wingfield co-owned both of them.

The south-central and eastern Nevada mining regions also drew a large number of immigrants, but from different groups than earlier booms. Again they ended up segregated residentially, and not just in the com- pany towns, where Guggenheim officials segregated them. Whereas the Irish had been the most prominent immigrant group in Comstock shafts, Greeks and Italians formed the backbone of miners’ unions in several

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towns, while Goldfield proved more heterogeneous and Caucasian than usual in mining communities. As in Virginia City and its environs, women trailed men in arriving, and fewer entered the sex trade than leg- end and myth suggest; they varied from waitresses to schoolteachers, but those who became prostitutes encountered the same unhappiness as oth- ers throughout the West: about one-third of the prostitutes who died in Goldfield committed suicide, usually around age twenty-one, about the average in mining country.

The Inevitable Decline

Russell Elliott, the boom’s preeminent historian, called it “the touch of the decay that was inevitable in these isolated mining booms once the ore petered out.” Small mining camps rose and fell quickly, often inside five years. Rhyolite’s estimated population of eight thousand in 1908 plummeted by 1920 to fourteen—still better than several other early-twentieth-century camps. Goldfield’s production began falling after a 1910 peak of more than $10 million until, a decade later, it generated only about $350,000, and the population of perhaps ten thousand around 1906 had dipped to nearly five thousand in 1910 and a little more than fifteen hundred by 1920. If others dropped like a stone, Tonopah coasted downhill, benefiting from wartime silver needs and the Pittman Silver Act of 1918, which set a minimum price of a dollar an ounce, but still gradually losing population and production. Tonopah and Goldfield benefited from their status as county seats and eventually the highways that went through them, but by 1920 their glory days had ended.

White Pine had better luck. Between 1908 and 1920, its revenues fell just short of the production from Tonopah and Goldfield combined, and Nevada ranked fifth among states in copper production. The Guggenheims still prospered from the district for decades afterward, although the Ely area, too, would suffer a decline.

The twentieth-century mining boom not only revived Nevada but also changed it significantly. Nevada’s connections to California deepened through its southern and central boomtowns, while eastern Nevada became more closely tied to Salt Lake City and Utah’s copper towns. Although few major political figures started out in White Pine, the south-central axis produced or influenced many of Nevada’s key politicians to the present. They would affect how the state functioned and Nevada’s relationship with

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the federal government, which evolved just as the mining boom reshaped the state—and reshaped the state in different ways.

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Brown, Mrs. Hugh. Lady in Boomtown: Miners and Manners on the Nevada Frontier. Palo Alto, CA: American West, 1968.

Coles, Kathleen, and Victoria Ford, eds. Nevada Mining Oral History Project. Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 2008.

Douglass, William A., and Robert A. Nylen, eds. Letters from the Nevada Frontier: Cor- respondence of Tasker L. Oddie, 1898–1902. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004.

Elliott, Russell R. Growing Up in a Company Town: A Family in the Copper Camp of McGill, Nevada. Reno: Nevada Historical Society, 1990.

———. Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom: Tonopah-Goldfield-Ely. 1966. Reprint, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1988.

Fleming, Jack. Copper Times: An Animated Chronicle of White Pine County, Nevada. Seattle: Jack Fleming, 1987.

Goin, Peter, and C. Elizabeth Raymond. Changing Mines in America. Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places, 2004.

Hall, Shawn. Preserving the Glory Days: The Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Nye County, Nevada. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999.

Jones, Florence Lee, and John F. Cahlan. Water: A History of Las Vegas. 2 vols. Las Vegas: Las Vegas Valley Water District, 1975.

Limbaugh, Ronald H. Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010.

Lingenfelter, Richard E. Bonanzas & Borrascas: Copper Kings and Stock Frenzies, 1885– 1918. Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2012.

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———. A History of Tonopah, Nevada. Tonopah, NV: Nye County Press, 1990. Olds, Sarah E. Twenty Miles from a Match: Homesteading in Western Nevada. Reno:

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P rogressives “caught the Populists in swimming,” Kansas editor Wil- liam Allen White said, “and stole all of their clothing except the frayed underdrawers of free silver.” While some Populists became Pro- gressives as the twentieth century began, the two groups of reformers dif- fered in key ways. Nevada’s Progressives proved the rule and the exception. Although many involved in the fight for silver joined the Progressives, both movements underscored the same problem for Nevadans: how reform minded they could be when their economy depended on the boom-and- bust cycle of mining, whom to ally themselves with regionally and nation- ally to achieve their economic goals, and whether those goals fitted with Progressivism.

The Origins of Progressivism

Like the Populists, Progressives reacted to social issues—corporate expan- sion, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corrupt politics— but in different ways. Generally, while Populists advocated that government take over industries such as railroads, Progressives preferred to regulate them. Populists hoped to control and even harness industrialization; Pro- gressives wanted to embrace and use it to promote scientific management of the government, economy, and environment, but divided on whether to allow large business or, like the Populists, encourage small producers. Rural Populists and urban Progressives saw cities differently, although they felt similarly about the evils of the corruption and social inequality in them.

How Populists and Progressives viewed all but nonwhite males sug- gested their contradictions. Both struggled with racism, especially as immigration from the East (southern and eastern Europe) and West

Making Progress

9 Co py ri gh t © 2 01 5. U ni ve rs it y of N ev ad a Pr es s. A ll r ig ht s re se rv ed . Ma y no t be r ep ro du ce d in a ny f or m wi th ou t pe rm is si on f ro m th e pu bl is he r, e xc ep t fa ir u se s pe rm it te d

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