by Bill Graves
Just south of Beatty, the highway makes an abrupt turn. Were I seeing this on the Travel Channel, pretentious music would swell up to reveal the dramatic change of scenery. The brown desert suddenly disappears. Green and tan bulrushes take over. Above, the leaves of spreading cottonwood trees spin in the wind. Squatting low in the bulrushes is a sign, the hand-painted silhouette of a frog. It reads Frog Crossing. I like Beatty already.
The mountains that earlier were away from the highway, now rise 1,500 feet beside it, creating an instant, inviting rock-rimmed hollow. It soon becomes as pleasant a green valley as exists anywhere in this otherwise arid state.
Fresh water from an underground river founded this town. Two nearby mining camps, which later became significant towns—albeit short-lived—had a shortage of drinking water. For a time, water from Beatty was hauled to the miners in whiskey barrels. There was no shortage of those.
I made a slow “windshield” tour of town. Spread over a square mile, Beatty’s 1,900 residents live in mobile homes, essentially. It’s easy to buy a lot here and order a house delivered. Wood is very expensive in a state that is mostly sand, which may explain the lack of frame houses here.
The Powder Horn, a gun shop, was closed. I got out to read the bronze plaque in front. It read On This Spot in 1897, Nothing Happened. Clever, but not as original as the frog-crossing sign.
Beatty’s three hotel-casinos, one at each end of town and one in the middle, survive on travelers who drop in off U.S. 95, visitors from central California, and Death Valley tourists. In spite of it Valley a year-round tourist spot.
At the north end of town, I pulled into the Rio Rancho RV Park, Cottonwood fluff swirls on the ground. Between shade trees in front, half circling a fire pit, enough wood was neatly stacked to relieve the chill of many evenings. Each RV site had a redwood picnic bench. Each site also had sand-filled coffee cans, painted white and stenciled BUTT. Cigarette smoking is still big in Nevada, unlike neighboring California, where it is almost against the law.
The main building sits back from the road. Its front is a long, covered porch with chairs. A half-dozen people, all Norman Rockwell characters, appeared comfortable and very satisfied there, watching people like me stir up the cottonwood fluff.
Ray Stevens, the manager, left his chair to greet me. “And we also have free wine and coffee,” Ray added, “from seven in the morning to seven at night.”
“Seven in the morning? Wine?”
“Sure, welcome to Nevada!”
I plugged in the motor home and joined the Rockwell group. Within an hour I had met almost everyone in the park and had learned about the town from Skinny Forsyth. He has lived here since 1961, but not in the RV park. He comes by every day to visit.
Looking for videos, ice, snacks, or maybe some wine, most of the overnight visitors eventually come by the porch. They quickly get caught up in the sit-and-visit lifestyle that permeates this place. Life at Rio Ranch—for some here, life it-self—focuses on the porch. Within a day, I was part of it, too.
The post office is next to the park. Much of Beatty parades by the porch to pick up mail during the day. After a couple of days, I began to recognize those who walked or rode a bike. As for those who drove, someone else on the porch usually knew the car.
Take the late-model sedan that Fran drives. “There goes Fran,” someone would always say. According to Skinny, “When anyone in town needs help, Fran is always Johnny-on-the-spot.” She owns Fran’s Ranch, the local brothel, just outside town.
Among the hard-core porch people was Bill Bridgeman from Arizona. After walking his four dogs, Bill’s day begins here with Ray’s coffee at 7:00 and ends here at dark. In between, when his wife Liz watches the soaps, Bill usually visits a casino and invests in the nickel slots. Bill wears tattoos from his years in the Navy and bib overalls from those as a Missouri rancher. Now, at age seventy-one, he is interested in old cemeteries. He wanted to show me one.
So we took off in his pickup. On our way to the ruins of Rhyolite, we passed huge, multicolored piles of crushed rock from a mine called the Bullfrog. The flags of Canada and the United States flew over the mine offices. Bill said that the flags of both Canada and Australia are common fixtures at the mines in this state.
I asked him why.
“I had the same question when I first came here,” Bill said. “Mining companies are international in scope. They go where the minerals are. Obviously, what they want they find here in Nevada.”
Rhyolite was the fourth-largest city in Nevada in 1907, with 6,000 residents. Fifty freight cars a day arrived here on the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad, and more on two other lines.
The elaborate railroad station in Rhylolite, much of which still stands, was the finest in Nevada in 1908. It still is in my book. It is a gorgeous and classic piece of Old-West architecture. To identify it with an earlier era, an esoteric art form, or as a European architectural style might be academically correct. But to me, wars have been fought for lesser causes. It is as unpretentious and all-American as cowboy boots or Bill’s bib overalls.
The roofless stone shells of a few three-story buildings outline Rhyolite’s main street. Once they had stairs of Itali an marble, windows of stained glass, and wood trim of Honduras mahogany. Their sun-bleached walls, now stripped by scavengers and weather, have crumbled some but remain today, as do six residents. But Rhyolite as a town is a ghost.
Bill turned the truck onto a narrow cut in the desert and stopped at a fenced cemetery. Mounds of sand and rock remain the only visible signs of the hundreds buried here. Wooden markers lay by a few graves, but most had long since released their epitaphs to the wind.
Bill pointed to one clearly marked grave in the corner. It was that of “Panamint Annie,” buried in 1979. Panamint is the name of a mountain range rimming Death Valley, but who was Annie? We could only guess. Perhaps it is enough to know that she is here and forever has a claim to a piece of the desert guarded by the Panamint Range.
13
Old Saloons and Tiffany Lamps
Goldfield, Nevada
The Sante Fe Saloon rests on a dusty side road that may well have been main street at one time. Over the last century, the heavy boots of miners have scuffed out hollows in the wood floor of the saloon deep enough to hold spilled beer. Although it seems more than one saloon in Nevada claims title as the state’s oldest, about this one in Goldfield they get specific: “in continuous use.” It was built in 1905, but its bar of dark mahogany is even older. It came around Cape Horn by ship and was hauled to Gold field from San Francisco on a wagon train.
A sign taped to the ornate bar advertises cactus juice at $1.50. “That’s for the people on the tour buses from Japan and Washington and the like,” the bartender said. Placing a beer in front of me, he asked, “You driving through, or what?”
“Little of both. I want to see what’s in Goldfield.”
“Then you’re about seventy years too late,” insisted a man hunched over an empty glass one stool over. “We had here the biggest city in Nevada once. It had trains and fancy dressers and the famous stage show, The Zigfield Follies, one time. Now you could put the whole town up for a night in the Hotel Goldfield and the building would still be half-empty.”
“Hell, Jack, the hotel’s been closed for fifty years. There’s no way. No beds in there, even. You ain’t gonna put nobody up there for the night,” came advice that was a little slushy and slurred from further down the bar.
“I know that. I was just making a figure of speech.” The man shook his head, rolled his eyes, and turned to tell me about the hotel.
The four-story Goldfield Hotel, when it was built in 1907, was said to be the most modern, elegant, and elaborate hotel west of the Mississippi. It had the first electric elevator. Each room had a phone. Many rooms had a private bath with both hot and cold running water. The floors in the lobby and restaurant are composed of hand-laid mosaic tiles. The ceiling of the bar and dining room, which held 400 people, are covered with twe
nty-two-karat gold leaf. Wyatt Earp dealt cards in the casino After he retired. And Theodore Roosevelt slept there. Attempts to renovate it have gone bankrupt. It stands empty today, as it has since 1945.
Unlike many mining towns in Nevada that sprouted overnight, Goldfield was well planned, surveyed, and mapped. Its population topped at 20,000 plus around 1913. Mines here produced $2 million in gold, and that’s when it sold for $16 to $20 an ounce. This still stands, apparently, as a record take, and is believed to be unequaled by any other gold camp in the world.
It’s ironic that Nevada’s one-time largest city is now the seat of the state’s smallest county. Esmeralda County has 1,410 people. The courthouse, built in 1907, buzzes with county business and is as “downtown” as Goldfield gets. The recorder’s office, where ladies still labor over table-size ledger books, has concrete walls almost two feet thick. Iron curtains still roll down over the windows, like louvered garage doors, every afternoon at 4:55.
Inside the courthouse I admired the fifty or so cattle brands, burned on patches of cowhide, that cover a first-floor wall. “Upstairs is the courtroom. I have the key if you want in,” whispered a small voice from the stairs.
“Sure would.” I followed Sarah Ridgeway into an immaculate, grand sanctuary of Old-West law. She is the courthouse housekeeper, although she calls herself the custodian. Being so petite, the title of custodian may describe her job, but it does not describe Sarah.
Elegant Tiffany lamps adorned the front corners of the judge’s bench. Their stained-glass shades were a brilliant red and gold. The window blinds of unfinished oak, exposed to the desert sun more days than most men live, hung straight and true. Sarah ran her fingers over the manufacturer’s plaque, tacked to the bottom blind. “Look, they were made in Burlington, Vermont.”
On the wall, above the judge’s chair, is the head of a huge bighorn sheep. Sarah explained that the hunter who killed it took only the head and left the carcass for the scavengers. That’s against the law. The hunter pleaded guilty in this courtroom. Others, some from as far as Las Vegas, were willing to pay the hunter’s fine and buy the mounted trophy. The judge instead decided it would stay in Esmeralda County. What better place than his courtroom? “So there it hangs,” she said proudly.
Sarah pointed to the wall fixtures. “We don’t use those carbide lights anymore. And the ceiling fans finally played out, so they put in air-conditioning.” She squinted and lowered her voice to a near whisper. “But it detracts a little bit, I think.”
Obviously, Sarah felt possessive of the courtroom and its legacy. And well she should. For the last twenty-five years, she has polished the brass boot rail in the jury box, dusted the feather-grained woodwork, and lovingly cleaned each piece of stained glass on the Tiffany lamp shades. This magnificent courtroom appears to be as much her home as where she lives.
The new computer by the witness chair Sarah called an eye-sore. “I hate to even dust it,” she remarked.
Early-day cattle rustlers were taken from this courtroom often to face a hangman’s noose. “But they still go on trial here,” Sarah said, sending me downstairs to get the details from her friend the sheriff.
“We haven’t hung one for some time,” Sheriff Ed Penson joked, “but we convicted one here two months ago.”
With only seven deputies and 3,700 square miles of country, Sheriff Penson admitted rustlers are hard to catch. But this time he got lucky. “I was searching for this guy on the Lida Ranch. If you don’t know it, it’s a local spread bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island. It even extends into Cali forma. After chasing him in his truck through some pretty rugged country, I finally got him. He was turning loose six unbranded calves.”
Cattle rustling in this day is not peculiar to Nevada, but what Goldfield’s justice of the peace told me certainly is. Pulling on her judicial robes over her sweatshirt and jeans, she recounted the story.
It seems that when she was a court clerk, a man came to her to file a suit in small claims court against the Cottontail Ranch, a well-known brothel south of town.
“He claimed he didn’t get his money’s worth,” she said with a smirk.
“Who won?”
“Oh, I talked him out it, told him he needed a witness.”
“And that ended it?”
“No, he thought about it for the longest time. I thought for a minute that he was going to come up with one. Then he took his hat and walked out. Never seen him since.”
Back on the road, I could just imagine what the TV tabloids from the big city would do in Goldfield with a case like that. I’ll bet Sarah wouldn’t let them in her courtroom and the sheriff would back her up.
14
A Class Act of the Old West
Tonopah, Nevada
The steep approach to Tonopah on Highway 95 cuts my speed so that the forty-five miles per hour speed limit was purely academic. Hills rising on both sides of the road are heavily scarred from years of mining. To call Tonopah a century-old mining town doesn’t distinguish it from others in Nevada, except from those founded on free drinks and all-you-can-eat buffets. Its population is 2,500 and dropping.
The mines here produced $150 million, mostly in silver, between 1900 and 1950. The town peaked in 1906 with sixty saloons and a railroad that ran until 1946. Its population shot from 3,000 in 1902 to 10,000 in 1906. Four years later, it was 3,000 again.
The Army Air Corps built a base just outside town during World War II. It was given to the county in 1947. The Air Force became a significant employer here in the 1950s and kept Tonopah whole after the mines closed. Now, the Air Force has all but pulled out.
Today the town hangs on with the help of county government {it’s the seat of Nye County}, a small mining operation, a struggling tourist business, and boundless optimism.
The owner of an overstocked pawns hop on Main Street told me, “We have been up and down before. The mines will kick in again, or the Air Force will create some good-paying jobs here. I’ll wait it out. Got no choice.”
The Station House, at the south edge of town, is Tonopah’s biggest private employer, with 105 employees. Although the all-night sign in front reads Station House Hotel and Gaming Saloon, it is also a mall where you can rent videos, get your teeth fixed, or apply for state welfare. Behind the casino, there is a bare strip of asphalt with nineteen RV hookups, which has only its convenience to the casino to recommend it.
When I met Station House manager Oliver Crickmon, he was having breakfast—a bowl of cold cereal—at his desk. A shaded window, his desk lamp, and the glow of five black-and-white TV monitors dimly lit his office. The monitors showed the front desk and the dining room and seemed to switch around the casino with close-up and overhead shots of the three blackjack tables.
He explained that Tonopah’s labor force now is mostly in the service industry, which pays the minimum wage and little more. “Tough to build a growing economy on that,” Oliver said.
A second casino is in the center of town in Tonopah’s finest building, the Mizpah Hotel. This magnificent, five-story classic—a true historic landmark—was built in 1907. It has been sensibly refurbished to preserve the best of the Old West, as good as the good life got back then. Most of the rooms still have toilets that flush with the pull of a chain and iron bathtubs that stand on clawed feet.
Jack Dempsey was a bouncer and bartender in the hotel, when he wasn’t working in the mines. Wyatt Earp stayed here often. He owned the Northern Bar in Tonopah. His brother Virgil was a deputy sheriff in neighboring Esmeralda County. And Howard Hughes got married here, but several other places can make that claim, too.
The Jack Dempsey Dining Room is heavy with rich mahogany. Brocade silk covers the walls. Its raised design was deep red and felt like velvet. The doors have beautifully etched, inlaid glass. A person who knows might properly call this Victorian style. I claimed it for John Wayne, ladies in ruffled dresses, and the Old West.
Bill Allison, age sixty-six, has owed the Mispah for thirteen years. He
calls the hotel the “grand old lady” and runs her as she begs to be run: with good taste, twenty-four-hour attention, and the unrealistic love of a dreamer. Although its rooms are full most all the time, the Mispah has seen better days, economically. “Too many mistakes in the past,” Bill says philosophically, realizing that his dream may die because of them.
The closing of the old hotel would be especially tragic. It’s the class act in town. Without it, Tonopah has none.
Still, things have a way of bouncing back in this town that silver built. Bill may lose his dream or “give it away,” as he puts it. If so, someone will surely come along and pick up where Bill leaves off. Whatever keeps these Nevada towns alive, it may yet save the Mispah.
15
A One-Sidewalk, One-Airplane Town
Mina, Nevada
Eugene Gates keeps his airplane, a two-seater Cessna, tied down next to his house between his big satellite dish and the monitoring station of the National Weather Service. To take off, he taxies for fifteen minutes. He steers his airplane down Helda Drive, crosses Wedge Street, takes care not to brush the trees by the Boyd’s house, angles off on a road graded from the desert, and finally reaches the airstrip.
Gene has been a pilot for forty years and an amateur-radio operator for fifty. At age seventy-three, he has three jobs. The most recent one he began twenty-four years ago. Obviously, when Gene starts something, he keeps at it. Probably the only thing he ever started with the intent of stopping is life here in Mina. When he and his wife came to Mina in 1954, they planned to stay just a year.
His twenty-four-year job, with what we used to call the Weather Bureau, does not pay anything. “They set up the equipment. All I do is read the numbers every day and keep a log.”
