by Peter Millar
‘Unfortunately the same could not be said for the rescuers: the engineer of a locomotive trying to plough its way up the tracks towards the trapped train was killed when a sudden avalanche swept him and his locomotive down the precipice below. Another man, an employee of one of the power companies who operated a snowcat for 48 hours continuously during the rescue attempt died of a heart attack a day later.’
It’s impressive stuff and makes us understand the need for the avalanche protection sheds that cover the tracks up here even if they do spoil the extravagant views. And then we enter what our docent calls, ‘The Big Hole’. ‘This is a two-mile-long tunnel, ladies and gentlemen, and when we come out the other side we shall be at the highest point across the Sierra, 7,500 feet up.’ With that he lapses into silence and the train whooshes into darkness.
Emerging is almost a shock to the senses. We have sprung from darkness into light, on the top of the world: a great blinding blaze of blue-skied sunshine beams down over an unspoiled vista of forest, green leaves flecked here and there with autumnal golds amid surprisingly gentle mountain tops and in the distance as we begin our gradually curving descent towards it, a wonderful lake of the deepest darkest blue. No sooner have we all got our cameras out than the fatalist in the engineer’s cab turns to a sombre story that cuts to the quick of the wagon train legend.
‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, below you we have Lake Donner. Back here in 1846 there occurred one of the worst tragedies of the pioneer days. A group of settler families who’d set out from Illinois heading for California camped here by the shores of this beautiful lake you see in front of you for a day or two. But they made the mistake of taking the weather in the mountains for granted to get shut in by a blizzard. This was in October, mind. Well, they were here for more than a day or two. In fact, it took until January for the first handful of them who had put together makeshift snowshoes to struggle on the next 100 miles to reach Sutter’s Fort. It took weeks more for a relief party to get back to the others, by which time half of the 87-strong party had starved to death, including five women and 14 children, while many of those who survived had had to resort to cannibalism, eating the bodies of their loved ones. The original family who had begun the trip in Illinois was called Donner, and the lake was named after them.’
All of a sudden Lake Donner’s placid dark blue waters look a lot less inviting. This is a tale that obviously has deep resonance with one group of passengers who have come into the observation car specially. For an unkind minute I think we have been invaded by the cast of a live-action Disney remake of Snow White. Beaming broadly are two middle-aged balding men with large beards in identical blue shirts, black dungarees and big black boots, and next to them two dumpy middle-aged women also dressed identically in green dresses with white bonnets and thick black stockings. And more remarkably still, a teenage girl dressed exactly the same. Back in Britain, if someone were to describe a family group all dressed in clothing that clearly related to their religion I would visualise chadors or at least headscarves and assume them to be Muslim. Here, I have little doubt I have come across my first Amish. Just to make it clear as they take their seats along the wall of the observation car facing Lake Donner they all burst into a tuneful rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’. I’m not sure what it is about the scene of great disasters that inspires the Godly to sing His praises when what they are confronted with appears to be proof of divine indifference.
But by now the little Amish group has taken us by surprise again, this time by pulling out a pack of cards and dealing hands.
‘Hey,’ says a big bearded ticket inspector passing through at just that moment – though his own hirsute appearance is more reminiscent of a mountain grizzly than one of Snow White’s dwarfs – ‘I though you guys didn’t do that kind of stuff.’
‘Sure we do. Get on,’ says one of the two women with a twinkly smile. It occurs to me that I would find it remarkably hard to tell the two men or the two women apart. It’s not that I couldn’t – they’re obviously not twins or anything – but it’s something to do with the identical clothing, identical glasses, identical hairstyles (at least as far as the men are concerned, the women’s hair is modestly concealed beneath their bonnets) and their remarkably similar shapes. Put them on stage and they could be an Amish ABBA tribute act! Except for the girl, of course. She’s probably about 15, I guess, though it’s hard to tell dressed like that. Pretty in a shy sort of way, behind her glasses and with her bonnet on, and overshadowed by the dumpy ghosts of her probable future, with whom, however, she is politely chatting and playing cards with a far greater good humour than many teenage girls dragged on holiday with their parents and parents’ similarly middle-aged friends might display.
And a holiday is indeed what they are on, I discover, getting into a casual conversation with one of the two men, who unfortunately reinforces my ABBA image by telling me his name is Ben (at least it isn’t Benny – or Bjørn). ‘From Benjamin,’ he explains, pronouncing the ‘j’ like a ‘y’, German-style.
It’s the language in fact, which has given me an opening into the conversation. As a German speaker it’s impossible not to be intrigued by a snatch like the following, overheard as they examined the cards in their hands:
‘Was bin ish?’
‘Troumpf.’
‘Hasht du a veildcard?’
‘Ach, my pen schreibt nit.’
It’s a wacky, unartificial, easy-flowing hybrid dialect of American English and an archaic German. (What suit am I playing? Trumps. Have you got a face card? Blow, my pen isn’t working.) Not one thing or the other, but the sort of language that families and close friends who are all bilingual drift into when talking casually among one another.
I don’t want to eavesdrop but as a linguist the blend is fascinating. Every now and then, the conversation slips away from me as they drift wholly into an archaic dialect of German that even a modern Berliner would find incomprehensible. And then all of a sudden they switch wholly back into American English. ‘Aw, man!’ says the teenager suddenly, laying out her obviously useless cards on the table. It’s not, I realise, as if they’re dropping into their own tongue to share some secrets but have momentarily forgotten that for politeness’ sake in mixed company they should speak the lingua franca.
‘Yeah, it’s a kind of German,’ one of the women says, when I dare to ask. ‘We call it Pennsylvania Dutch, but that’s really “deutsch”. Our testament is in German,’ she adds with that disarming beaming smile.
Ben explains their holiday route. I know the Amish, who keep mostly to themselves on their farms in and around Pennsylvania, prefer to shun most aspects of modern life, including cars, television and certainly aircraft. It just hadn’t occurred to me that they would have embraced the train. I guess it just depends at what stage you put history on hold. They have already crossed the country twice, visiting Chicago and Texas, and are planning on doing it again. The Amish turn out to be the only American travellers I meet who have been on more American trains than I have.
I’ve been assuming that the card game is something like Snap or Happy Families. I can see it does not use traditional playing cards – the sort my own staunch Presbyterian Northern Irish grandfather routinely referred to as ‘the devil’s cards’. But the women explain to me that it’s actually a form of rummy, with suits and wild cards of its own. Sin, like beauty, it would seem can be wholly in the eye of the beholder.
There was more than enough sin in our next stop; the docent interrupts our conversation over the microphone. Truckee owes its quixotic name not to being a truck stop but to Chief To-Kay of the Paiute tribe. ‘It began as a lumber town and had 14 mills working by the time the railroad arrived in 1867. But it soon had more saloons and became known for its lawlessness.’ It seems unlikely looking out at the little row of gentrified late nineteenth-century shops and the car parks full of suvs. ‘In fact, in the space of 11 years, between 1871 and 1882, the whole town burned down six times. Today, however, the town is a pop
ular outdoors vacation stop and the Truckee River has some fine fishin’.’
The Amish, clearly happier with God’s bounty than the fires of hell, nod happily and one of the women – I’m still not sure which is which – leans over towards me and nodding towards Ben says, ‘He’s a real good fisherman.’ And Ben, who despite my earlier evocation of him as one of Snow White’s pintsized retinue has to be at least six-foot-three, blushes to the roots of his thinning hair. Ahhh, bashful. I was right after all.
But by now our docent has cut in again for ‘one last anecdote, folks, before we leave you’ (once safely over the Rockies they turn around again and head back to Sacramento to perform the same service for westbound travellers). ‘We are comin’ up to Verdi,’ (up until now I had been inducing Italian origins, but he pronounces it Verd-Eye), ‘and it was near here that almost as soon as the railroad went through, it saw its first armed robbery.’ But then we have crossed the state line into Nevada now and the state that made the mafia respectable has to be expected to have had a chequered history.
What is it about railway robberies that somehow accrues glamour? I suppose we had it in Britain with the grudging admiration for the thieves who carried out the Great Train Robbery in the 1960s and went on, mostly, to be rehabilitated. In the story of the American West they have acquired a legendary status all of their own. Montana had Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the Hole in the Wall Gang but it was here in western Nevada that the precedent was set. Barely 18 months after the first transcontinental railroad had been completed a gang of ex-stagecoach robbers turned their attention to the new Iron Horse, helped by inside information from a mine agent at Virginia City, one of Nevada’s oldest mining towns and, as it happens, the site of the fictional Ponderosa Ranch in the classic TV series Bonanza. The agent, Jack Davis, was aware of a shipment of gold coins due from San Francisco to pay the miners and informed the gang who struck as the train was leaving Verdi for Reno just after midnight on 5 November 1870. Their ringleader was John Chapman, who just happened to be the local Sunday School superintendent. Three men boarded the train in Verdi, to be joined by five others already on board as passengers. Two of them tackled the ‘engineer’ urging him to fire the train on, while the others beat off an attack by an axe-wielding conductor, detached the rest of the train which was left behind while they, the locomotive and the ‘express car’ – which contained the strong room – sped on down the track. Six miles further on, they stopped, tied up the engineer and clerks, broke into the strong boxes and escaped with $41,600 in gold coins.
They were eventually tracked down in a manhunt across the two states, but a substantial proportion of their loot was never found, believed to have been stashed in caves in the desert. Even today there are still strange characters to be seen wandering around isolated desert valleys of western Nevada with metal detectors. But perhaps it’s no more foolish than the original gold prospecting. And certainly – as I’m about to find out – a lot more productive than hoping to find a pot of gold in Nevada’s casinos.
The casinos loom all around us now as we pull into Reno, self-proclaimed ‘biggest little town in the world’. The Amish, wisely, stay on the train.
1 There are several but the most comprehensive has to be Nothing Like It In The World by Stephen E. Ambrose.
14
All the Way in Reno
I’M STANDING ON A BALCONY looking up at the inside of a giant silver golf ball on which a simulacrum of the night sky revolves around the pinnacle of a 50-foot creaking, groaning construction of steel and plastic that I’ve only just realised is a theatrical mock-up of a functioning nineteenth-century silver mine.
Then lightning crashes in the artificial heaven, thunder peels out, a wave of green lasers flashes out into a completely phoney but disconcertingly realistic impression of infinity and amidst the gigadecibel cacophony there explodes a tune of cathartic intensity, a piece of music that is as essential to the soul of America as perhaps nothing save The Archers theme tune is to Britain. Sing along now: ‘Bump-diddy-ump-diddy-ump-diddy-ump, BONANZA!’
Instantly my inner eye conjures up a black-and-white picture of paternal Ben Cartwright, dim but lovable Hoss, dull old Adam and teenage heart-throb Little Joe, four abreast astride their steeds about to shout ‘Yee-hah!’ on the threshold of an ever-optimistic future. A few people descending to the lower floor of the Silver Legacy Resort Casino stare up at what appears to be a middle-aged bloke having a fit of hysterical laughter while at the same time consumed by a bout of uncontrollable nostalgia. You have to be grateful for magical moments like that. And hope that they don’t happen too often.
The ranch on which the classic 1960s series was based, long before Lorne Green evolved from humble rancher to command Battlestar Galactica, is just up the road, in Nevada terms, from Reno. From 1967 until 2004 there was a Ponderosa Ranch theme park on the site but it is now closed down. Nonetheless a bonanza is what every visitor to the ‘biggest little town in the world’ is hoping for. In its dizziest daydreams Reno would like to grow up to be Las Vegas, even though the best thing about the place is the fact that it isn’t. Even still it can be an assault to the senses.
Arriving by train – as most visitors don’t – immediately reveals Reno’s greatest statement of belief in its future: it has all but buried the tracks. Having grown up literally around the railway, Reno discovered that by the late twentieth century having traffic halted repeatedly during the day for mile-long-plus freight trains to trundle by, was a serious nuisance. As a result, the city – backed by the private finance invested in the casinos and a generous grant from federal government – spent some $284 million on cutting an open trench through the centre of town, allowing road traffic to pass uninterrupted.
Happily the station – a minor detail given that only two passenger-carrying Amtrak trains (one in each direction) call per day – substantially survived, with the addition of a lift down one floor to the new platform level. Entertainingly they left the ‘restrooms’ at street level, calling for much anxious lift-button-pressing by passengers apparently equally terrified of having to walk up one flight of stairs to the convenience or missing the once-a-day train (an admittedly serious inconvenience).
From the station it’s a modest trot to the Silver Legacy where I had booked a room. You could stay somewhere other than in a casino in Reno, but it would be odd, and it wouldn’t be easy. The Silver Legacy was identifiable, I’m told by the station attendant, by a silver golf ball the size of a small planet perched on its roof. It was only later that I found out why. Being identifiable from the outside, however, is quite another thing to being readily accessible on the inside, particularly to that little known and less regarded life form: the pedestrian.
It takes me three attempts to work out that all the obvious entrances from the street lead straight into the main, slot-machine throbbing casino floor and that to get into the hotel which towered above it, with the reception and lobby on the first (in American: second) floor, you’re expected to drive straight to the underground parking. Or failing that, be chauffeured through a cavernous concrete-pillared approach about as pedestrian-friendly as the docking slot on a Death Star. Despite it being less than a five-minute walk most people coming here from the railroad station catch a cab.
Having finally negotiated the entrance procedure, I find myself suddenly enshrouded in a thin but deceptive veneer of luxury. Casino hotels are designed to look five star, even though they charge only two-to-three-star prices. If you look closely at the fixtures and fittings you’ll find it’s only rarely you hit the jackpot, but the reckoning is that if you’re feeling flush and comfortable enough they’ll soon get their money off you.
When I’ve checked in and been handed my fistful of vouchers for the ‘casino resort attractions’, I make my way to the 18th floor to find a view that is five star and more: endless limpid azure skies with just the wispiest of clouds floating over distant barren hills, and in the foreground this small but outrageous concrete and neon
oasis of Mammon. Looking at Reno today, it is hard to imagine that the city it might have aspired to rival is not Las Vegas but Salt Lake City. This was originally a Mormon settlement, but sold its soul for 20 pieces of silver, although probably more like 20 million pieces nowadays. Annually. At whatever the going rate for silver is.
The discovery of silver in the second half of the nineteenth century finished off Reno’s ambitions to becoming a strict Mormon community as the settlers were swamped by an influx of those who’d missed out on the gold rush. Silver was easier to find and easier to mine. It might not be worth as much but you could still end up rich if you got your hands on enough of it. And with the prospectors, as usual, came the saloons, whores and, most importantly for Reno – and all of Nevada – the card tables.
Gambling was legalised in 1931, just in time to take over as the local community’s main source of income. With the sun still high in the sky, however, my first plan is to find out what else there is to Reno apart from gambling, by the simple if unorthodox plan of taking a stroll through town in the crisp dry desert air. Unfortunately this turns out to be a lot harder than I had imagined. I don’t mean finding what else there was to the city, I mean simply finding fresh air or sunshine again. After 40 minutes wandering through a maze of slot machines and fast-food outlets, I’m despairing of ever seeing the light of day again. When they say ‘resort casino’ they mean it: the operators’ clear intention is to prevent you as far as possible from ever venturing outside. Once your income stream – however small – has trickled into the casino’s great well, there’s no way it is easily going to trickle out again.
