Virginia City, Nevada (Part 1 of 3)

For photos see greatmirror.com
For a transcript, see buzzsprout.com1970784

Transcript

I hadn’t looked around the U.S. for years.  There was nothing to see, I thought.  I meant nothing to learn.  I really meant nothing I wanted to learn.  What’s that, you say?  Yes, yes.  Aquarius.

I decided to go to Virginia City, a town about an hour’s drive southeast of Reno.   Virginia City sits atop the Comstock Lode, fabulously rich in silver until it was more or less cleaned out in the 1860s and 70s.  The Comstock made Virginia City in those years the metropolis of Nevada.  That’s hard to believe when Reno today has a quarter-million people and Virginia City has fewer than a thousand, but back in the day, as we say, Virginia City had 25,000 people, and Reno had only one thousand.  

I had visited Virginia City in 1963.  I’m not sure why I went there, but in school I had been told to read Mark Twain’s Roughing It.  I did read parts of it.  The book centers on the two years Twain spent in Nevada, largely as a reporter for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise.  Twain was here exactly a hundred years before my 1963 visit–and no, I’m no more interested in numerology than I am in astrology.

I remembered from 1963 a straight and almost level main street laid out on the smoothly planed eastern side of a mountain with a long view east across a vista of desert mountains and valleys.  I remembered two- and three-story brick buildings lined up on about half a mile of that main street.  With bold signs and names like The Bucket of Blood saloon, the target was obviously tourists, who in 1963 almost certainly could tell you the names of the characters and even the names of the actors in “Bonanza,” a TV show set near Virginia City and then in the middle of a near-record run of over 400 episodes.  I didn’t remember much else except the heaps of waste rock dotting the slope below the main street. They were flat-topped and looked like launch pads for rockets.

I had intended in 1963 to stick around for a few days, but there was a problem.  I had left San Francisco because I was sick of the summer fog, and I had thought I would find sunshine in Nevada.  I didn’t.  Depressed to the edge of disgust, I decided to keep driving.  I had just graduated from the University of California with a degree in Geography.  So, with that preparation, in what direction would I head?  East?  Sensible, but nope.  South?  Good guess, but wrong again.  Don’t laugh, but to find sunshine I drove to Seattle.  And it gets funnier, because in the week that followed and disgusted by Seattle’s clouds, I drove all the way to Chicago.  I had never been there–never been east of Nevada–and I asked somebody where the city got its drinking water.  He looked at me as if I was pulling his leg, then said, “the lake, of course.”  I then asked him how the city removed the salt.  I still see him tipping his head to one side and wondering about California.

I know more geography now, but not enough to brag.   For  example, I know how to drive from my home in Oklahoma to Reno.  I just have to drive north on Interstate 35 to Salina, Kansas, then west on 70 to Denver.  Then I have to switch to 25 and go north to Cheyenne.  I make one last turn there and let Interstate 80 take me the rest of the way. If you’re a trooper, which I used to be, the trip will take 25 hours.  So, to repeat: north, left, right, left.  That’s it.

I also know how to fly to Reno, usually with only one stop, probably Dallas or Denver or Salt Lake City.   I have a so-called choice of airlines, though except for their color schemes and logos, I can’t tell them apart.  It’s like Ford and Chevy.  There’s a reason the tailgates of pickup trucks look like billboards.  

Suppose we make a harder test.  Suppose we pretend I’m making the trip not in 2023 but in 1823.  

I know I better start in spring, because I remember the Donner Party.  In the winter of 1847 several members of the snowbound party starved to death thirty-five miles from what is now Reno. 

I’m also thinking about Jedediah Smith, who survived two perilous trips across Nevada in the 1820s but who a few years later and out on the High Plains didn’t survive the Comanche.  Neither would I, so let’s imagine I meet no Indians.  There’s a downside to doing this, because Jed Smith, like Lewis and Clark and lots of others, habitually relied on Indians for directions.  Still, I am going to stick to my no-help plan because my purpose is to display my knowledge. 

I’ll carry Clint’s favorite gun.  You know the one.  It’s the most powerful handgun in the world, he tells us, a gun that, as he says winningly, “will blow your head clean off.”  I wish I could say it the way he does.  I’ll take as many cartridges as I can carry and  a big knife, a blanket, a bunch of waterproof matches, a waterproof cape or groundsheet, and a change of heavy wool socks.  I’m already betting that I’ll abandon some of those cartridges the way pioneers in covered wagons abandoned pianos.

Anyway, here I go, no guide, no map.  Uh, I just remembered I should take a  compass.  

Maybe I should get a tin cup, too, but otherwise I’m off to a good start, heading west upstream on the Canadian River, which passes south of Oklahoma City.  The river will get me all the way across what is now the Texas Panhandle.  The river ends, or maybe I should say starts, in the Southern Rockies in New Mexico.

But which way now?  Good question.  I don’t know what to do except bushwhack west across the mountains–I think they’re the Sangre de Christo–to the Rio Grande.  That river flows north to south and I want to go west, so I guess I’ll go upstream and hope to get to the San Luis Valley, near the head of the Rio Grande.  

Again I’m stuck and don’t know what to do except bushwhack west to the Colorado.  I’m pretty sure I don’t want to follow that river downstream, not through the Grand Canyon, thank you.   I could try hugging its north rim and then walking north from what is now Las Vegas.  Not sure how to do that.  Stupidly, perhaps, I’ll try instead to walk northwesterly from the San Luis Valley to Great Salt Lake.  I say stupidly because I then have to cross 400 miles of Nevada desert with lots of more or less parallel mountain ranges driving me crazy, one after another.  I will very likely die of thirst but maybe not of hunger if I can blow the heads clean off of some punk jackrabbits. 

If I’m unbelievably lucky, I’ll eventually bump into the Sierra Nevada, the biggest and the last of the parallel mountains.  I’ll know I’m there if I see Donner Lake, with its crystal-clear but damnably cold water.  I’ll walk east about 35 miles and spread out my blanket along the Truckee River.  I’m sitting on the site of what will be Reno.  

I have to tell you that I’m so tired that I’m going to wait until the world’s first transcontinental railroad shows up.  It should be here in 45 years and will still be in place in 2023, but by then it will have changed names twice.  It will be built as the Central Pacific, then swallowed by the Southern Pacific and then swallowed by the Union Pacific.  The Union Pacific today is a busy freight line, but there are only two passenger trains daily through Reno, one eastbound and the other west.  They’re run by Amtrak, the federal corporation that delighted the nation’s railroads in the early 1970s by taking over the money-losing business of carrying people.

Sitting at the edge of the Truckee River, maybe I’ll daydream about Jesse Reno, a general killed in the Civil War.  Reno’s ancestors came from France, where the family name was Renault.  I bet you didn’t know that, but it explains why Reno is famous for champagne and crepes.  I’m sorry, but you’re on your own sorting out the truth from my chaff. 

So there you are: I’m embarrassed that I can’t provide a more detailed route.  Shall I console myself by saying that people in 1823 knew even less than I do?  That’s not fair, you say, and you’re right, but I’m going to cling to this excuse and point to a famous map produced in 1816 by John Melish, a Scot settled in Philadelphia.  This was the first map to show the area of what became the 48 states.  

Melish is very, very good east of the Mississippi and  very, very bad west of it, especially in Nevada.  He does have a Texas—there’s always a Texas—but it just hugs the Gulf Coast, and it has no cities except San Antonio.

Melish has no Oklahoma–when he made the map there wasn’t even an Indian Territory–but he does see and label the Red River, the Arkansas River, and, in between them, the Canadian, which I just followed to the Rockies.  Farther west, Melish has got the Rio Grande, which he calls the Rio Del Norte.  He’s got it coming out of the Colorado Rockies, but for those complex mountains he shows only three parallel caterpillars.  He calls the middle one the Snow Mountains, a sensible name even if it didn’t stick.

Melish relied heavily on Zebulon Pike, who did for the Southern Rockies something similar to what Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were doing farther north at about the same time.  Melish’s map in fact shows the location of the building–he calls it a block house–that Pike built to winter in 1806 about 30 miles west of Pueblo.   That’s the same winter that Lewis and Clark spent near the mouth of the Columbia.  Melish draws a funny little mountain which he labels Highest Peak. It’s now Pike’s Peak but has been demoted to Colorado’s 20th highest.

Melish is good with the Columbia.  Thank Lewis and Clark.  He plots the Colorado River, too, which he calls the Rio Colorado of the West and which he knows ends in the Gulf of California, which I bet money is more than most Americans today know.  

In the 400 miles between Great Salt Lake and the Sierra Nevada, Melish knows nothing.  He knows the Bear River, which feeds the lake from the east, but he calls it the Buenaventura.  West of the lake, he adds a long dotted line heading west, and he adds these words to it: “Supposed course of a river between the Buenaventura and the Bay of Francisco which will probably be the communication from the Arkansas to the Pacific Ocean.”  Well, dreamers dream.  The only other feature Melish has between the Great Salt Lake and San Francisco Bay is another caterpillar, this one labeled California Mountains.  There is no Lake Tahoe, no Truckee River, and of course no Reno.  No champagne or crepes.

Well, as we say, cut him some slack.  Melish drew his map a decade before the first white man crossed Nevada.  That was Jed Smith in 1826.  Smith never published a map of his travels, so we have to wait another 20 years for Captain John C. Fremont to cross Nevada with the help of Kit Carson.  Fremont did produce a map, and it shows both Great Salt Lake and Lake Tahoe.  In between, again, there’s almost nothing.  Fremont was the first to call this region the Great Basin.  He describes it concisely: “contents almost unknown, but believed to be filled with rivers and lakes which have no communications with the sea, deserts and oases which have never been explored, and savage tribes no traveller has seen or described.”  It’s almost like “Here be dragons.”

Fremont’s map was published in 1844, and two years later a young man named T. H. Jefferson—no relation to the president–crossed Nevada with a wagon train.  Jefferson then published a map in four sheets covering what he called the Emigrant Road from Independence, Missouri, to San Francisco.  

The map corresponds to the Oregon Trail from Independence as far as South Pass, which is about 50 miles north of what is now Rock Springs on Interstate 80 in western Wyoming.  Jed Smith had established South Pass as the easiest crossing of the Continental Divide, and Jefferson’s Emigrant Road, like the Oregon Trail, runs over the pass but then heads southwesterly to the site of what will be Salt Lake City.  The road continues around the south shore of the lake and then begins adding grim details: “no grass nor water,” “fearful long drive,” “battle with the Pauta Indians,” (I assume he means the Paiute), “grave,” “Salley’s grave,” (I have no idea who Salley was), and “no water, no wood.”  

It’s sobering, but on the far side of the desert, Jefferson does show the Truckee River.  (By the way, Truckee was a Paiute chief, and the river is so beautiful that I almost cry when I think of it flowing through the high rise misery of downtown Reno.)  Jefferson’s map has no Tahoe and no Reno, which means there’s still no champagne or crepes.  I’m getting hungry just joking about them.   

Two centuries later, there was no adventure for me.  I flew to Reno from Oklahoma City via Austin, Texas.  It was a weird routing, but it only cost 15,000 miles round-trip, and the flight times were good.  

I can now report that whoever’s in charge of Reno’s airport really liked the 1960s, because the airport ceilings are so flat and low that you feel that you’re walking between two stacked waffles, brightened up in this case not by strawberries but by slot machines, flashing colorfully when plugged in but when unplugged looking like rows of coffins stood upright.  

I couldn’t believe all the people hoping for a jackpot.  Most of them were old enough that they wouldn’t appreciate my telling them they only had to wait a while.  It occurs to me that if you want to be sure that our civilization is continuing on the path of progress, you only have to check to see if people are getting more and more bored.    

Anyway, I rented a car, easy-peasy, went to Google maps on my phone, and let the lady who has no name direct me a few miles along Interstate 580 and then along some city streets to the Amtrak station. 

The station is next to the old Central Pacific tracks, now the Union Pacific.  The station is the third building on the site and is a high-ceilinged affair built in 1926.  There were only three people in the station: me, a clerk, and somebody looking at his phone and waiting to be picked up, I think.  The station belongs to the City of Reno, I’m guessing to the railroad’s relief.

This is where I had sat waiting for 45 years, and it’s hard for me not to imagine now a Central Pacific locomotive coming through.  It has a funnel-shaped smokestack because its firebox burns wood.  Cinders from the firebox are dangerous because they can start forest fires, so the funnel shape–there were many patented versions–is not an ornament.  It’s meant to spin the exhaust centrifugally to the edge of the funnel and then catch the cinders before they fly aloft and make trouble.  When locomotives on the West Coast switched to coal or oil around 1900, funnel stacks disappeared, but if you remember that famous photograph of the Central Pacific meeting the Union Pacific at Promontory, Utah in 1869, you may recall that the Union Pacific engine, on the right side, has a straight or cannon stack.  That’s because the UP, bless its heart, ran on coal.

A couple of men now come to mind.  Not Leland Stanford or Charlie Crocker or Mark Hopkins, whose names linger as three of the railroad’s Big Four, but the fourth partner, the most important partner, the guy who handled the money and dealt with the federal government.  Collis Huntington once dictated a short autobiography–I remember seeing the text written longhand in pencil by a stenographer–in which he freely admitted bribing congressmen.  Is that good or bad?  I mean, we admire honesty, don’t we?  He also said that in school he had done very poorly in every subject except geography.  This pleases me, and I wonder if he found geography useful in planning the expansion of the railroad’s track network.

The other man who comes to mind is Theodore Dehone Judah, the engineer who, before the Big Four were Big, found the route that the Central Pacific would take from Sacramento east over the Sierra Nevada.  When construction had hardly begun, Judah made what he thought would be a quick trip back east.  Like most people at that time, he sailed to Panama and crossed the Isthmus.  He found no Comanche but he did find the kind of mosquitoes that transmit yellow fever.  That was the end of Theodore Dehone Judah, dead at 37.  Anyone inclined to romanticize the past, and I’m one of them, should remember him.

I found neither Comanche nor mosquitoes nor thirst nor hunger, but I did dare to park across the street from the Amtrak station and to scorn the parking meter.  They wouldn’t dare, I said to myself.  And they didn’t.  Live dangerously, I say.  Take risks.  Do what you want.  You’ll live longer.  

I asked the clerk if he had ever heard of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad.  This was the short line that from 1872 to 1938 connected Reno to Virginia City. Yes, he said.  Great, I replied, because I wondering where the V&T’s Reno station was.  He apologized and said he didn’t know.  Well, the V&T tracks in Reno are long gone, so his answer may seem reasonable, but two minutes later and not twenty feet from where he sat, I saw a map on the wall.  It was part of an historical display, and the map showed that the Amtrak station had once served both the big railroad and the small one.  You got off one train, crossed through the station, and got on the other.  It’s not as though the clerk was crazy-busy  Why hadn’t he ever looked around?  Of course we know the answer.  Just wait:  iPhones one of these days will be surgically implanted.  

Trains in Reno now run in a 30-foot-deep trench, which means that if you’re getting on or off an Amtrak train, you have to deal with a lot of stairs or an elevator.  The trench was put in about 15 years ago, and most motorists are happy not having to wait for trains to clear a grade crossing.  They may not even notice that they’re crossing a track.  That’s assuming there’s no train rolling through town.  If there is, motorists new in town will glance anxiously to see if the rumbling signifies an earthquake about to bury them.

Reno does have some very pleasant, older neighborhoods, but the area around the Amtrak station is a jumble of seedy casinos and tedious office towers, high-rise condos, and that joy-without-end, multi-level parking structures.  They’re nearly all concrete and the same shade of gray.  The once-famous casinos from the 1950s–Harold’s, Harrah’s, and the Mapes–are either closed or demolished.  Some smaller ones survive, but the big new casinos are mostly two or three miles south, where there’s room for parking lots the size of Manhattan.  Unlike the downtown towers, the big new casinos dress like showgirls.  After all, they have to project excitement, though in Virginia City I would meet a retired blackjack dealer who said she was glad to be out of the business.  She had seen houses lost and marriages destroyed in those places.  

Every now and then in the next few days, Reno would come up in conversation.  I’d sum up my reaction by mentioning my surprise at finding meters at the entrances to Interstate 80.  One car per green, just like Los Angeles.  On a gravel road in the mountains outside Virginia City I stopped a UPS van to ask about some road conditions.  We chatted a bit and then I said he had a great route and was lucky compared to drivers in Los Angeles.  He nodded and said, “or even in Reno.”

I don’t anticipate a cure for the modern city, but there is an easy escape from Reno.  Maybe three hours after landing, I got back on Interstate 580, went south less than 10 miles beyond the airport, then turned onto State Highway 341, a two-lane road that straightaway heads east and climbs about 3000 feet to a pass over the Virginia Range.  Virginia City’s just over on the other side.

Long before I got to the top, I was driving through a sparse pine forest. Ponderosas and Jeffreys, I suppose.  I was remembering their scent on hot summer days years ago in the Sierra Nevada.  It’s a smell I love so much that even on this chilly November day, with–may God forgive me–my window probably rolled up–the trees reminded me that I was alive.  It came almost as a pang.  My God, this is what it feels like.  Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but three hours earlier I had been breathing air from Boeing.  Nobody breathing Boeing air has ever, in the history of the airline industry, thought that it smelled wonderful.