Sacramento to Winnemucca

We're continuing our journey eastward over the Sierra Nevada. This will be a short jaunt, be we've got two 19th century stories to talk about: the Donner Party and the namesake of Reno, Nevada. 

Transcript

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Hello everybody and I guess good morning if we're playing along on this armchair road trip. Hopefully you've had a really good night's rest after a fun day in San Francisco and all of the sugar crash after all of our Ghirardelli Sundays, which I already regret not having. But now we are going to drive. Out of Sacramento, excuse me, and then up over this here in Nevada, and in to Nevada. And now I know this will not be as exciting as San Francisco. Few places are. Few places have as great of food too. I mean, sourdough, Ghirardelli Sundaes, but, uh, this will be one of the more scenic and dramatic drives, because we will drive through the tallest mountain range. in the continental U. S. Sadly, we're not going to get close to the tallest mountain, Mount Whitney, but not seeing the tallest mountain will be made up in the fact that we get to talk about one of the largest tragedies in American pioneer history, and probably the American history as a whole too. It's wild if you know where we're going. But we have to start out Sacramento still. It's a very pretty town, I think. Kind of low key. A lot of people, but it's not as flashy as a lot of other state capitals. And I think that's because California already has a lot of flashy cities. And so Sacramento's content by being itself. Also, it knows it's the state capital. That's kind of its purpose. So with that in mind, we're going to skip the continental breakfast if you want to grab it on the way out of the hotel, then so be it. But I tend to stay up later and drive later and then leave late and because of that I missed the continental breakfasts. Not that I'd eat it anyways because better to have an earlier lunch and stay somewhat on a decent eating schedule. So off we go. Let us head to Winnemucca, but first let's stop at the state capital. So this building, which is really quite magnificent, was built from 1861 to 1874. And, of course, at first glance, it is obviously modeled on the federal capitol building in Washington, D. C. It is the fourth state capitol. Well, okay, Sacramento itself is the fourth state capitol city of California. In colonial times, Monterey was the capital. Which, Monterey is a really great city, a really great place, very quaint, very charming, but probably ill suited to being the state capital of a state like California, especially because it's location, it's Just, kind of, off the beaten path, but not truly off the beaten path, whereas Sacramento is easily accessible from all parts of the state. So we don't count Monterey because it was the territorial colonial capital, but the first state capital was San Jose, which would just be up the road from Monterey. This lasted for about a year, and then they moved up a little farther, the bay, into Vallejo. This also lasted for a few months to a year. And then they moved just a little farther to the city of Benicia. And this lasted For just a little bit too. And then in 1854, they decided to move the state capital to Sacramento. This may have been related to the fact that a lot of the state would have been living between San Francisco and the Gold Rush Mines. And so Sacramento made a perfect place. I mean, Los Angeles and San Diego aren't as important as they are now. They were just small little baby cities, if that. And so Sacramento was the natural choice, and it sits in the Central Valley. And we talked about this, that central, um, the Central Valley is extremely low in elevation and very flat. So that makes Sacramento the city, after New Orleans, most likely to flood in the United States. But, notwithstanding the natural disasters, California deserved a building where it could house its government and be governed in magnificence. Maybe I'm waxing a little too strong there. I do love state capitals. I think they're a unique way to look at the state's culture and also the history of the state. And California is no exception. And my favorite part of the building is actually the landscaping. The building itself is really pretty and you need it to look through the land, but looking at the building through the landscaping, that's probably a better way to talk about it, I think is really pretty. They have all these trees from California, palm trees. Love them, and the building is really white. They keep it very clean, I guess, but it's very, very, very pretty, with the green landscaping, and the white building, and then the darker dome. We get to enjoy that today, because there was a single vote. in the 1970s. I would really love to be a fly on a wall of many a building, and I think we all would love to have been there to say no to New York City when it allowed the destruction of Penn Station. But even though there was the rising movement of the cultural heritage of buildings, Jackie O, and the saving of Grand Central Terminal, some people still had it in their minds that These buildings may not be worth it that they should just be leveled and then replaced with a faceless Lifeless skyscraper, which is really interesting. I mean many questions and California almost fell victim to this At least the California state capital. There's probably plenty of travesties, architectural travesties, throughout the state. But, to lose the state capital would have been terrible. In the 1970s, obviously, California is now one of the powerhouse states in the United States. And To that effect, there were a lot of people, and in the government, who felt that California would be better to replace the Capitol with a skyscraper. The building, obviously, was not built to seismic standards. It was old. It probably was a bit drafty. And, they just thought, you know what? If we're gonna keep spending all the money in the upkeep for this old building, which, imagine, this is Barely a hundred years old. All the Europeans are probably laughing at us. But this 100 year old building, they're like, it's probably not even worth it to keep. Well, it goes to a vote, and it was a single vote that saved the building. So, as we look at it today, with its white facade and slate dome and all these trees and this nice little public park area, we should be grateful to that single vote who saved the building. So anyways, we've enjoyed our little mid morning, probably late morning walk around the capital. And it is time to head into the mountains. So as I mentioned yesterday, all of the suburbs of Sacramento are to the east because of the flood plain. So, this will be fun to drive through a lot of suburbia as we head up into the mountains. There's gonna be nothing in these artsy little towns up As we cross over into Nevada. So while we're climbing I think it's A good time to talk about the Transcontinental Railway, which we could talk about at any point on this trip since we largely parallel the tracks, especially from Omaha West, but this part that we're going to be driving is the most dramatic of the entire railway. So, we've talked about how roads were not the best, because there was no reason for them to be the best, and that the trails people pay, or, I guess, not paved, but the trails people blazed would often still be very dangerous and very rough. A railway Needs to be somewhat smooth. You cannot just stick a railroad on a 10 percent grade. I guess you could. There are railways, funiculars all over that do that, but as a general rule, a railroad needs wide turns and a very slight incline. The Sierra Nevadas are not conducive to that kind of construction. So, when the federal government decided to step up and build a The Transcontinental Railway, it's always the federal government. They. We're also affected by the Civil War, so it didn't start and it took a lot longer than anticipated. It started in, work started in 1863 in the midst of a civil war, but then ran until 1869. This date is emblazoned on every Utah student because, well, who knows, maybe not now, but when I was in fourth grade and we did Utah Studies, we learned a song about it and there was some chorus that I have gratefully forgotten because It was corny and it was, it was catchy, but it was, it was something, it was special. But this railroad actually only ran for 1, 912 miles. It started officially in Council Bluffs and ran to Oakland. San Francisco obviously sits on the other side of the Bay. At the time of the railroad, it was not feasible to. Build a tunnel or a bridge. So you would get off in Oakland and then take a ferry across to the city. Likewise in council bluffs, it kind of acted as the collector city for all the other railroads in the country. And then it would put everybody on the single line out and go through Nebraska and pretty much parallel the journey we're taking on our little road trip. Now it's a lot easier to build the railroad in Nebraska. where the incline of the land is very, very slight and you don't almost notice it. Uh, well, you don't notice it as much and then you get into Cheyenne and all of a sudden you're in mountains. California, on the other hand, you go from a very low elevation, say Sacramento, and then within about an hour, hour and a half driving, you are going through mountain passes that are some of the highest, um, traversed by Well, major roads. There's probably a lot higher in Colorado, but Interstate 80 is a major, major road. Sorry. I've pulled out my map. Cause I'm trying to see this. Let's see. Exit 109 is just East of Sacramento and then to exit 174. So yes, 65 miles. 65 miles is all it takes to really. Get up into the actual mountains and the mountain valleys and passes and all of the fun stuff that mountains bring with them. So imagine you're building a railway. The east, eastern side, the Union Pacific, had a really easy time. They got a bunch of Irish immigrants to come out west. Probably with the promise of, one, a stable job, but then two, land, because the federal government gave the railways a lot of right of way. And so that's why there's all these towns strung out like little pearls. So, they were working, going west. The people in California, the Central Pacific Railroad, had a lot harder time, because obviously blasting a railroad through mountains is a lot more dangerous than building it over the Great Plains. So there was a high rate of attrition in the employees. And this is one of the fun stories, I think, that sometimes gets passed over with the Transcontinental Railroad because we're all like, Yay, Civil War, and yay, now we're reunited by a railroad. But most, of the railroad, uh, from California into Utah was built by Chinese immigrants. But basically, the Irishman hired to work in the Central Pacific, they were more apt to complain and grumble about their working conditions, and they were slightly capricious in that sense. They thought that if things weren't what they expected, then they didn't have to work. Well, as the railroad gets going, And more and more people stopped working, they realized they have a problem. So they hired Chinese workers. These Chinese workers were, to say the least, very self contained. And they were very different from the Irish, because they were there to work. They also did not spend their money or their time much in the same way as a bunch of Irishmen would. But they really were the unsung heroes of the railroad. And they were even called Celestials. And this was in part because they were very well behaved, punctual, but also their spiritual beliefs. And they literally just would put their nose to the grindstone and work. And they literally built the railroad over the Sierra Nevada. There were lots of injustices. They were paid less. They were also subject to a lot of racial prejudice. But they were also healthier. They avoided a lot of diseases because they were more hygienic and they had a more varied diet. And they were not, they were just, probably, to say it in a very, very simple way, they were better workers. So, with the two teams, the Irish Union Pacific and the Chinese Central Pacific workers working to meet. As we mentioned, it was a lot easier to plow through Nebraska and then through the well worn trails of Wyoming and then down through Utah and they would meet in Promontory Point which is, I don't know, probably a two hour drive now from Salt Lake City. Um, it's kind of the boonies because the railroad, they eventually built a trestle to go across the lake and so it's not really an accessible place. You kind of commit to a Big day trip to go out and see it, but because of their work, travel between the coasts was a lot safer. We think of going to New York to California all the time. You just hop in a, in a plane. Or, you really can drive it if you're hard pressed, and if you really want the fun, you can still take a train, the California Zephyr, from Chicago to Oakland. But before this, you either walked, which, oh, that would not be fun. That's not my, that would not be my idea of a great summer. Or, probably even worse, you would have to take a boat all the way down and around South America and then back up the Pacific coast. And this could take nine months to a year. Granted, you get to see a lot of the world, but. It's not as exciting as it would have been today, and so the railroad really was quite the impressive accomplishment. So thanks to all of the Irish and Chinese workers who did that and suffered from the railway railroad bosses, but you can still see a lot of the original engineering, which is why I talked about this at this time. Because as we're driving up you will see a lot of the train sheds still and the tunnels and a lot of it is still the original Line, not the track, they've replaced it, but it's still the same path. And the train sheds, with the snow, it's just an impressive feat of engineering as we climb up into the Sierra Nevada. So, that part's exciting, but now that we've, we've reached the pass, we've reached the highest pass we're going to drive through on Interstate 80 in the Sierra Nevadas. And it is the Donner Pass. Which, that says it all, the name says it all. There are a lot of cute, quaint, little art, artsy towns, mountain towns up here, but they do not exactly tell the full truth of how difficult these mountains are and have been for travelers coming west. The United States has a very strong pioneering heritage, Manifest Destiny, and all of that which we could get into and spend a lot of time talking about the rights and wrongs of it. But, when it comes down to the lived experience for a lot of people, it was very difficult to walk from the to the promised lands of Oregon and California. One such group was the Donner party. This is a group of 90 people on a wagon train west from Springfield, Illinois. Their goal was to get to California to the Central Valley and they would leave Springfield and then meet up with some other families in Independence, Missouri, which is a suburb of Kansas City. They decided to follow the Oregon Trail, which by this time was a tried and true path and every bit as dangerous as the game makes it out to be. I don't know if they still play that nowadays because that was a fun time when we talked about it in American history and we all just sat there and played the single player game of the Oregon Trail. Inevitably everybody dies. But The Oregon Trail was well worn, it was well signed for a path across the country, and a lot of people had experience walking it. So you'd think, oh, piece of cake. Well, this family left late. They left Missouri a month later than most wagon parties would, which would be mid May. Most of the time, To really give yourself the benefit of a full summer and a little cushion, you would leave by mid April. So, yes, rivers might still be a little swollen, but you can use that to your benefit. In some way, also there's water, but leaving mid May, you're kind of cutting it close. Which, we're like, oh mid May, summer hasn't started. Well, winter's coming sooner than, than you want. So they left late. And part of this was that, part of their problem, also, was that they elected to follow a different trail. That was called the Hastings Cut Off. And this meant, this trail was named after a man, whose last name was Hastings. Who, uh, was kind of a booster for these Westward trails, however, he had never walked what he was promoting, so the, so the Donner Party had no idea what they were getting into. The Hastings Cut Off promised a shorter route to California, that it would leave the trail in Wyoming, and it would come down through the Salt Lake Valley, and then out west. Which, to those who have driven west of Salt Lake City, you know that is probably one of the most inhospitable places in the United States. There's nothing. And then you get into Nevada, which, that part of Nevada isn't the Garden of Eden either. So, then it would meet up just around, just west of where present day Elko is, and then it would meet up with the California Trail, and then you'd walk the rest of the way, the same way as everybody else. These people did not know that as soon as you enter the Great Salt Lake Desert, you're, you're planning on roughly 80 miles without water. Now when we say desert, I mean, we like to think of the Sahara, but it, in many places, it is just scrubby sagebrush. And so it is possible to find water, there's lots of springs. But the Great Salt Lake Desert is basically a salt flat, a remnant of an ancient lake, which means that the water you find, which you can find, it's, it is in the salt. So that's an extra step if you have to have a desalinization process, but then there's nothing, it's flat and it's white. There's no, there's nothing for your animals to eat, which that's important when they're hauling your, hauling your stuff. And so this is the first disaster. Now I remember, and this is, this may be wrong, but in seventh grade, which is also Utah history, um, we were told that As it became worse and worse, that they would just leave stuff, so supposedly they left a grand piano, just out in the middle of the desert, and supposedly that as people would come back, and I think people tried to retrace their steps, because They were treasure hunters and there were lots of talk they they would then be like, oh, yeah We found all this stuff out in the desert obviously be destroyed by now, but interesting food for thought So they they cross Nevada. They lose cattle. They run off. They have to go find them so now they're wasting daylight because How can you move anything without the oxen? This means that they arrive on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in late to mid November. There had already been a storm in early November which then blanketed the the mountain passes which every winter it's really interesting because being just east we get a lot of the atmospheric rivers that hit California albeit with a little less force but it's always interesting that they will tell us oh it's gonna Uh, like Northern California, it's gonna rain, rain, rain, rain, but the snow that's gonna fall this year in Nevada is wild. I mean, it's feet. When they talk about it, it's not in inches, it's feet. So imagine, it's now mid November, and you're essentially stranded, and you know you're stranded because there's no way that once the snow comes that you will be able to pass through it. It's kind of a waited out situation. Which, if you're driving this road in winter, you'll get a good view of that. That's why they have a lot of snow. The sticks on the side of the road that, um, indicate the edges of the road for the snowplows. Wild. It's a whole experience driving the snow in a mountain pass. Anyways, this poor Donner party, they decided to winter out what is now, was called Truckee Lake, but is now Donner Lake. Which is at the top of this pass. Within two weeks, they've run out of food and many could barely get out of bed. And of course this is when the real horror, I guess the thing they're infamously known for happens. And because they had no food, their living conditions were terrible, they resorted to cannibalism. Obviously, many people have died, so they just used their bodies for food. And this causes a huge ideological divide between the group. Obviously they're starving, and the parents are watching their kids waste away and starve to death. So you're doing something that is considered to be a heinous crime and very disrespectful to a deceased body, but also you have no food. You've already stripped everything you can find, and you've already eaten all the leather, and you are chewing on tree bark. And, sitting in bed, wasting away. Like, we cannot imagine how horrific this winter must have been for them. Well, a group of them decide to leave and try and cross the mountains. And this party was called the Forlorn Hope. And they had drama of their own. The party ended up getting stranded somewhere else too. And they killed one of the members with them. To use, like, just frankly to straight up use for food. And. After their drama getting stuck in some other parts of the mountains, they did make it into the Sacramento Valley, Central Valley, in mid January. So now winter's in full force. However, they must have been relieved but also blown away that in Sacramento Valley, it must have been, the weather must have been flawless. Winter in Sacramento, it doesn't snow. It's actually a really interesting thing that they will measure snow a hundred miles away in feet when it falls, not inches. And then in Sacramento it hardly falls at all. Just putting it out there. Geography's bizarre. So now, all of these people have realized that there is a stranded group, mostly women and children now, and some men, a lot of them dead, stuck up in the pass. So it took three relief parties for them to get there, and they wouldn't arrive until mid February. So now that's three months. These must have been the worst three months. of many of these people's lives. What the rescue parties must have seen must have been horrific because as soon as they arrived, the children stripped their shoes of the shoelaces and ate them. God help us all to never be that desperate. Of course, the circumstances in which the Donner Party found themselves led to the story becoming highly sensationalized. And of course, this is right at the time of journalism becoming very sensationalized and very I guess the word would be yellow journalism when scandal or drama sells more than just the straight facts, which, well, we're seeing that again, aren't we? But this sensationalism and the taboo surrounding them ended up ruining their lives, obviously. Now that they've been rescued, there became. a point in which they fought and there was a lot of finger pointing and it's been difficult for historians to actually figure out what happened in many cases because the families became so bitter that it was a giant he said she said there's a lot you can find out a lot about the details about who killed who or who ate who and which families did and didn't It's a little too grisly for this podcast, and also this podcast host, but needless to say it ruined their lives. Most of the survivors, once they got down into the valley, would disband and they would never see each other again, and they would move far away from each other. And the orphans were adopted, which was a very happy note. And can you imagine They have no control over a lot of the circumstances they found themselves in being children, and now they're forever associated with one of the greatest tragedies of, um, of the time. One of the grandchildren of a survivor noted that their grandmother was extremely serious. And she said, I wish I could cry, but I cannot. If I could forget the tragedy, perhaps I would know how to cry again. I think we're much more in tune with mental health these days, hopefully, and what trauma can do physically to a person, and mentally. But these poor people must have just been ruined for the rest of their lives. It really contrasts as we drive through this that it's a really extremely beautiful place, especially in the summer and the spring and the fall. And even now that we're able to drive through in the winter and appreciate the snow and see the beauty of it. But dang, this It's terrible, and it's really hard to read about. It can be kind of morbidly interesting, but then, they show pictures of the cabins after all the snow melts. And, thank goodness they're in black and white. But, it, but, just, it conveys the sense of the tragedy, but it cannot make us understand, if that makes any sense. Anyways, we're done with that. We're done with the Sierra Nevadas. They're not like the Rockies where you're passing through them for hours on end, which will happen in Wyoming. But, we are now descending into Nevada. Um, anybody want to gamble? Very another interesting thing that's happening in the United States right now is that gambling is becoming more legalized in places Yet, Nevada is still going strong So let me flip my atlas to Nevada And we're coming into the biggest little city in the world, Reno It's kind of scenic. I don't know. I don't know how I really feel about Reno. I'm very neutral on Reno. Um, I do love the other side of Nevada. Which, not the east side, we're talking the south side. Las Vegas. I did write my master's thesis on Las Vegas, so I do have a lot of affection for that city. But Reno is the largest city in Nevada that is not in the Las Vegas Valley. And it used to be the divorce casino hotspot before the rise of Las Vegas, thanks to the mafia and air conditioning in the 1930s and 40s. Reno sits in the Truckee Meadows, which was kind of the final fertile place before you crossed the Sierra Nevadas. I guess the last reliable place before you crossed the Sierra Nevadas. It was originally named Lakes Crossing by the Central Pacific Railroad. And then another super, uh, superintendent of the railroad later would rename this city after Civil War Major General Jesse Lee Reno, who died in the Battle of South Mountain. Now this is one of the fun parts of this podcast because I know we're talking about Reno, Nevada, but we're going to take a small, break. The Battle of South Mountain was fought in September of 1862 and was the prelude to the Battle of Antietam three days later, because they were fighting to control three passes in the South Mountains in western Maryland. Antietam would later go on to be known as the bloodiest day in American history with 22, 727 casualties in a single day. In the Battle of South Mountain, Jesse Lee Reno was killed. And it's at this point that I think it should be just, we're going to start saying it, Jesse Lee Reno. And here's why. Jesse Lee Renaud was born in present day Wheeling, West Virginia, which would have been Virginia when he was born, his ancestry was French, and the name was originally which would have been spelled capital R E Y N A U D, but upon arriving, and Settling in West Virginia, they anglicized the spelling to capital R E N O to make it easier for everybody else to say. So, Renault. He did grow up in Pennsylvania, and he was noted to be of handsome countenance, of medium stature, brave and quick in action, and a generous companion, even as a boy. And this is perhaps the biggest factor why we're talking about The Civil War hero in Reno, Nevada. He did serve with distinction in this Mexican American war. And it was in this war that he became known as the soldier's soldier. Most leaders would. obviously send their soldiers out in front of them, or maybe even stay behind. But Jesse Lee Renaud was a leader who would be at the front with his soldiers. He was more than willing to go into battle. And so it was this charisma that led him to become extremely popular amongst those he served with. However, with his death, that kind of struck a big blow to So this is really interesting because we have Reno, Nevada, we have a county in Kansas, a small city in Ohio, we have another city, although we've Spanishified it and called it El Reno, Oklahoma, and then another place in Pennsylvania. I know I love place names because of what they carry with them. Place names are kind of essentially the tie between the history and the culture and kind of what we think of a place to an actual physical spot on the land. So it's just really interesting that this man who was A very charismatic leader, a military leader, he became prolifically known, he became known after because of this prolific place naming after him. Now I don't know if any places really kept the original French pronunciation or if we're all just following Nevada's example and saying Reno. And so if anybody wants to correct me about Oklahoma or anywhere else, please let me know. And then, last but not least, Washington D. C. even named a park after him, Fort Reno Park, which coincidentally contains the highest natural point in the District of Columbia. But I do have to admit this landscape that we drive through from Nevada all the way into Salt Lake City is kind of special because it's what the landscape I grew up in, the basin and range. And it's always, to me, impressive to fly out of Salt Lake City Airport. And I generally sit on the left side of the plane because when you're flying east, that means the sun isn't coming directly through your window. Complicated, I know. But as you're flying north, you get this great view over the lake and then the successive mountains and valleys out into Nevada. And it's so pretty. When I see it, I know I'm home in the west. And it's not one of those, like, oh, um, not like Colorado West where it's really great plains. Um, but true, like, mountain desert, high desert west. Um, yeah, I'm a snob about that. But as we're driving through this, uh, it's a, it's kind of a cool thing to note that we think of The Great Salt Lake a lot. It's very in prominent on our maps, but there's a small lake that will drive within about 30 miles of called Pyramid Lake, and it is the last remnant of a lake called Lake Lahontan, which like the predecessor to the Great Salt Lake was an ice age lake, one of these ancient lakes that really covered a lot of land area. Lake Laton would've covered most of. western Nevada. However, like Lake Bonneville, it ended up draining, but it left this little remnant called Pyramid Lake, and we can look at the pyramid shaped island. Which gives it its name, but also I think it's really interesting to note that it has 10 percent of the area of Great Salt Lake, which we will pass tomorrow in our little road trip, but then 25 percent more volume, and this is entirely because of its depth. It is quite deep, especially in comparison to the Great Salt Lake, which is about 35 40 feet deep on a good day. And so this lake holds a lot of water, but it is also not as salty, and so, that's it. Nevada! Woohoo! And we'll drive to Winnemucca get ready because tomorrow will be an exciting trip as we'll go through Elko and Wendover, past the Salt Flats, and arrive in Salt Lake City. So, rest up, friends, and, we'll get ready for an exciting drive tomorrow.