[Elmer B. Harris, The New West: A Social Study of Life in Nevada's Towns Today, Sunset, February 1907]

 

THE NEW WEST

A SOCIAL STUDY OF LIFE IN NEVADA TOWNS TODAY

By ELMER B. HARRIS

            BRET HARTE'S country is overlaid with a shell of sophistication. Sutter Creek, like Plymouth Rock, has a fence around it. The streams have delivered their treasure, the hills their golden fleece; railroads have crept in and off-shoots of city places have invaded old mining camps. The exponent of the red shirt, cowhide boots and ever ready hip arsenal, if he survives at all, does so at the expense of tourists. Romance still centers about him, but he is gone, like the prairie-schooner. The modern gold field is no longer a temporary camp of lawlessness and adventure. Tied down as tightly as Gulliver in Lilliput, a telegraphic ganglion in the world's banking and finance, linked to civilization by Pullman cars, it is only next door, as it were, to Wall Street or the Bourse; differs from them hardly more than a manufactory from a salesroom.

            The most popular modern mining camp on the Western Slope is marked on the map by a constellation of small towns in the Nevada desert, twenty-four hours by rail from San Francisco, over the spine of the Sierras and on across an illimitable expanse of sage and sand. As the train sways like an arrow through the wilderness, a hot wind toasts the bread on the plate before you, curls it like a cuff. A fine dust sifting in through the closed windows blinds the eyes, bites the nostrils. Walker Lake, a smooth blue boomerang hurled into the deserted hills and forgotten, a few gulls idling on its shore, subsisting a mile above sea level by some miracle known only to their creator; a forlorn prospector leading his dusty burros westward; a reservation where the original possessors of this treeless land crouch stolidly in the shade of huddled shanties, watching the shadows lengthen on the mesa—these, perhaps, will be its sole distractions, its sole reminders that the train still moves upon God's earth where life is precious and souls are schooled for paradise. The lapse of the hot, white hours is slow and uneventful in the desert, the end of the day welcome because cool, the sunset beautiful in its lonely grandeur—clouds bursting with gold and silver and long cloud-wings of pink cooling to drab enfolding the vermillion-painted hills; and the twilight,

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lit by massive stars, continues in this high altitude until the dawn.

            Goldfield, the center of the group, of mushroom growth, is compounded of dug- outs, tents, huts of beer bottles and adobe, others of tin sheeting, conventional red or green roofed cottages, a few mismated, squarebrowed buildings, some of stone, the whole spilled out over a gag in the jaws of an extinct volcano. To the east, the foothills bristle with derricks. Pick and pan have been supplanted by electric hoists and ventilators. The railroad calls at the door. The incessant noise of mills and machinery is punctured by the muffled thud of dynamite. The ground is cracked open in jagged stopes whence lessees have torn the noble metal, paid their ground toll and departed triumphant. The windlass, the whin, the hoist, mark embryo mines, stampmills full-fraught producers. No time is lost in handling ore or stock, and between the mines and the town automobiles glide back and forth as swiftly as weavers' shuttles. A walk through the mines and a trip down one or two of the shafts in an ore-bucket leaves one clay-stained and hungry. The hotels are clean and commodious. The use of the bath costs one dollar—and the good will of the succeeding occupant. In the Palm Restaurant, at Café Fiesta prices, one may lunch in the breeze of revolving fans on the delicacies of the San Francisco season, remembering, if he be an adopted son of the soil, to remove his coat before unfolding his napkin. Laced boots and pongee shirts have replaced cowhides and red flannel, and a "biled" collar is no longer the excuse for a lynching that it was in the early days. Music is not forgotten. From a balcony, piano and violin furnish a repertory including "Silverheels" and "La Boheme." The waiters might have come from Tait's. The tenderfoot who is looking for "copy" is invariably disappointed at the conventionality of his surroundings and finds it difficult to remember that this is the furthermost frontier of western America.

            There is, however, a characteristic note which designates the frontier, the absence of artificial class distinction. As the druggist put it: "I don't care what Smith says of Jones; it's what Jones does to me that counts. We are all here to get rich, and your dollar is as good as mine." This is the spirit of Goldfield, as of every other community whose aim is purely economic and where expediency and fair play are synonymous. Mental and moral discrepancies pale before a man's economic importance to the town and the courage with which he keeps his word. For the rest, everybody calls everybody by his nickname. "Why, I been here so long," remarked one resident of a year's standing, "that I don't know anybody by his last name!" The women, however, are more easily catalogued, segregating themselves naturally under three heads: the impeccable married woman, the wife and mother, removed and preserved by marriage; the independent, unattached young lady, earning her way by canonized methods at typewriter or soda fountain, bright-eyed, quick-tongued, holding her own against all corners and, with inviting glances, ensnaring men in the meshes of curiosity; and the omnipresent night-butterfly who, as the yellow moon balances on the low, black wave of hills, in the caressing air of evening, hovers on the porch of her tawdry cabin, flicking her cigarette and joking with the passers-by. Chinamen are not allowed in Goldfield; and such negroes as arrive there are permitted to do the work of porters only. These are the types one meets, these the divisions of society. There are represented three denominations in religion, but, as the flaxen-haired adjutant of the Salvation Army admitted: "In Gol'field, to safe souls is wery unbopular !" Fair play is religion enough. When a man dies or a child is born, the minister is called in; the mystery of life and death, the fret of the spirit is, on the whole, as rudimentary as are social distinctions in this oasis of buried treasure.

            There are few things more characteristic of a community than its amusements. Rock-drilling contests, burro races and the like are time-honored diversions in a mining camp. Gambling, the willingness to take a chance, a necessary and ineradicable impulse in our makeup, must

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here be reckoned with as a legitimate form of amusement. The business of sophisticated society is to relieve the individual from the hazard of taking chances. On the frontier, where life itself is precarious, the gambling instinct reaches its culmination, and all that is needed to foster this parody of existence is the open door. These are conventional pastimes, however, and the last Labor Day Committee on Entertainment decided to have a prize fight. In Nevada, bare knuckles are recognized as a legitimate means of arbitration, and it is no cause for wonder that this form of human remonstrance should have been selected as entertainment. In less than an hour fifty-two thousand dollars were subscribed, and the best men in the business were engaged to pummel each other until one lost consciousness. The day came. Hotels, restaurants, supplemented by avenues of Pullman cars, ran to capacity. The streets writhed with men. Some talked fight, others mines, still others the boycott of a local paper. In front of the paper office stood a man with a camera, ready to placard all who entered as unfair. The spirit of fair play had got into the Game as well, gun-fighters were to be at the ring-side, and if contestants or referee abetted dishonesty, trouble was promised. From the palaces came the rattle of poker chips and the monotonous call of the crap shooters. Here were Labor and Chance, arms linked, carousing together. Death, too, was there—unheeded; an unknown man had entered the Salvation Army barrack and shot himself while the flaxen-haired adjutant was praying on the street corner. In the heat of the day long rivers of men flowed out from the town into the open mesa, focussed upon the square, high-walled arena. Yonder were the mines, sending up their uncounted wealth; to the right the town, sliced with deserted streets; here a graveyard, the head-boards all awry; and by its side the arena with eight thousand men and a few hundred women and children, their blood stirred to primal instincts of survival by force and stamina, cheering a black man and a white who fought until the reddening sun sank over the rim of hills.  Seventy-five thousand dollars was paid at the gate. Twice as much changed hands as men at the ring-side, shading themselves with palm-leaf fans, sketched the battle on bulletin boards in distant cities. Another fabulous sum was paid for the rights of the motion pictures.  And all this, remember, two hundred and fifty miles into the desert, under an open sky, where water is so expensive that graves are not kept green. 

            This, then, is the New West, a land prodigal and self-sufficient. No one goes there who is not willing to take a chance, no one stays who is not willing to see fair play. Adventurous spirits from Texas gambling and Alaska, from Australia and South Africa find there a congenial stamping ground. The last of the gun-fighters go there to die. There bankers do their back-gardening, as it were; and life is a queer mixture of six-shooters and spot less table-cloths.