Authors: Jan Morris
N
ext to Utah stands Nevada, the State
par
excellence
of the ghost towns. It is worth visiting these abandoned centres of the West, for even when the tourist trade has tarnished them you can still trace in the crumbling ruins of their cabins some of the old excitement of the region, when a wild multitude of adventurers was looking for gold, fighting feuds, drinking ghastly brews, making fortunes and ruining women among the dusty hills. Some such skeletal towns, indeed, are quite isolated and forgotten. I drove for many hours along rough tracks, through uninhabited hills, to reach the site of an old mining centre called Aurora, on the eastern frontier of California. This had its heyday in the 1860’s, but until recently a couple of resilient prospectors were still extracting a little gold, by simple means, from the surrounding land. The shells of their shacks are still there, with sagging staircases and holed ceilings, and a few shreds of flowered wallpaper, and the body of
an old-fashioned car with no tyres is rusting away in a gulley. For the rest, there are only the suggestions of vanished occupation—fragmentary walls and piles of bricks, flagstones sprouting thistles and doorsteps hidden in the undergrowth. In this place, now totally deserted, Mark Twain began his career as a reporter, at a time when the news from Aurora was read avidly throughout the mining regions, and had its effect upon the price of gold, upon private fortunes and public funds, even upon the state of peace and the chances of war. Much of America has this feeling of impermanency, partly because people are always prepared to move, and have no roots in the towns where they live, and are just as prepared to make money in San Diego as they are in Buffalo, New York. But it is not always so poignantly obvious as it is in the dead towns, which so recently enjoyed their days of consequence.
Sometimes, like great mansions in England, they are preserved as curiosities, and so, with a tightening of the belt and a grimace, manage to potter on through the years as remembrances of things past. Central City, in Colorado, has achieved this sad protraction. It is tucked away in the Rockies above Denver, and has a stream running through it from which, if you are conscientious and have time to spend, you may still extract a few dollars’ worth of gold any day you please. The hillsides flash with deposits of mica, which deceived many a poor prospector, in the old days, and is still called “fool’s gold”. But the town is surrounded by the decaying remains of mines, long ago worked out, and has rows of quaint western houses and saloons, and an old Opera House in which distinguished companies now perform, during a summer season, to audiences composed of dutiful tourists and the sizeable local intelligentsia. The Victorianism of the place is its present fortune. Shop names are written in ornate lettering; houses that would hardly deserve a second glance in some dingy London outskirt are displayed as historic attractions. The Old West, which seems so very old to the western American, smacks strongly of Aunt Agatha to the wandering Englishman. Central City is a museum piece, interesting enough as a memorial to the mining pioneers, but stultified and fossilized.
There is one ghost town, however, which has managed, despite the tourists and the sanctity of age, to retain something of its old rumbustious heartiness. Virginia City, Nevada, was the capital city of the Comstock Lode, and for a decade or more it was one of the most exciting cities on earth. It was built high on a hill range near the western frontier of the State; around its ridge stretches an enchanting green plain, made fertile by irrigation, beautified with rows of tall poplars, bounded on one side by the desert, on the other by the brilliant peaks
of the Sierra Nevada. Immense fortunes were made in Virginia City in its palmy days, and it was a large and luxurious metropolis. The International Hotel was famous for its food and for its elevator, the first to be installed between Chicago and San Francisco. Paris couturiers had branch houses there, so plentiful was the cash and so ambitious the inhabitants, and whole ships were chartered to bring European furniture and fripperies for the mansions built by the gold magnates. A celebrated railroad, the Virginia and Truckee, wound its way up the hill to Virginia City, conveying in its elegant canary-coloured carriages many an eminent financier from San Francisco, and taking back in guarded trucks the troves of gold extracted from the neighbouring mountains. At the big Opera House scores of eminent artists performed at one time or another—more for the money, I suspect, than for the critical acumen of the audience. The
Territorial
Enterprise
was the most distinguished newspaper of the West, and a national force not only because of the wealth that lay underneath it, so to speak, but also because of the trenchancy of its comments. Virginia City must have been the brashest and rowdiest of towns, full of saloons and gambling houses and brothels; enlivened by romances, brutal murders and the affairs of celebrated courtesans; rolling in gold, fame and notoriety; so important that the discovery of a single deposit at Virginia City caused Bismark to abandon the silver standard—and all this among the forsaken hills of Nevada, a land of freebooters, Indians and desert creatures.
Virginia City is still a vivacious and florid place chiefly because it happens to be in Nevada. Of all the States of the wide West, Nevada retains most completely and most easily the old frontier liberalism of the region. Gambling is legal in Nevada, and divorce is easy. It is a place of hard drinking and all-night gambling, a State with no speed limit for cars and a flexible outlook on the value of existence (a croupier who recently murdered a customer by knocking him down and jumping on his head was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and is probably back on the job by now). All the symbols of the West are more intrusive in Nevada than elsewhere. It is the least populous of the American States, and the great trains sweep majestically across its expanses of empty desert. It is a place of insufferable summer heat; at Death Valley, just over the California border, temperatures have been recorded higher than anything known in Asia, and only two degrees Fahrenheit lower than the highest ever recorded anywhere (at Azizia, in Libya). Mines are everywhere, and often and again you can see on the side of a distant hill the cabin of some lonely operator. There are many Indians: one tribe, the Paiute, lives on the shores of Pyramid Lake, a secluded place
of dazzling beauty, once abounding with rare fish, with swarms of white pelicans flying over its depths and settling on its jagged rocks. Nevada is a colourful, open-air, easygoing State; and it makes its living by gambling, for every town has its garish casinos, and Las Vegas, the crowning symbol of the State, is one great blinding and nightmarish tribute to the gamblers’ gods.
It is gambling that has kept Virginia City so boisterously alive—gambling and the presence there of a stormy lover of the West, Mr. Lucius Beebe, who edits a revived version of the
Territorial
Enterprise
and lives grandly in a small Victorian mansion, keeping Rolls-Royces and St. Bernards. When we first drove along the narrow main street of Virginia City, a blurred composium of bright saloons, with the clatter of a piano, disastrously ill-tuned, echoing among the alleys, we chose a likely hotel and had our bags moved through its tiny front parlour, up its narrow stairs, and into a front room boldly named “Julia Bullette” after the most famous of the town’s nineteenth-century
madames.
Virginia City has many such hostelries, smelling slightly of dust and old bricks but agreeably instinct with memories of robust pioneers and their adventures. Almost before we had settled in (first opening the windows to let out some of the prospecting aridity, then closing them again to keep out the piano) Mr. Beebe was aware of our presence, by bush telegraph; and before long he was showing us the town, wearing a hat with a flat crown and a very broad brim, a shirt with a wide and handsome check, an elegant pin-striped suit, and a waistcoat embellished with a splendid gold watch-chain. Mr. Beebe is a fine sight at any time, but is at his best when he strides into a gambling house with his St. Bernard at his heels; pausing for a moment beside a roulette wheel to throw a handful of silver dollars on the table with a satisfying clang; shrugging his shoulders with a cheerful nonchalance when he loses the whole lot; bending an ear to a tattered prospector from the hills who has some slight financial worry; raising a negligent hand of greeting to an acquaintance here and there; listening patiently to a report of the activities of a man who plans to get even with him for something he wrote in the paper last week; ushering his guest into the dimness of the bar with a truly Bostonian courtesy, before hitching his frame on to a bar-side stool and ordering an extremely large whisky.
He has managed to make Virginia City a greatly profitable affair, without entirely destroying the magnificent natural brassiness which never deserted the town, even in its inglorious decades of neglect. Many tourists are attracted to it by its manner of rather musty wickedness, and the shops are booming. A man dressed as Buffalo Bill, with
authentic moustaches and goatee, and a cowboy hat, runs a place that is part museum, part antique shop, crammed with old clothes and mining mementoes, with frilled bloomers hanging from its walls, and all kinds of oddities displayed on tables. The Opera House, despite its blackened decrepitude, is open to the public again; its walls flutter with hundreds of old posters, and familiar names spring out as you pass along the line—Jenny Lind, an indefatigable performer to western audiences, Edwin Booth, and many another well-remembered virtuoso. The
Territorial
Enterprise
flourishes again, after a few years of oblivion. Huge posters proclaim its value throughout the surrounding hills, and everywhere in the town you see its old-fashioned masthead and glimpse a few lines, on the newsagents stand, about a vendetta, or an effrontery, or a brazen boast—matters which appeal to Mr. Beebe, its publisher, and admirably reflect the tenor of the town. The paper circulates widely, for it has a curiosity value, besides some good writing by friendly contributors of distinction; and because Mr. Beebe has been, in his time, a well-known eastern
bon-vivant
and observer of society affairs, it is crammed with advertisements for night clubs and scents, expensive cars and splendid hotels, which read queerly among the tumble-down enticements of Virginia City.
Very little has been rebuilt in the town, despite its revived prosperity. Main Street is still lined with false fronts, the pompous façades of the shops belying their poky premises. On the walls there are still visible advertisements for forgotten remedies of startling efficacy. Part of the station is still there to see, though the marvellous old trains run no more; one old engine stands forlornly in the main street of Carson City, the capital of Nevada, a few miles to the north; and in another piece of rolling stock, wheel-less and pitiable, you may eat a memorial hot dog, and wash it down with a sad funereal coffee. From the saloons on main street you can look down on the richly Gothic church, built by a gold magnate when the galleries of his mine underran the old one; and far in the distance, down a sandy gulch, you can glimpse the place where they buried Miss Bullette, who was eventually murdered by a thief and taken to her unconsecrated grave in pomp by all the men, and none of the women, of that rampaging community.
In the summer season the gambling houses are crammed with drastically assorted crowds—ranchers in wide hats and shirts with pearl buttons, visitors from Iowa in loud shirts, impending divorcees from Reno and Las Vegas, a schoolmistress or two (most adventurous of Americans), a few hairy locals and mountaineers, and Mr. Beebe strolling expansively through the throng. You may gamble in many different
ways, entrusting your cash to the roulette wheel or slipping your dime into that emblem of emasculated risk, the fruit machine. Numbed indeed are the faces of those unfortunates who find themselves hypnotized by this last device; there they stand, hour after hour, inserting the coin, pulling the handle, inserting the coin, pulling the handle, catching their meagre winnings as they fall from their hole in a little paper cup provided for the purpose. Sometimes they win a jackpot, and are handed a voucher for 30 dollars or so. More often they squander the hours away listlessly, with never more than momentary fluctuations in their capital, confident that the machines are honest (for the State controls gambling with paternal care), and performing the necessary actions with a heavy rhythm. In the bigger gambling towns of Nevada you may see these people at any hour of day or night, sweating in the raging heat of noonday or dismally alone at night, clutching their little paper cups, their eyes glued dully to the machines, inserting the coin, pulling the handle, while the hours crawl by.
But sometimes, too, you may observe a gambling session in the legendary style: the groups of anxious betters, grouped around the roulette table, not disposed with the elegance of Monte Carlo, but in a rougher, lustier pattern; and the hard-faced croupier of tradition, impassive at the head of the board. I remember clearly the appearance of one of the most famous of Nevada’s croupiers, descended directly from the great western gamblers of the gold rushes. He is a tall man who wears a check shirt, open at the neck; narrow trousers sustained by a belt with an ornate buckle; and a black eyeshade. His face is withered and wrinkled, like a tortoise; his nose hooked and slightly crooked; his eyes sharp and pale; his mouth thin but humorous, conveying an impression of unyielding
bonhomie;
his ears long and protruding; his tall thin neck entwined with a mesh of muscles and sinews, like Laocoön and the snakes. Coldly and knowingly this man presides over the game, with precise efficiency, taking or paying mechanically with never a flicker of emotion, only the slightest hint of a nod, or the suspicion of a gesture, or the embryo trace of a beckon in the direction of the management. In front of him the piles of big silver dollars (common currency in Nevada) glitter like stage properties, and once in a decade there passes through his hands a dollar made of gold, withdrawn with heart-searchings from beneath some indigent mountaineer’s mattress.