History

Melvin Dummar recounts his brush with fortune and loss.   BY SHAUN ASTOR “I grew up in Fallon. There was an airport, where the Churchill County rodeo grounds are at,” Melvin Dummar, now 74 years old, recalls on a warm evening as the sun falls behind the Resting Spring Mountain Range to the west of […]

Nevada State Railroad Museum staff and volunteers   Rolling Through the Years How the Nevada State Railroad Museum Cares for its Collections. BY CHRISTOPHER DE WITT The Nevada State Railroad Museum (NSRM) in Carson City has a significant collection of Nevada-related restored and unrestored rolling stock—a term that refers to any vehicle used on a […]

’30’ is ticked off  for Sam Davis Sagebrush School journalist penned Silver State history. BY CHIC DIFRANCIA On March 18, 1918, the “Car-son City Daily Appeal” carried a front-page obituary for its former publisher and editor, Samuel Post Davis. The headline read: “‘30’ Is Ticked Off For Sam Davis.” Now archaic, “30” at the time […]

Tears of joy and sorrow have both been shed at the site of Donovan Mill in Silver City. The intense and unexpected changes that follow the boom and bust cycles of small Nevada mining towns have been the only constant. Pioneering new ideas and techniques were discovered and put into action here: a place rich with mining innovation, as well as with gold and silver. Originally the land was an idyllic part of the hunting and gathering territory of the Washoe Tribe. The possibility of wealth brought speculators and adventurers, eventually changing the landscape forever. The community, settled in 1859, was filled with people who proved themselves to be independent, resourceful, and self-motivated.

African Americans on The Comstock fought for equality. BY ERIC CACHINERO Blood and silver soaked the earth in the mid 1860s. Seemingly just as quickly as the blood from Civil War battles was spilled in the eastern United States during the conflict’s culmination, silver was scooped from the recently formed Comstock district. This bizarre pseudo […]

If you were to ask the average Western history buff to name the most infamous desperados of the late-19th-century frontier, he would no doubt rattle off such names as Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, and Billy the Kid. It is highly unlikely that such monikers as “Big Jack” Davis, “Three-Fingered Jack” McDowell, “Fighting Sam” Brown, or “Farmer” Peel would ever come up. And yet, these products of a raw and often lawless Nevada, as well as dozens of their contemporaries, were every bit as piratical as their more notorious counterparts.

The hanging of Elizabeth Potts marks Nevada’s only execution of a woman. Photos courtesy of the Northeastern Nevada Museum. “It is a dreadful thing to hang a woman, but not so dreadful as for a woman to be a murderer.” BY BOB SAGAN If “Dubious Achievement Awards” were handed out in 19th-century Nevada, Elizabeth Potts […]

Las Vegas History Finds Its Way Home Preserving mid-century neighborhoods strengthens community at large. STORY BY CHRIS LEWIS PHOTOS BY MARK DUNTON “What history?” That’s the common reply when history and Las Vegas are used in the same sentence. It’s a city that places a value on newness; a town that doesn’t hesitate to level a […]