On the Back Roads (6 page)

He had wanted to call the town Riverside or Casino, imitating another Nevada border town named Jackpot. But the people at the post office changed his mind. “The man who came down here was named O'Neil,” Don explained. “I forgot his title. Postal inspector, I think. He said that they didn't like my suggestion of Riverside or Casino because they are too common. He said Laughlin was a good Irish name. O'Neil liked it, so that's how it happened.”

The son of poor farmers in Owatonna, Minnesota, Don knew early on that he didn't want to be a farmer. Although gambling was illegal in Minnesota, many people, including his mother, played slot machines. They fascinated him. Don bought his first one out of a mail-order catalog. Until his high-school principal came down on him, he was taking in more money as a student than most full-time workers in Owatonna. So he quit school to operate his six machines, placed in taverns and stores, until Minnesota stopped turning a blind eye to gambling.

Don moved to Las Vegas in 1952 at the age twenty-one. Finally in his element, he worked as a bartender and went to
dealer's school at night. Don saved his money and two years later bought a bar and restaurant. He sold that after ten years, moved here, and made a boomtown that never closes.

Don is probably many times a millionaire. What's important, he's doing what he wants to do with his life and very much on his terms.

He flies his own airplane and keeps a helicopter tied down just outside the back door of his casino. He works all the time but relaxes by walking through his spacious calino, usually eating a bag of popcorn. He is not a big guy. He blends in easily with his customers. Though few people notice him, he is under the constant surveillance of the casino security cameras. They track his every move. After all, he's the guy who can open the safe.

B
uilt originally of rock, layered with wood ties and steel rails, today it's asphalt. U.S. 95 through the Amargosa Desert lies on the roadbed of the old Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad. Between 1906 and 1918, it carried trains of gold and silver and the equipment to mine them. Now it's cars, trucks, and tour buses filled with a geriatric crowd on a free ride to a Las Vegas casino.

There must be fifty small towns between here and Canada where this highway is Main Street. Goldfield in Nevada. Jordan Valley in Oregon. Craigmont in Idaho. It's the lifeline for many small towns of the West. U.S. 95 continues into British Columbia, where it becomes the Crowsnest Highway.

Open Range signs along here are not the common black-on-yellow profiles of startled cows. They are the silhouettes of horses or burros, both of which run wild in the Nevada outback and number in the thousands.

Over the Funeral Mountains to the west and down some 3,500 feet is the immense, scorching floor of Death Valley. Ahead is a dump for low-level hazardous waste that is trucked
from as far away as Texas. The dump once took in radioactive leftovers, but not anymore.

In the mountains to the east and north is the Nellis Air Force Range, so my new map says. The old one, which I just threw away, included the words
Bombing
and
Gunnery
in the name of this 3-million-acre facility. I question motives when a government changes place-names for no apparent reason. Obviously, bombing and gunnery is still what goes on there, because that's what the Air Force does.

The Nevada Test Site begs the same skepticism. The word
Nuclear
was in that name originally, back in the testing heyday of the cold war. Between 1951 and 1958, the Atomic Energy Commission detonated 100 nuclear weapons in the air over those mountains. Later it tested even more in the ground under them.

They do not test there anymore, so why not drop
Test
from its name? Perhaps
Nevada Site
would mean nothing, and
Nevada Nuclear Site
would mean too much. Whatever they call it, the tunnel-ridden site is closer to the highway than the gunnery and bombing range.

All this map-and-sign trivia has put me on notice that I could be zapped, bombed, or neutralized at any time. Or, more realistically, I could run into the descendant of some gold prospector's burro, turned lose hereabouts long before I was born.

Just south of Beatty, the highway makes an abrupt turn. Were I seeing this on the Travel Channel, pretentious music would swell up to reveal the dramatic change of scenery. The brown desert suddenly disappears. Green and tan bulrushes take over. Above, the leaves of spreading cottonwood trees spin in the wind. Squatting low in the bulrushes is a sign, the hand-painted silhouette of a frog. It reads Frog Crossing. I like Beatty already.

The mountains that earlier were away from the highway, now rise 1,500 feet beside it, creating an instant, inviting rock-rimmed hollow. It soon becomes as pleasant a green valley as exists anywhere in this otherwise arid state.

Fresh water from an underground river founded this town. Two nearby mining camps, which later became significant towns—albeit short-lived—had a shortage of drinking water. For a time, water from Beatty was hauled to the miners in whiskey barrels. There was no shortage of those.

I made a slow “windshield” tour of town. Spread over a square mile, Beatty's 1,900 residents live in mobile homes, essentially. It's easy to buy a lot here and order a house delivered. Wood is very expensive in a state that is mostly sand, which may explain the lack of frame houses here.

The Powder Horn, a gun shop, was closed. I got out to read the bronze plaque in front. It read On This Spot in 1897, Nothing Happened. Clever, but not as original as the frog-crossing sign.

Beatty's three hotel-casinos, one at each end of town and one in the middle, survive on travelers who drop in off U.S. 95, visitors from central California, and Death Valley tourists. In spite of it Valley a year-round tourist spot.

At the north end of town, I pulled into the Rio Rancho RV Park, Cottonwood fluff swirls on the ground. Between shade trees in front, half circling a fire pit, enough wood was neatly stacked to relieve the chill of many evenings. Each RV site had a redwood picnic bench. Each site also had sand-filled coffee cans, painted white and stenciled BUTT. Cigarette smoking is still big in Nevada, unlike neighboring California, where it is almost against the law.

The main building sits back from the road. Its front is a long, covered porch with chairs. A half-dozen people, all Norman Rockwell characters, appeared comfortable and very satisfied there, watching people like me stir up the cottonwood fluff.

Ray Stevens, the manager, left his chair to greet me. “And we also have free wine and coffee,” Ray added, “from seven in the morning to seven at night.”

“Seven in the morning? Wine?”

“Sure, welcome to Nevada!”

I plugged in the motor home and joined the Rockwell group. Within an hour I had met almost everyone in the park
and had learned about the town from Skinny Forsyth. He has lived here since 1961, but not in the RV park. He comes by every day to visit.

Looking for videos, ice, snacks, or maybe some wine, most of the overnight visitors eventually come by the porch. They quickly get caught up in the sit-and-visit lifestyle that permeates this place. Life at Rio Ranch—for some here, life it-self—focuses on the porch. Within a day, I was part of it, too.

The post office is next to the park. Much of Beatty parades by the porch to pick up mail during the day. After a couple of days, I began to recognize those who walked or rode a bike. As for those who drove, someone else on the porch usually knew the car.

Take the late-model sedan that Fran drives. “There goes Fran,” someone would always say. According to Skinny, “When anyone in town needs help, Fran is always Johnny-on-the-spot.” She owns Fran's Ranch, the local brothel, just outside town.

Among the hard-core porch people was Bill Bridgeman from Arizona. After walking his four dogs, Bill's day begins here with Ray's coffee at 7:00 and ends here at dark. In between, when his wife Liz watches the soaps, Bill usually visits a casino and invests in the nickel slots. Bill wears tattoos from his years in the Navy and bib overalls from those as a Missouri rancher. Now, at age seventy-one, he is interested in old cemeteries. He wanted to show me one.

So we took off in his pickup. On our way to the ruins of Rhyolite, we passed huge, multicolored piles of crushed rock from a mine called the Bullfrog. The flags of Canada and the United States flew over the mine offices. Bill said that the flags of both Canada and Australia are common fixtures at the mines in this state.

I asked him why.

“I had the same question when I first came here,” Bill said. “Mining companies are international in scope. They go where the minerals are. Obviously, what they want they find here in Nevada.”

Rhyolite was the fourth-largest city in Nevada in 1907, with 6,000 residents. Fifty freight cars a day arrived here on the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad, and more on two other lines.

The elaborate railroad station in Rhylolite, much of which still stands, was the finest in Nevada in 1908. It still is in my book. It is a gorgeous and classic piece of Old-West architecture. To identify it with an earlier era, an esoteric art form, or as a European architectural style might be academically correct. But to me, wars have been fought for lesser causes. It is as unpretentious and all-American as cowboy boots or Bill's bib overalls.

The roofless stone shells of a few three-story buildings outline Rhyolite's main street. Once they had stairs of Itali an marble, windows of stained glass, and wood trim of Honduras mahogany. Their sun-bleached walls, now stripped by scavengers and weather, have crumbled some but remain today, as do six residents. But Rhyolite as a town is a ghost.

Bill turned the truck onto a narrow cut in the desert and stopped at a fenced cemetery. Mounds of sand and rock remain the only visible signs of the hundreds buried here. Wooden markers lay by a few graves, but most had long since released their epitaphs to the wind.

Bill pointed to one clearly marked grave in the corner. It was that of “Panamint Annie,” buried in 1979.
Panamint
is the name of a mountain range rimming Death Valley, but who was Annie? We could only guess. Perhaps it is enough to know that she is here and forever has a claim to a piece of the desert guarded by the Panamint Range.

T
he Sante Fe Saloon rests on a dusty side road that may well have been main street at one time. Over the last century, the heavy boots of miners have scuffed out hollows in the wood floor of the saloon deep enough to hold spilled beer. Although it seems more than one saloon in Nevada claims title as the state's oldest, about this one in Goldfield they get specific: “in continuous use.” It was built in 1905, but its bar of dark mahogany is even older. It came around Cape Horn by ship and was hauled to Gold field from San Francisco on a wagon train.

A sign taped to the ornate bar advertises cactus juice at $1.50. “That's for the people on the tour buses from Japan and Washington and the like,” the bartender said. Placing a beer in front of me, he asked, “You driving through, or what?”

“Little of both. I want to see what's in Goldfield.”

“Then you're about seventy years too late,” insisted a man hunched over an empty glass one stool over. “We had here the biggest city in Nevada once. It had trains and fancy dressers and the famous stage show,
The Zigfield Follies,
one time.
Now you could put the whole town up for a night in the Hotel Goldfield and the building would still be half-empty.”

“Hell, Jack, the hotel's been closed for fifty years. There's no way. No beds in there, even. You ain't gonna put nobody up there for the night,” came advice that was a little slushy and slurred from further down the bar.

“I know that. I was just making a figure of speech.” The man shook his head, rolled his eyes, and turned to tell me about the hotel.

The four-story Goldfield Hotel, when it was built in 1907, was said to be the most modern, elegant, and elaborate hotel west of the Mississippi. It had the first electric elevator. Each room had a phone. Many rooms had a private bath with both hot and cold running water. The floors in the lobby and restaurant are composed of hand-laid mosaic tiles. The ceiling of the bar and dining room, which held 400 people, are covered with twenty-two-karat gold leaf. Wyatt Earp dealt cards in the casino After he retired. And Theodore Roosevelt slept there. Attempts to renovate it have gone bankrupt. It stands empty today, as it has since 1945.

Unlike many mining towns in Nevada that sprouted overnight, Goldfield was well planned, surveyed, and mapped. Its population topped at 20,000 plus around 1913. Mines here produced $2 million in gold, and that's when it sold for $16 to $20 an ounce. This still stands, apparently, as a record take, and is believed to be unequaled by any other gold camp in the world.

It's ironic that Nevada's one-time largest city is now the seat of the state's smallest county. Esmeralda County has 1,410 people. The courthouse, built in 1907, buzzes with county business and is as “downtown” as Goldfield gets. The recorder's office, where ladies still labor over table-size ledger books, has concrete walls almost two feet thick. Iron curtains still roll down over the windows, like louvered garage doors, every afternoon at 4:55.

Inside the courthouse I admired the fifty or so cattle brands, burned on patches of cowhide, that cover a first-floor
wall. “Upstairs is the courtroom. I have the key if you want in,” whispered a small voice from the stairs.

“Sure would.” I followed Sarah Ridgeway into an immaculate, grand sanctuary of Old-West law. She is the courthouse housekeeper, although she calls herself the custodian. Being so petite, the title of custodian may describe her job, but it does not describe Sarah.