On the Back Roads (7 page)

Elegant Tiffany lamps adorned the front corners of the judge's bench. Their stained-glass shades were a brilliant red and gold. The window blinds of unfinished oak, exposed to the desert sun more days than most men live, hung straight and true. Sarah ran her fingers over the manufacturer's plaque, tacked to the bottom blind. “Look, they were made in Burlington, Vermont.”

On the wall, above the judge's chair, is the head of a huge bighorn sheep. Sarah explained that the hunter who killed it took only the head and left the carcass for the scavengers. That's against the law. The hunter pleaded guilty in this courtroom. Others, some from as far as Las Vegas, were willing to pay the hunter's fine and buy the mounted trophy. The judge instead decided it would stay in Esmeralda County. What better place than his courtroom? “So there it hangs,” she said proudly.

Sarah pointed to the wall fixtures. “We don't use those carbide lights anymore. And the ceiling fans finally played out, so they put in air-conditioning.” She squinted and lowered her voice to a near whisper. “But it detracts a little bit, I think.”

Obviously, Sarah felt possessive of the courtroom and its legacy. And well she should. For the last twenty-five years, she has polished the brass boot rail in the jury box, dusted the feather-grained woodwork, and lovingly cleaned each piece of stained glass on the Tiffany lamp shades. This magnificent courtroom appears to be as much her home as where she lives.

The new computer by the witness chair Sarah called an eye-sore. “I hate to even dust it,” she remarked.

Early-day cattle rustlers were taken from this courtroom often to face a hangman's noose. “But they still go on trial here,” Sarah said, sending me downstairs to get the details from her friend the sheriff.

“We haven't hung one for some time,” Sheriff Ed Penson joked, “but we convicted one here two months ago.”

With only seven deputies and 3,700 square miles of country, Sheriff Penson admitted rustlers are hard to catch. But this time he got lucky. “I was searching for this guy on the Lida Ranch. If you don't know it, it's a local spread bigger than the whole state of Rhode Island. It even extends into Cali forma. After chasing him in his truck through some pretty rugged country, I finally got him. He was turning loose six unbranded calves.”

Cattle rustling in this day is not peculiar to Nevada, but what Goldfield's justice of the peace told me certainly is. Pulling on her judicial robes over her sweatshirt and jeans, she recounted the story.

It seems that when she was a court clerk, a man came to her to file a suit in small claims court against the Cottontail Ranch, a well-known brothel south of town.

“He claimed he didn't get his money's worth,” she said with a smirk.

“Who won?”

“Oh, I talked him out it, told him he needed a witness.”

“And that ended it?”

“No, he thought about it for the longest time. I thought for a minute that he was going to come up with one. Then he took his hat and walked out. Never seen him since.”

Back on the road, I could just imagine what the TV tabloids from the big city would do in Goldfield with a case like that. I'll bet Sarah wouldn't let them in her courtroom and the sheriff would back her up.

T
he steep approach to Tonopah on Highway 95 cuts my speed so that the forty-five miles per hour speed limit was purely academic. Hills rising on both sides of the road are heavily scarred from years of mining. To call Tonopah a century-old mining town doesn't distinguish it from others in Nevada, except from those founded on free drinks and all-you-can-eat buffets. Its population is 2,500 and dropping.

The mines here produced $150 million, mostly in silver, between 1900 and 1950. The town peaked in 1906 with sixty saloons and a railroad that ran until 1946. Its population shot from 3,000 in 1902 to 10,000 in 1906. Four years later, it was 3,000 again.

The Army Air Corps built a base just outside town during World War II. It was given to the county in 1947. The Air Force became a significant employer here in the 1950s and kept Tonopah whole after the mines closed. Now, the Air Force has all but pulled out.

Today the town hangs on with the help of county government {it's the seat of Nye County}, a small mining operation, a struggling tourist business, and boundless optimism.

The owner of an overstocked pawns hop on Main Street told me, “We have been up and down before. The mines will kick in again, or the Air Force will create some good-paying jobs here. I'll wait it out. Got no choice.”

The Station House, at the south edge of town, is Tonopah's biggest private employer, with 105 employees. Although the all-night sign in front reads Station House Hotel and Gaming Saloon, it is also a mall where you can rent videos, get your teeth fixed, or apply for state welfare. Behind the casino, there is a bare strip of asphalt with nineteen RV hookups, which has only its convenience to the casino to recommend it.

When I met Station House manager Oliver Crickmon, he was having breakfast—a bowl of cold cereal—at his desk. A shaded window, his desk lamp, and the glow of five black-and-white TV monitors dimly lit his office. The monitors showed the front desk and the dining room and seemed to switch around the casino with close-up and overhead shots of the three blackjack tables.

He explained that Tonopah's labor force now is mostly in the service industry, which pays the minimum wage and little more. “Tough to build a growing economy on that,” Oliver said.

A second casino is in the center of town in Tonopah's finest building, the Mizpah Hotel. This magnificent, five-story classic—a true historic landmark—was built in 1907. It has been sensibly refurbished to preserve the best of the Old West, as good as the good life got back then. Most of the rooms still have toilets that flush with the pull of a chain and iron bathtubs that stand on clawed feet.

Jack Dempsey was a bouncer and bartender in the hotel, when he wasn't working in the mines. Wyatt Earp stayed here often. He owned the Northern Bar in Tonopah. His brother Virgil was a deputy sheriff in neighboring Esmeralda County. And Howard Hughes got married here, but several other places can make that claim, too.

The Jack Dempsey Dining Room is heavy with rich mahogany. Brocade silk covers the walls. Its raised design was
deep red and felt like velvet. The doors have beautifully etched, inlaid glass. A person who knows might properly call this Victorian style. I claimed it for John Wayne, ladies in ruffled dresses, and the Old West.

Bill Allison, age sixty-six, has owed the Mispah for thirteen years. He calls the hotel the “grand old lady” and runs her as she begs to be run: with good taste, twenty-four-hour attention, and the unrealistic love of a dreamer. Although its rooms are full most all the time, the Mispah has seen better days, economically. “Too many mistakes in the past,” Bill says philosophically, realizing that his dream may die because of them.

The closing of the old hotel would be especially tragic. It's the class act in town. Without it, Tonopah has none.

Still, things have a way of bouncing back in this town that silver built. Bill may lose his dream or “give it away,” as he puts it. If so, someone will surely come along and pick up where Bill leaves off. Whatever keeps these Nevada towns alive, it may yet save the Mispah.

E
ugene Gates keeps his airplane, a two-seater Cessna, tied down next to his house between his big satellite dish and the monitoring station of the National Weather Service. To take off, he taxies for fifteen minutes. He steers his airplane down Helda Drive, crosses Wedge Street, takes care not to brush the trees by the Boyd's house, angles off on a road graded from the desert, and finally reaches the airstrip.

Gene has been a pilot for forty years and an amateur-radio operator for fifty. At age seventy-three, he has three jobs. The most recent one he began twenty-four years ago. Obviously, when Gene starts something, he keeps at it. Probably the only thing he ever started with the intent of stopping is life here in Mina. When he and his wife came to Mina in 1954, they planned to stay just a year.

His twenty-four-year job, with what we used to call the Weather Bureau, does not pay anything. “They set up the equipment. All I do is read the numbers every day and keep a log.”

Gene opened a mineral assay office in Mina almost the same day he got here. Whether it's delivered by courier from
a mining company or dragged in by a dirt-poor prospector, if it's a mineral, Gene tells them what it is and what it's worth. That's what an assayer does. Gene's success is not because he is the only one between here and Reno, it's because he is the best. Samples for analysis come to him from all over this hemisphere, and some from Africa.

During the last three years, mining has slacked off dramatically in this mineral-and gem-rich state. New federal laws have turned mining, even prospecting, into a bureaucratic nightmare. “Environmentalists have really made it hard for the little guy, who is out there digging on a hunch, and very expensive for the big guy,” Gene insisted.

Gene is also a judge. He is the longest, continuous-sitting judge in the state. He has held the elected office for thirty-one years.

“Nobody runs against him anymore,” Ruth Fanning told me. She has lived here fifty-one years and ought to know. I met Ruth on the sidewalk. Mina has just one sidewalk. It runs a ways along the west side of Front Street. Front Street is also U.S. Highway 95. I came in on it yesterday.

Ruth and her teenage granddaughter Kim were trying to see through the dirt-streaked windows of the Burger Hut. Although they pass it on their walk every day, this day they were curious. “It's been closed for a year, but the lady who ran it is back in town. We hope that she will open again. Good cook, that lady,” Kim said.

I walked with them for the remainder of the sidewalk. We passed a building with fiberboard sides and a sign: For Sale: Two Lots and a Shop. “You could buy a new Ford in there, when I came,” Ruth remembered.

‘“Over there, the train used to stop every day.” Ruth's hand, gripping a can of Diet Coke, swept the horizon across the street. “All that was depot and freight office and all imaginable kind of railroad stuff.”

The splintered remains of a railroad station and a transfer warehouse were all that remained. It once belonged to the Nevada & California Railway, a division of the Southern Pacific. From the sidewalk, the station looked like a collapsed
house of Pickup Sticks that no one may touch until someone has counted the score.

“It's been that way for nine months. The guy they paid to pull it down…well, he took off with the payroll.” Ruth stopped walking. “You know, I wonder why somebody hasn't hauled off that wood and built something.”

The railroad founded the town in 1905 and named it for the daughter of a railroad executive. Mina grew with the railroad and the mining industry, but it was never a boomtown like some in Nevada.

Most of the tracks had three rails to accommodate both the standard and narrow-gauge trains.

The narrow-gauge train, the local shuttle, was called Slim Princess. Indians were allowed to climb on top of the cars and ride free. The paying passengers and crew often shot jackrabbits, ducks, and sage grouse from the windows of the train. It would slow so that the shooters could run out and retrieve whatever they shot. On hot days, the train always arrived late. How late depended on how long the crew stopped at the swimming hole.

Today, the railroad is gone. Even the tracks have been pulled up. With the bungled demise of the railroad station, little of Mina's heritage still stands. What remains rests in the finite memories of old-time residents like Ruth.

“This was all bars and barber shops, but it burned.” Ruth was referring to a block of weeds and desert grass along the sidewalk. An old hotel appeared on the verge of falling over. Its brick walls were leaning at precarious angles that would tempt a Vegas oddsmaker. Heavy plywood nailed over its windows may be all that keeps the old hotel standing upright.

It's too early in the day for the Mina Club to be open. It's a bar that advertises free coffee for truckers. Just outside town is a brothel called Billie's Day and Night. It, too, advertises free coffee, but for anybody.

Kim told me that someone wants to open a brothel right in town. Ruth couldn't believe it. “It's true! It's on the agenda for the town meeting Thursday night!” Kim insisted.

So we stopped in Jackson's Mini-Mart to read the agenda for the town meeting. Ruth's daughter Theora Jackson, always
posts the agenda and whatever else people want posted there. Sure enough, next to Margaret's three-by-five card advertising free cocker spaniels was the one-page agenda. Under “New Business” was the following: “Linda Levier's request for citizen support for establishment of Happy Harry's Whore House in downtown Mina.”

I talked later with Phyllis Perry. She works for the judge. “It's not a real whorehouse. From a crafts class up in Luning, somebody knows this Linda lady. She's from Hawthorne, in her forties. Her husband is a teacher. She wants to make it a tourist attraction, sell souvenirs. Claims it would put Mina on the map.”

“Sounds crazy!”

Phyllis nodded. “Sure, but they'll get a pretty good turnout Thursday night.”

Mina's sidewalk runs out before Sue's Motel. Sue's is not a place where a guest would likely find little bottles of pink shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom. But I bet for a couple of quarters, the bed would vibrate you to sleep.

There is nothing but sand between Sue's motel rooms and the road. There, eight guys were strapping on motorcycle gear and having a good time at it. They were on a tour, exploring Nevada's mountain country by motorcycle—old mining camps, ghost towns, the remote places where few people go. Each day for them ends in a different town.