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Yes, we HAVE often annually covered Halloween and its original Celtic roots, along with the Latin American Day of the Dead, and All Hallows Eve, and All Saints Day, and whatever other historical identities and cultural fixations pertain to harvest celebrations. After all, music and dance are integral parts of most of those things. But this year, we just didn't come across things like that you could attend. No, that doesn't mean they aren't out there, but we were not in the loop if they are. Yes, yes, shocking admission, given. we are expected to know all and tell all that isn't scandalous gossip.
So we are instead engaging in storytelling. We'll tell you an October 31st tale you have never heard. It's about a land of wonder that's right next door if you're a Californian. And it features a look beyond the usual attractions of a favorite vacation destination visited by most of the world. Stick with us for a few minutes, and you'll have plenty of new reasons to appreciate it when next you go there.
Let's get started!
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A land of wonder, right next door
Nevada celebrates its 158th birthday on Monday, Oct 31. Yep, Halloween is its birthday. Which may explain why some people invoke the fates and embrace the spirits when they go there. But we will 3xplire the fascinating realm of the real. One hint: if you have pinstriped overalls And gauntlet gloves, put them on as your Halloween costume to come aboard. Because -- though it isn't readily evident today -- no state has more connections with its colorful railroad past.
Here are some fun facts about Nevada:
Nevada's silver financed the Union victory in the Civil War. Because the Confederacy realized that and coveted the then-territory's riches, Nevada was made a state in 1864 with the motto, "Battle Born."
Nicknamed the "Silver State", Nevada is actually the largest gold-producing state in the U.S. and fourth-largest in the world.
Nevada is the seventh-largest state in size in the U.S., at 110,622 square miles.
The state was named after the High Sierra, which is, formally, the "Sierra Nevada" mountain range. Nevada's highest point is Boundary Peak, named because it's barely in the state at the north end of California's White Mountains / Inyo Mountains chain. Those north-south mountains are east of and across from the Sierra Nevada, and those ranges of mountains are almost all in California.
Still, Nevada contains more separate mountain ranges than any other state in the U.S., including Alaska. Nearly all Nevada's mountains run north-south in parallel ranges, divided by north-south valleys with pasture land, antelope, cattle herds, creeks fed by alpine snows, and due to hot summers, dry lake beds.
Wagon trains of 1840s-1860s westward-bound settlers for Oregon and California took trails winding around those north-south mountain ranges. The first transcontinental railroad, the Central Pacific, had to do the same.
Subsequent railroads -- dozens if them, like the Eureka & Palisade, Virginia & Truckee, Nevada Central, Carson & Colorado (named for the rivers, not the other state), Nevada Northern, Tonopan & Goldfield, Death Valley Railroad, and more -- tackled formidable mountains to reach mining towns.
A few other railroad "through routes" -- the Western Pacific, built by Colorado's Denver & Rio Grande and stolen by Gilded Age banksters, and the UP's surrogate "Salt Lake Route," though built to get somewhere else, connected some of Nevada's mining camps with California and the East. Mining railroads Tonopah & Tidewater and Las Vegas & Tonopah became trunk lines using lateral valleys to connect northern and southern Nevada's cities. (Today, with no rail connection between Reno and Vegas, the highway is packed with big rig trucks.)
America's largest silver deposit, the Comstock Lode, was found in Nevada in 1859. That was a decade before the transcontinental railroad was completed. Virginia City developed on a mountainside to feed the Comstock mines with supplies and the miners with saloons and ladies of the evening.
The Virginia & Truckee Railroad became the first in the pattern: it climbed up to Virginia City in a geographical fishhook, connecting with the transcontinental railroad at Reno. Notably, the 150th birthday of the V&T was just celebrated in July 2022 at the Nevada State RR Museum in Carson City, the State Capital and the former V&T midpoint.
Nevada was the first state to ratify the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution which prohibits state and federal governments from denying a citizen the vote based on that person's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
The transcontinental railroad had been built from the East primarily by Irish immigrants, and from the West over the Sierra Nevada and across the state by Chinese immigrants who were recruited in China to do work California's 1860s residents did not want to do. After building the Central Pacific, these Chinese immigrants became the West's railroad builders in Nevada and elsewhere. But that does not mean their contribution was acclaimed, or even valued. The West's Chinese experienced severe discrimination, eventually settling in enclaves like the Chinatown communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Nevada never had "Jim Crow" laws that racially separated passengers aboard its trains, unlike the accommodations unconstitutionally mandated until the 1960s by individual state laws aboard trains in Texas and across the entire Southeast. But there was de facto discrimination in Nevada's hotels for the state's first hundred years, practiced against most of America's minorities.
Today, Las Vegas has more hotel rooms than any other city on Earth. 15 of the top 25 largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas.
The gambling mecca of Las Vegas was originally established not by Bugsy Siegel and the mob, but by the San Pedro, Los Angeles, & Salt Lake Railroad, "The Salt Lake Route." I
Originally, Las Vegas was simply a water stop for steam locomotives because good water was plentiful there in the middle of the desert. The springs in "The Meadows," the Engish translation of the Spanish-named Las Vegas, seemed abundant, until the city outgrew even what Lake Mead can provide.
That railroad, the SPLA&SL, that established Las Vegas, was from the start a subsidiary of the Union Pacific. Its rails were the first to take the Union Pacific to the Pacific, via L.A., branching southwest from its previous Utah terminus with the Central Pacific. (That was a hundred years before the mega-mergers UP gobbled-up purt near every other railroad that reached the Pacific via California, or the Gulf of Mexico via Texas and Louisiana.)
Nevada nourishes the fervor of the conspiratorially minded with its state-designated "Alien Highway."
"Area 51" is a cliche with an actual name too secret to be spoken, much less published here. It is a top secret area of Nellis Air Force Range and Nuclear Test Site. And it is rumored to have housed the development of the first operational mach-3+ high altitude airplanes and the first Stealth aircraft -- and to be the home of "alien UFO research facilities."
It IS true that a conspiracy existed for decades to minimize and lie altogether about the dangers of nuclear testing in Nevada. Culprits with complicity included government, the state's gaming and hospitality industries, the military, the Atomic Energy Commission. In later years, the central villain promoting denial of harm and fighting cancer treatment compensation for Atomic Veterans and esposed civilians is the nebulously-defined Military-Industrial-Cybersecurity-Complex in its original identity (pre cybersecurity) when President Eisenhower coined the term to warn about it in his Farewell Address. Atomic fights continue in Nevada, over the state's designation as the sole depository for nuclear waste.
Today -- in addition to the casinos and a previously nomadic football franchise -- Nevada offers delights beyond the cities. Things that were always there are being discovered anew. These include remote mountain hikes and climbs, opportunities to view wildlife, water sports on rivers and reservoirs, and seasonal rides aboard vintage trains on historic rail routes. You can board the Virginia & Truckee (reborn in 1976 in Virginia City) and the Nevada Northern (the best-preserved 1890s railroad in America, rejuvenated in Ely), and the Nevada State Railroad Museum's two sites, in Carson City and Boulder. Amtrak's modern "California Zephyr" runs daily, year-round, across the width of Nevada on the original 1869 transcontinental railroad route.
Aside from the historical attractions and tourist trains, all the railroads in Nevada now are owned by the Union Pacific. That includes its own original "Salt Lake Route" mainline from Los Angeles, roughly paralleling the newer I-15 East to Vegas, then heading north into the hinterlands to fascinating little Pioche (great local museum there) and historic Caliente, then going up the largely roadless and still wild Meadow Valley Wash and into Utah. In addition, UP now owns both the original Central Pacific, which became Southern Pacific, and its later rival Western Pacific. Both those lines cross the state from their separate Sierra crossings in California, one down from Donner Pass, the other via the Feather River Canyon. From Reno, they parallel I-40 east, before taking their own routes into Utah.
Alongside those rail arteries, there are huge modern distribution warehouses outside Reno and Vegas, mostly served by trucks. So Nevada's railroads -- except for passenger stops by its sole Amtrak train -- don't service much Silver State commerce anymore. It may be a metaphor for today's coast-to-coast "conveyor belt" freight railways, but it just feels more poignant in a Silver State once served by a network of gleaming silver rails.
You should know about a splendid instigation tool for field adventures. It's the two-volume book, "Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California," by Prof. David Myrick. 60 years after it was first published, it remains a top resource. Whether read at home for ideas, or out where the wild horses roam, it's a time machine to when Nevada epitomized rootin' tootin' galloping horses, train robbers, 20 mule teams, and echoing steam whistles across the Wild West.
Nevada's backroads take you to the tangible remnants of the Oregon and California Trails and the route of the Pony Express. And to dozens of abandoned railroads from times when you endured eating dust from atop a mule, or went by steam train. The latter often had Pullman sleepers and dining car meals that included fresh oysters and pheasant under glass. Railroad cuisine was served on real china, unique to individual trains, and still prized by collectors. But any archaeologist will tell you that an object outside its culture context loses its meaning. So go get the context, of the view from where the trains ran -- whether or not you have the inclination to invest in a 130-year-old dinner plate.
From old US 50, now deemed "the Loniliest Road in America," to dozens of other two-lane routes that crisscross the state, there are vistas that inspired Native Americans for thousands of years, pioneer routes, and ghost towns to explore. All are enriched by taking along Myrick's book.
A lonely linear ridge gathering windblown sand -- still with the occasional dried-out fragments of wood crossties and a peppering of rusting spikes -- suddenly is understood as part of a lost spider web that connected Nevada. Its filaments of vanished iron were once the routes of empire, magic carpets of excitement for a journey to a new land, a new life, hopes of a better future. And cultural context? How often it ends in windblown sand vs. the nighttime glow of garish lights a couple mountain ranges away on the Vegas Strip. And now, dreams of gold vs. scarcity of essential water as Lake Mead goes dry.
Nevada's history is more expansive than the bandustling anonymity of casino "action" and overpriced shows "starring" overhyped celebrities in Reno and Vegas. Next time you go, do more than fantasize as you feed an insatiable slot machine. Go out and find your own vision of a John Ford Western or a classic Lucius Beebe narrative of a long-lost train ride.
Nevada is a place that invites contemplation of unsustainable development, and perspective on what may and may not warrant greed masquerading as investing in dreams. It's a place for picking your guitar beneath a star-filled sky and becoming mindful of what really matters. Happy birthday, Nevada!
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Concerts, Club Gigs, Events, etc...
Are covered in the previous edition, and reach into November -- as far as we have compiled them so far.
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IMPORTANT REMINDER, and memo to the future
We've changed the original intro to this important final item. That's because the folks it really needs to reach would have blown it off before. We hope they won't do that, anyway.
So here ya go: Point is, a whole bunch of us are getting tired of looking out for everybody else's future. I mean, it isn't all that much fun for ANY of us to invest time in learning about and understanding all the very many things that are poised like vultures on a fence rail to eat our lunch. Or rob us blind. Or steal the future. And, when they do it, leave the masses wondering "what happened?"
Because that is soooo predictable, AFTER too damn many of us found it too easy to be... distracted ...elsewhere. You know somebody that you have the desire to tell, "ya know, you, uhh, pay attention to a lot of crap that really does not matter a whit to what kind of future we will share. You even waste MY energy with your endless foolishness."
That is what it's all about. Not "politics" or "midterms" or "partisan control." It's about the future. The entire U.S. House of Representatives gets elected THIS November. All of them! Plus, one-third of the U.S. Senate gets elected that very same day! November 8th is "Rovember." November 8th is THE day when the future of REVERSING Climate Change, or instead, turning corporate oligarchs loose to plunder the planet, will be decided. Not just "the day it is determined," but the day it is DECIDED. That's because YOU can choose to vote on November 8th, "Rovember 8th," on "stop the oligarchs" November 8th, on Save Democracy November 8th.
And frankly, if you don't choose to carry your part, a whole lot of other folks are damned tired of doing it for you. I, for one -- your editor here, whose past includes holding White House press credentials and covering government, politics, science, technology, aerospace, engineering, infrastructure, international relations, and doing investigative journalism to enable all that, and not "just" doing music and the arts -- well, I am pretty close to done with all of it except one thing.
My rant can be summed-up in this short paragraph: I am tired of being an advocate for others who never utilize the opportunity to work in a coalition that advocates for their own future together with the rest of us. So, if voter turnout is low on November 8th, you can stop looking for my public policy advocacy on a broad range of issues. I will be a voice only for reversing climate change. The rest of you can tell each other how shocked and disgusted you are about everything else that happens after you fail to vote.
Or you can get mad while it matters, get motivated while it can make a difference, use your mind, use your voice, use your passion, use your vote, and take action for your future.
Check your VOTER REGISTRATION while there's still time. You can do it easily online by typing-in "check voter registration" and your city and state. You may need to re-register. Or if you have never been registered, it's time to change that.
Certain interests with ultra-rich backers are VERY actively engaged in purging voters from registration rolls, nationwide. There has never been anything like it in the United States of America in our lifetimes -- though the U.S. state of Georgia, four years ago, gave the registration purgers the model they are now using nationwide. It's all about winning by rigging the game. Only it isn't a game. It's power and control and who will wield it against rich interests -- who use politics for their self-serving wealth-grabbing -- at the expense of the rest of us.
The planet has a rapidly diminishing window to stop runaway climate change. Yet some interests continue to deny that it is happening at all, and will profit from despoiling the entire world unless we, the people, stop them.
Subterfuge, distraction, diversion, denial, Big Lies, outlandishly outrageous claims, every unimaginably ridiculous premise, exploitation of differences through scares and fears, and, when all that fails, overt threats against all who disagree, are the leading tactics of those who don't want you to vote.
Whether your top concerns are reproductive freedom or a future worth having and handing-off to future generations, or something else entirely, it all comes down to one thing: democracy must be preserved, defended, nurtured, and ultimately protected from those who would trample it. Ignore that, and fascism replaces democracy.
Check your VOTER status, and be sure you are qualified and thoroughly informed to vote this November. This is the most important "midterm" election cycle in 90 years, and the most consequential we may ever face.
~ Lawrence Wines, editor
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