The Goldfield news. [volume] (Goldfield, Nev.) 1904-1911, 1906-01-05
NEVADA TO THE FRONT
Once More Takes Her Place in the
Sisterhood of Producers

Once More Takes Her Place in the
sisterhood of Producers
Ask any Nevada miner whether he
believes there's luck in odd numbers.
In 80 the '49ers from Californis
were prospecting for gold up in the
gray, ash heap plains Of Nevada. They
were bothered by a lot of heavy stuff
that kept getting into the pans one
way or another. One day a prospector
he vas from somewhere down in
Maine, where men are born asking
questions-wanted to know what the
heavy stuff was. No one knew, so he
took it to an assayer. The assayer
found out what it was; for it was
nothing on the rolling world but silver
cleaning, shining silver; and in
twenty-four hours after the assayer
had told the truth about it, the news
of the Washoe strike was fltering
down through the gulches and rushing
down in the rivers and creeping down
over the pack trails, and in three weeks
the melancholy desert was melancholy
no longer, but mad, stark, starving,
raving, raging, delirious mad-for the
Washoe strike was on.
In '73 came the Comstock strike and
out of that Comstock lode came the
Mackey-Bennett cable that spun a
thread across the ocean and linked two
continents together.
The Comstock lode built the railroad
that frightened the snorting buffalo
out of the plains and made the red men
of the desert understand at last that
there was no use in fighting the white
man who could invent such w~hooping,
snorting, blazing weapons as a railroad
engine to come to his defense.
1t was the Comstock that gave up
millions to the Fairs. Who that sees
Mrs. w. X. Vanderbilt at the opera in
Paris today would ever dream that she
was born in a wide open little Nevada
town made up of shacks and tents, back
in the amazing days that followed
'73S
When the Comstock grew too hard t.,
work without the expenditure of vast
sums in heavy machinery the prospec-
tors left Nevada. They stood on the
peak of the range that separates Cali
fornia and Nevada and shook their
fists at the red desert. "Played out!''
they cried. "Played out. Now roast
and burn and freeze and blow alone.''
And now Nevada, the played out, the
f%orlorn, the desert, the has-been, is call
ing all men to her feet again as the
singing sirens called Ulysses of old, and
all the wealth of all the Indias cannot
compare with the wealth that is still
waiting in her strange, dull colored
jewel box-the jewel box of Nevada.
It's gray and desolate, is Nevada,
and at noon of summer it is smitted
with such a fierce heat that ever the
coyotes and the lizards crawl away and
hunt for some pretense of shade.
In the winter the air is clear and as
light and heady as a draught of spark
ling wine. The wind blows all the time
in Nevada and it tastes of alkali. The
water tastes of it, too, slippery, soapy
stuff that it is, and you have to be 4
magician to make a tree or any sprie
of green grow into vigorous life there
And the strange towns, %springing up
in a night, like Jonah's gourd, are
growing into cities, the tents are com
ing down, houses are going up, the
desert paths are being swept away and
streets are taking their places. The
bad man of the frontier has no home
in Nevada, lawlessness has gone farther
afeld and Nevada-the old, the gray,
the mysterious, the sphinx-like-is
opening her strange heart and telling
her wonderful secrets to the sons If
men as she has never told them before.
Goldfeld, Tonopah, Bullfrog, Rhyo-
lite, all these cities are on the map now,
and they are on the map to stay.
Nevada has taken her place in the
r~oll-call of the world.-Denver Post.
The News Annual contains the com.