Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411220006
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: G-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM GORMAN LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: EUREKA, NEV. LENGTH: Long
The nearest McDonald's and Kmart are 120 miles away in Elko, and it's a 77-mile drive to the nearest lawyer, doctor or pharmacy, in Ely. For major hospitalization, Eureka's residents trek to Reno, 240 miles to the west, or Salt Lake City, 320 miles to the east.
But the gold is here, and cattle and alfalfa, and enough work for everyone who's willing to put on a pair of heavy gloves. People such as 63-year-old Witz Bailey, ranching 17 hours a day in the same treeless valley where his grandfather settled in the 1860s. And 42-year-old Greg Tibbs, drilling 12 hours a night for gold in the same hills where silver and lead were mined 120 years ago.
Welcome to Eureka, where the population waffles between 500 and 800, depending on the latest gold-mining operation, where dogs walk down the middle of Main Street, where the biggest social event in town is the Christmas dinner party at the 1880 opera house, and where the 1879 courthouse - with its original pressed-tin ceiling - is maintained not as some tourist trap but because it is the only courtroom in the county.
Along the same street where 125 saloons and a handful of brothels once served a boom town of 9,000 dreamers and diggers, drunks and die-hards, today's laborers still lubricate their bodies with too many beers and whiskeys, and fetch rides home from the local sheriff to their modern-day work camps - mobile home parks and RV lots.
This is the heart of the ``Other Nevada,'' a phrase coined by Nevada author Robert Laxalt to describe the immense expanse of land where the sparse population is rough and tumble and has no use for the glitz of teeming Las Vegas and Reno.
Although Eureka is part of the fastest-growing state in the nation - its environment, its economy, its very essence in a tumult created mainly by transplanted Californians - the town stands as testimony to the old pioneering spirit.
It remains untouched by the influx of outsiders seeking to redefine the state's storied lifestyle. Old Nevada values are sanctified here and you'd best not tinker with them.
Reflects Bud Lloyd, who was the local district attorney before retiring 24 years ago: ``We're the Nevada that the casinos have passed up. We're the Nevada of mining, and of people caring for each other instead of inflicting themselves on one another.''
Eureka's resistance to outside influences bodes well for the state.
The real Nevada, laments Laxalt, is ``disappearing so darn fast. But Eureka, it's still pure, and if you lose it, you've lost the identity of Nevada.''
For many, Eureka is too far off the beaten path, and so it has established its own population equilibrium. While the state's population has increased 50 percent over the last decade, no one anticipates waves of Californians reaching here. There's little reason.
``Probably the biggest complaint we have in town is that we can't seem to keep a doctor here,'' said Eureka native Leroy Etchetaray, a county commissioner. ``They'll come, but their wives can't seem to handle it, so they leave.''
Even the high school principal drives every other weekend to Reno - to visit his wife, who does not want to live here.
Living in Eureka was a challenge from the start.
Its first residents were five prospectors who discovered silver in 1864. Within six years, more than 1,000 mining claims peppered the land, but the early mountain men were frustrated in extracting the treasure, stubbornly encased in junk ore.
Pressed to innovation, mining companies engineered revolutionary smelters with an insatiable appetite for charcoal to fire giant furnaces, melting the raw ore and refining the silver and lead.
By 1879 - as Eureka's population swelled to 9,000 - the town's 16 smelters were consuming 175,000 pounds of charcoal a day; within 50 miles of Eureka, elevation 6,500 feet, the hills were scalped of all pinyon pine, dwarf cedar and mountain mahogany.
A mineralogist noted at the time that ``heavy black clouds of dense smoke from the furnaces, heavily laden and strongly scented with the fumes of lead, arsenic and other volatile elements of the ore, are constantly rolling over the town, depositing soot, scales and black dust, so that it resembles very much one of the manufacturing towns in the coal regions of Pennsylvania.''
Eureka became known as the ``Pittsburgh of the West.''
Besides foul air, life's miseries were compounded by harsh winters, the paucity of fresh food, fires and floods. But the townsfolk were a hardy stock - miners from Europe, the British Isles and Mexico, as well as 2,000 Chinese who worked as domestics or laying train track.
But by 1890, the price of silver had fallen, new boom towns were forming elsewhere in Nevada, and the local hills were considered depleted - a mistaken notion that was righted only in the past 30 years.
Eureka's population plummeted to close to 1,000 at the turn of the century, but the town never was given to ghosts. For the next six decades, the town sustained itself as a farming community; Basque sheepherders worked the pastureland, and cattle ranching became the primary commerce. Occasional gold strikes created spurts of activity.
In the mid-1960s, new gold extracting technology sparked a resurgence of mining in the northern end of Eureka County, 80 miles from here. Mining companies found it financially feasible to chemically leach microscopic bits of gold from the earth. It was profitable - even if the earth yielded only 0.1 ounces or less of gold per ton of mined ore - and the newest boom was on.
The gold breathed new life into Eureka.
Today, two of the largest gold-mining operations in the United States are in northern Eureka County; although the miners live in Elko, the state's newest boom town, which is closer, and spend their payroll checks there, it is Eureka County that is reaping the easy money.
This year, Eureka County will get $3.1 million in gold tax revenue - paltry compared to the more than $1.5 billion in gold that is mined annually, but still a windfall for a county with a population of about 2,200 residents spread out over an area twice the size of Delaware.
Indeed, of county government revenues of about $13 million, nearly half is generated by the gold mining industry, through gold tax, property tax and sales tax.
So the county is flush with money; it spent more than $2 million to renovate the old opera house, enclosed the community pool, improved roads and water systems, built an airstrip, developed a fairgrounds, installed a 911 emergency phone system, modernized the Sheriff's Department and is considering a nine-hole golf course.
On top of all that, the county has $14 million in cash reserves - an amount that exceeds its annual budget.
The two Eureka schools have benefited from the gold bonanza, too.
Eureka's visitors eschew the big Reno to Salt Lake City interstate to the north in favor of the two-lane Highway 50 as it cuts across central Nevada's open rangeland. The expanse offers glimpses of deer and wild horses, but is free of billboards.
Given the paucity of services, the highway was christened ``the Loneliest Road in America'' in a 1986 Life magazine photo spread. It advised motorists to exercise ``survival skills.''
But the travelers are rewarded: state historians say Eureka is the best-preserved old mining town in Nevada. Some local accommodations - including a restored parsonage house - date back more than a century.
Witz Bailey, the rancher, says there are probably easier places to make a living than here, where he has mortgaged the ranch to pay the fees so his cattle can run on Bureau of Land Management land.
``Oh, I've looked over the fence a couple of times,'' he said. ``But if you can ride a good horse and have a good dog, life here is good.''
by CNB