Historic Markers in Nevada

Storey County, NV

In the boomtown of Virginia City, free-born entrepreneur William A.G. Brown ran the Boston Saloon from 1866 to 1875, serving the town's small but vibrant African American community fine meals and the best cuts of meat — details archaeologists later confirmed digging through the site. Though rarely more than a hundred African Americans lived in the city, they worked as laborers, barbers, business owners, and a respected physician, and by the 1870s their children attended integrated schools. The great fire of 1875 destroyed the building soon after Brown sold it.

Pershing County, NV

In the summer of 1846, brothers Jesse and Lindsay Applegate led a party south from Oregon's Willamette Valley seeking a safer eastern route, reaching a broad Humboldt River meadow—now Rye Patch Reservoir—and blazing the Applegate Trail. Oregon-bound emigrants used it successfully over the next two years. But in 1848, Peter Lassen guided a small wagon train toward his California ranch along a barely passable extension, and the emigrants suffered such loss of life and livestock that it earned the grim name "Death Route." The two branches shared this desert junction.

Clark County, NV

The Arrowhead Trail was an all-weather auto route linking Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, championed by Las Vegas boosters who claimed to have originated it. It was a grassroots effort—promoted by chambers of commerce and built by volunteer labor—that gained wide fame when Los Angeles's Charles H. Bigelow drove the route repeatedly in 1915–1916 in his twin-six Packard, "Cactus Kate." The section near here, completed in 1915 between St. Thomas and Las Vegas, marked a real milestone in early automobile travel.

Henderson, NV

The Arrowhead Trail traced a corridor with deep roots: before 1850, New Mexican trading caravans from Santa Fe followed this stretch of the Old Spanish Trail toward Los Angeles, passing through El Dorado Pass and on to San Bernardino. Its name likely came from the arrowhead logo of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad. Between 1916 and 1924 the route was revived as an early automobile road linking Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, boosted by local towns eager to promote Southern Nevada tourism.

Lander County, NV

Austin sprang to life after William Talcott struck silver here on May 2, 1862, while hauling wood out of Pony Canyon below — a find that set off the famous "Rush to Reese." The nearby camp of Clifton flared briefly, but fast-growing Austin overtook it and became the Lander County seat in 1863, swelling into a substantial city of several thousand before its mines began to fail in the 1880s. From this high Great Basin outpost, prospectors fanned out to open many other important mining camps across central Nevada.

Lander County, NV

The silver-mining boomtown of Austin raised three churches in quick succession during its heyday. St. Augustine's Catholic Church went up in native brick and stone in 1866, where Father Monteverde charged a dollar's admission to his first Christmas Eve mass to control the crowd; the Methodist church followed, financed by stock sold as far as the East Coast; and St. George's Episcopal Church was consecrated in 1878 after a rousing Easter sermon secured pledges, its organ shipped around Cape Horn. The young Emma Wixom attended Sunday school here before becoming the world-famous soprano Emma Nevada.

Lander County, NV

Battle Mountain took its name from a nearby range where California emigrants were said to have been ambushed in the 1850s, but the town itself sprang up in January 1870 after the railroad shifted its station here from Argenta and renamed the Reese River siding. Stage and freight roads teemed with mud wagons and heavy freighters bound for the mining camps to the south, and from 1880 to 1938 the town served as headquarters for the Central Nevada Railway. A copper boom arrived in 1897, and the growing town finally won the county seat from Austin in 1979.

Nye County, NV

Beatty grew into the hub of three short-lived "gold" railroads spawned by the early-1900s strikes at Tonopah, Goldfield, and Rhyolite—boosters even dubbed it the "Chicago of the West." Between 1906 and 1907 the Las Vegas and Tonopah, the Bullfrog Goldfield, and the Tonopah and Tidewater railroads all reached through the area, converging on the boom camps. The rush proved fleeting, and the rails at Beatty were finally torn up beginning in July 1942.

Mineral County, NV

Founded in 1874 by Alsop J. Holmes, Belleville sprang up to mill ore from his Northern Belle Mine at Candelaria, shipping its first bullion bar in 1875. When the Carson and Colorado Railroad reached town in 1881, Belleville's population peaked near five hundred, supporting hotels, restaurants, a schoolhouse, and seven saloons. But once pipelines carried water directly to Candelaria's own mills in the late 1880s, the town lost its purpose and stood deserted by 1892.

Nye County, NV

A reliable year-round spring in Buena Vista Canyon long drew Shoshone people to this high valley for rabbit drives and gatherings before silver strikes in 1865 transformed it into the boomtown of Belmont. At its peak it boasted schools, churches, a newspaper, a Chinatown, and a rowdy reputation for brawls, feuds, and vigilante justice, serving as the Nye County seat from 1867 to 1905. When the shallow, high-grade ore played out around 1890, residents drifted off to newer strikes, leaving the surviving courthouse to preside over a quiet townscape.

Nye County, NV

Named for its smoky-blue distances, Big Smokey Valley lies in Shoshone country between the Toiyabe and Toquima ranges and saw a procession of Western legends pass through. Jedediah Smith crossed in 1827 and John C. Frémont, with Kit Carson, came in 1845; by 1859 the valley carried the Jackass Mail, Pony Express, Overland Telegraph, and Overland stagecoaches. Silver strikes at Austin in the 1860s sparked its first mining boom, dotting the ranges with camps like Ophir Canyon and Jefferson. The Tonopah strike of 1900 revived the rush and gave rise to Manhattan and Round Mountain.

Esmeralda County, NV

When the Pittsburgh-Silver Peak Gold Mining Company bought up the major mines in 1906 and found land speculators had cornered nearby Silver Peak, it simply surveyed its own townsite to the north and named it Blair. The company built a 100-stamp mill in 1907 and ran a 17½-mile railroad from Blair Junction to the Tonopah & Goldfield main line. Yet the boom was brief: by 1920 Blair was all but deserted, leaving stone-building remnants and mill foundations as its only survivors.

Carson City, NV

Built in 1879 by lumber and railroad magnate Duane L. Bliss, this was in its day the largest and most modern home in Nevada. Constructed entirely of clear lumber and square nails, it was the first house in the state fully piped for gas lighting. It stands as a monument to the fortunes made from the timber and transportation that fed the Comstock mining boom.

Washoe County, NV

Bowers Mansion, built in 1864, stands as a monument to the sudden riches of the Comstock Lode. Lemuel "Sandy" Bowers and Eilley Orrum, whose adjoining Gold Canyon claims struck a rich vein, married and became likely the first millionaires the great find produced, raising this house on their new fortune. But misfortune chased fortune: the vein gave out, a mill was destroyed, Sandy died in 1868, and Eilley finally lost the property to foreclosure in 1878, dying in poverty even as the mansion lived on as a popular resort.

Douglas County, NV

In December 1861 William H. Boyd received a Utah Territory franchise to build a road linking Genoa to the Cradlebaugh toll road, the main trunk line toward the Esmeralda mines. When the Placerville-to-Genoa telegraph line was strung along it in 1863, the route picked up a second name—"Telegraph Road." Douglas County bought the road in 1876 for $2,650, and its trace is still visible across the valley.

Lyon County, NV

Samuel S. Buckland settled here in 1859, starting a ranch, a station for the Overland Stage Company, and a tent hotel, and building the first bridge across the Carson River below Genoa. In 1860 his station became the assembly point for volunteers in the Pyramid Lake War and a remount stop on the Pony Express. He later ran a store supplying soldiers at nearby Fort Churchill, and built his two-story house from timbers salvaged when the fort was dismantled.

Lincoln County, NV

Bullionville sprang up in 1870 when John H. Ely and W. H. Raymond moved a five-stamp mill here from Hiko, drawn by the water that nearby Pioche lacked. Because ore could be milled beside a reliable water supply, most of Pioche's mills soon relocated here, and by 1875 the town had five mills, 500 residents, and eastern Nevada's first iron foundry. When a Pioche waterworks was built that same year, the mills drifted back, and even a tailings-reworking plant in 1880 could not halt the town's decline.

Humboldt County, NV

In 1873 Frank Button and his uncle Isaac drove cattle into the fertile valleys of northern and eastern Humboldt County to start ranching under their famous Double Square brand. Across some 4,000 square miles of range they raised thousands of fine horses. Though the original ranch sold in 1884, Frank Button stayed in the country, serving as Button Point's postmaster and as chairman of the Humboldt County commissioners.

Caliente, NV

Caliente began humbly as Culverwell's Ranch, cutting hay for the mining camps of Pioche and Delmar, until the railroad transformed it. In 1901 rancher Charles Culverwell reportedly ended the eleven-year Harriman–Clark right-of-way feud with a shotgun, letting one grade cross his meadows; a tent city followed in 1903 and a railroad division point by 1905. Waves of Austrian, Japanese, and Ottoman immigrant workers built the town, crowned in 1923 by its grand Mission Revival depot that doubled as civic center and hotel.

Lyon County, NV

In one of the U.S. Army's stranger experiments, camels were imported in the 1850s and tested by Lt. Edward Beale as pack animals for the arid Southwest. When the military experiment failed and the animals were auctioned off, some found new work here in Nevada, hauling wood and salt to the mines and mills of the Comstock and stabled behind the stone Leslie Hay Barn. Used for roughly a decade between Sacramento and Nevada, the camels were eventually turned loose to fend for themselves, with few seen after the 1880s.

Humboldt County, NV

From 1865 to 1868 the U.S. Army ran Camp McGarry near Summit Springs on the Old Applegate Trail, its troops guarding the Idaho-California mail and stage roads and the emigrant trails threading Nevada and Oregon. The post grew to include officers' quarters, barracks, a mess hall, and a 100-horse stone barn, and in 1866 became headquarters of the District of Nevada. At 75 square miles it was the largest military reservation in the state before its abandonment in 1868, when the troops moved to Camp Winfield Scott; the land later became an American Indian reservation.

Carson City, NV

Established just north of here in October 1864, Camp Nye was the home base of Companies D and E of the 1st Nevada Volunteer Cavalry during the Civil War. Rather than fighting Confederates, these Union troopers were largely engaged in conflicts with American Indians across the region; Company D suffered Nevada's only two combat deaths of the war in a battle at Table Mountain in Elko County on May 20, 1865. The camp was deactivated that August, and no trace of its barracks and stables remains.

Mineral County, NV

Seven miles west lie the ghost towns of Candelaria and Metallic City, born of the silver mines opened in this district in the 1860s. Candelaria — its name drawn from a mine and ultimately the Catholic feast of Candlemas — grew by 1880 into the area's largest town, with three doctors, three lawyers, two hotels, six stores, and ten saloons. Its leading mine, the Northern Belle, was located in 1864 and developed after 1870 to yield an estimated $7 million, chiefly in silver, and piped-in water eventually dropped the price from a dollar to a nickel a gallon.

Carlin, NV

Carlin, the oldest town in Elko County, was laid out by the Central Pacific in December 1868 at a meadow long favored as a stopping place by emigrant wagon trains, where crews built a roundhouse and shops and named the town for Union general William Passmore Carlin. Through the 1870s and 1880s it vied with neighboring towns for the freighting business of the surrounding mining camps, and for decades it served as an important icing station for refrigerator cars. In 1965 it became the shipping point for the nearby Carlin gold mine, one of the largest in the country, and remains a working railroad division point.

Elko County, NV

Carlin Canyon opened to European Americans in December 1828 when Peter Skene Ogden's Hudson's Bay Company brigade passed through; one of his trappers, Joseph Paul, died and became the first emigrant buried in the Humboldt country. Frémont's men struggled through in 1845, and the doomed Reed-Donner Party glimpsed it in 1846. The Central Pacific's Chinese crews pushed the transcontinental railroad through in 1868, and later the Western Pacific followed in 1907. In 1913 the first auto road took over the old rail grade—becoming the Victory Highway, U.S. 40, and at last Interstate 80.

Mineral County, NV

This freight depot was the first railroad building erected in Hawthorne, a surviving remnant of the narrow-gauge Carson and Colorado Railroad that pushed south from Mound House in 1881. Railroad officials laid out the town in the desert and auctioned its first lots that April. The line was later extended into California's Owens Valley, but Hawthorne's rail service ended when the town was bypassed in 1905, and the depot went on to serve as a store, a bar and restaurant, and finally an Elks Lodge hall.

Carson City, NV

Carson City grew from Eagle Station, a trading post and ranch established in 1851 on a branch of the California Trail and named for an eagle skin nailed to its wall. In 1858 Abraham Curry, finding Genoa's lots too dear, bought much of the Eagle Ranch and platted a town — deliberately reserving a central plaza for a future capitol. His foresight paid off: Carson City became the territorial capital in 1861 and the state capital when Nevada joined the Union in 1864.

Douglas County, NV

The broad, cultivated Carson Valley below began as a ribbon of natural meadow where California-bound 49'ers rested their stock and bought vegetables from the Mormon Station settlers. After the 1858 discovery of the Comstock Lode, farmers extended the meadows by irrigation to feed the miners of Virginia City, and from 1870 German, Danish, and Swiss immigrants enlarged the fields further to supply booming camps like Bodie, Tonopah, and Goldfield. Sound range and farming practices have kept it among Nevada's finest agricultural regions.

Carson City, NV

This was the home and observatory of Charles William Friend, Nevada's first weatherman, astronomer, and seismologist. Born in Prussia in 1835 and drawn to California by the 1849 Gold Rush, Friend settled in Carson City in 1867 and opened a jewelry and optical store. He built Nevada's first observatory here, equipped through the help of U.S. Senator William Stewart, and in 1887 founded the state's first weather service, directing a network of volunteer stations whose data is still cited today.

White Pine County, NV

The town of Cherry Creek grew from the Tea Cup gold claim staked by Peter Corning and John Carpenter in 1872, booming to more than 1,800 people at its 1882 peak and producing gold and silver into the 1940s. Just to the south, Egan Canyon carried Howard Egan's 1855 route and a Pony Express change station by 1860, then an Overland Mail stop. Soldiers from Fort Ruby found gold there in 1863, founding the town of Egan and its own mining district with three stamp mills by 1865. Both camps boomed and busted their way into the twentieth century.

Pahrump, NV

Chief Tecopa came of age as the first European Americans reached southern Nevada, and as a Southern Paiute leader he fought hard to hold his people's land and traditional life. Recognizing that survival lay in coexistence, he devoted a long life—spanning nearly the whole nineteenth century—to keeping peace between the Paiutes and the newcomers settling around them. He died in the Pahrump Valley he had worked to protect.

Sparks, NV

Erected to mark a century from 1864 to 1964, this marker honors the thousands of Chinese Americans who helped build Nevada. Drawn from across the Pacific to California's Gold Rush and onward into Nevada's mountains and deserts, they laid railroads, cut timber, and labored at countless tasks, forming sizable communities in Virginia City and other towns. Their contribution to the state's first century, the marker declares, will be forever remembered.

Storey County, NV

First located in 1859, the Chollar was one of the Comstock Lode's leading mines, consolidating with the Potosi in 1865 to form the storied Chollar-Potosi. The Nevada mill was built here in 1887 to work low-grade Chollar ore, and it holds a notable double distinction: it was the last mill on the Comstock to use the old Washoe pan amalgamation process, yet the first to generate and use its own electric power.

Fallon, NV

Churchill County was created in 1861 and its seat wandered—from La Plata to Stillwater—before Fallon claimed the honor in 1903. That year a Neo-Classical courthouse rose on donated land, built in wood by contractor W.B. Wyrick for $7,300 to designs by Reno architect Benjamin Leon, and accepted by the commissioners in early 1904. Remarkably, it remains the only monumental wooden courthouse ever built in Nevada and has served continuously ever since.

Esmeralda County, NV

Columbus took root on the edge of a salt marsh in 1865, when a quartz mill rose at the only spot for miles with water enough to run it. Its real fortune arrived in 1871, when William Troop discovered borax on the marsh and four companies rushed in to work the deposits. At its 1875 peak the town held around 1,000 people, a post office, and a newspaper aptly named The Borax Miner — but once the borax played out, Columbus faded, all but abandoned by the early 1880s.

Sparks, NV

When it opened in June 1909, Coney Island was one of the grandest amusement parks in the Nevada region, the creation of Otto G. Benschuetz, who laid out landscaped grounds, a bandstand, a dance pavilion, and even an artificial boating lake with bath houses. Its bright heyday was brief, fading after Benschuetz died in 1912. The site was reinvented again and again—an aircraft assembly plant, an auto court—before fires and the arrival of Interstate 80 in the 1960s erased what remained.

Esmeralda County, NV

This building was the nerve center of Goldfield's communications from 1908 to 1963, during and after the great gold rush that briefly made Goldfield the largest city in Nevada. Between 1904 and 1910 the district boomed with more than 15,000 residents, four railroads, and mines producing millions. Flood in 1913 and a fire that leveled 53 downtown blocks in 1923—which this structure survived—hastened the town's long decline.

White Pine County, NV

The great open-pit copper mines of eastern Nevada, including the Liberty Pit — the largest in the state — lie just south of this point, and through the first half of the twentieth century the district produced nearly a billion dollars in copper, gold, and silver. The huge mounds on the landscape are waste rock stripped away to reach the ore. Two miles east, near Lane City, the Elijah became the first mine of the Robinson Mining District; Lane City, first called Mineral City, was settled in 1869 and grew to some 400 people, with a hotel, a stage station, and the Ragsdale Station.

Douglas County, NV

Built in 1861 by William Cradlebaugh, this bridge across the Carson River shortened the road from Carson City south to Aurora and the booming Esmeralda Mining District. Travelers converged here from two routes—one hugging the river's west side, the other winding through Jacks Valley—before crossing and striking out across the desert past waystations like Desert Station and the Twelve Mile House. Douglas County bought the road and bridge in 1895 for $5,000.

Lincoln County, NV

Crystal Spring served as a watering place and campsite on an alternate branch of the Mormon Trail in the mid-1800s, and in 1866 it was named provisional seat of the new Lincoln County. That spring Governor Henry G. Blasdel set out from Carson City with more than twenty people to organize the county, but a harrowing crossing through Death Valley left them starving — one man died and the rest survived on lizards and desert animals before reaching the spring. Blasdel found too few voters to qualify the county, which was finally organized a year later at Hiko.

Carson City, NV

Louisa Keyser — known as Datsolalee — was a Washoe weaver whose spherical degikup willow baskets, decorated with bracken fern and redbud, elevated a thousands-of-years-old utilitarian craft into internationally celebrated fine art. Working under the patronage of the Cohn family from 1895 until her death in 1925, she produced more than 120 documented major baskets now prized in museums nationwide. Her success came as the Washoe were recovering from the mid-19th-century loss of their homelands, and it inspired renewed basketry across the tribe.

Lyon County, NV

Dayton is among the oldest settlements in Nevada, born as a riverside resting spot where California-bound emigrants paused after crossing the desert. In 1849 Abner Blackburn plucked a gold nugget from the mouth of Gold Canyon, sparking the prospecting that a decade later uncovered the fabulous Comstock ore bodies at Gold Hill and Virginia City. The town cycled through several names before settling on Dayton in 1861, honoring John Day, who surveyed its streets, and it thrived for decades as a milling and trading hub and as the Lyon County seat until 1911.

Lyon County, NV

Founded in 1851, Dayton Cemetery is one of the oldest continuously maintained burial grounds in Nevada, sited beside the emigrant trail to the California gold fields whose wagon ruts can still be traced nearby. The town grew from an 1849 gold discovery in Gold Canyon and was named in 1861 for surveyor John Day; that same year Lyman Crockett dug the cemetery's first grave. Among those buried here is James Finney, "Old Virginny," the namesake of Virginia City, alongside many Italian American families who farmed the Carson River bottoms to feed the Comstock.

Lyon County, NV

Dayton holds the site of Nevada's first Chinatown, settled as hundreds of thousands of immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea crossed the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century — pushed by upheaval at home and pulled by the promise of gold and work in the Rocky Mountain West. In August 1857, Edward Rose hired Dayton's Chinese laborers to dig the four-mile Rose Ditch, carrying water from the Carson River to the placer miners at Gold Canyon. Facing steady discrimination but drawn by the work, they mined the canyon and settled along the river, and the community remained a vital hub for Chinese Americans in Nevada into the 1880s.

Lyon County, NV

Dayton served as the first seat of Lyon County, and residents celebrated the two-story Italianate brick courthouse finished in 1864 as a mark of their new state's sophistication. Fire destroyed the building in May 1909, and the county seat soon moved to Yerington. Rather than abandon the ruins, the legislature funded a high school on the site in 1918, a building that has since served the community as an elementary school, a junior high, and today a community center.

Lyon County, NV

In 1865 Lyon County built this imposing stone schoolhouse for Dayton, then the county seat—making it the second oldest schoolhouse in Nevada and the oldest still standing on its original site. It educated local children until it closed in 1959. In later years the building sheltered the Dayton Senior Citizens Center and, since 1991, has been home to the Dayton Historical Society Museum.

Douglas County, NV

Known to the Washoe as De-ek Wadapush, Cave Rock has been a sacred place for thousands of years, a site where medicine people meditated and prayed and a landmark woven through the tribe's legends and traditional life beside da ow — Lake Tahoe. In the settlement era it also served the newcomers: quarried granite blocks still brace the old Lake Bigler Toll Road on its face, and highway tunnels were bored through the rock in 1931 and again in 1957. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property.

Lincoln County, NV

Gold discovered by John and Olivia Ferguson around 1891 spawned a camp first called Ferguson, renamed Delamar after entrepreneur John DeLamar bought its best claims in 1893 for $150,000. Over 1,500 people crowded this remote place, served by a newspaper, hospital, school, churches, and an opera house, though water came 12 miles and all other goods 150 miles by mule team. The dry milling process threw off fine silica "death dust" that killed many residents and earned the town its grim nickname, "The Widow Maker," even as it produced $25 million in gold to lead Nevada at the turn of the century.

Washoe County, NV

Authorized in 1903 and completed in 1905, Derby Dam diverts the Truckee River for irrigation as the first structure built under the U.S. Reclamation Service—its very Specification and Drawing Number One. It anchored the Newlands Project, named for the Nevada senator who championed the 1902 Reclamation Act, and delivered its first water in 1906. Modest beside its descendants, it was the forerunner of Hoover, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and Glen Canyon Dams. Here the federal effort to remake the arid West with engineered water began.

Lyon County, NV

About a mile south lie the remains of Desert Well Station, a typical stage stop of the 1843–1869 era that bridged the age of emigrant wagon trains and the transcontinental railroad. Later known as Nelson's, it won a measure of fame when Mark Twain recounted his stop there in Roughing It. The original site had two wells, an inn, and corrals—one well reserved for the camels famously brought to the Nevada desert to haul salt to the Comstock mines.

Lyon County, NV

This rugged reef of rock was one of the most famous landmarks of Nevada Territory, guarding the narrow gorge through which thousands of prospectors streamed toward the Comstock Lode. Nearby in June 1850, John Orr and Nicholas Kelly found the first gold nugget ever unearthed in Gold Canyon, opening a decade of placer mining. During the brief Paiute War of 1860, Silver City's residents built a stone battlement and even a wooden cannon atop the eastern summit for defense.

Eureka County, NV

Long a gathering ground for Shoshone and Paiute people, Diamond Valley was first mapped by Captain John C. Frémont in 1845 as he charted routes for western migration. Colonel J.H. Simpson surveyed a path through here in 1859 that immediately became the Pony Express and Overland Telegraph route, while freight toll roads served the lead and silver camps booming in the 1860s. A limited livestock and dairy industry followed, and in 1957 a tapped underground lake brought irrigation water to the valley.

Elko County, NV

Jackson Lee Davis (1870–1949), known everywhere as "Diamondfield Jack," was a flamboyant gunman hired by cattle interests—including future Nevada governor John Sparks—to keep sheep ranchers off the ranges of southern Idaho and northeastern Nevada. Convicted in 1896 of murdering two sheepherders, he was sentenced to hang even after others confessed, and was finally pardoned in 1902. He remade himself as a successful mine operator in Tonopah and Goldfield before drifting into obscurity and dying in Las Vegas.

Elko County, NV

Dinner Station began in the early 1870s as a meal stop that William C. "Hill" Beachey established for the Tuscarora and Mountain City stage lines, first known as Weilands and later as Oldham's Station. After a fire in the 1880s, a handsome two-story stone house, outbuildings, and a corral replaced the earlier frame structure. For a time it was among the county's most popular inns, serving both horse-drawn stages and early automobiles—until cars made such stops obsolete after 1910.

Douglas County, NV

Known also as Round Tent Ranch, Double Springs was a station at a pair of springs on the road threading the south end of the Pine Nut Mountains. It served travelers moving between the ranching and dairy country of Carson and Walker valleys and those bound for the Esmeralda mines, and a toll road once connected the area west to the Kingsbury Road toward Lake Tahoe. Nearby stood Carter's Station, which held the post office and 1861 polling place for the local mining precinct.

Douglas County, NV

In 1917, State Senator William F. Dressler gave this forty-acre tract to Washo people then living and working on ranches across Carson Valley, and after a school opened in 1924 it grew into a settled community. For generations before European intrusion, the Washo had followed a seasonal round—wintering in the Pinenut Hills where they stored pinenuts, summering in the Lake Tahoe Basin to fish and gather, and hunting in Carson Valley each fall. Their world was organized by kinship and animated by a rich cosmology of water babies and spirit beings of the High Sierra.

Elko County, NV

Established by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 on the ancestral lands of the Western Shoshone, the Duck Valley Indian Reservation spans some 300 square miles across Nevada and Idaho and is home to Northern Paiutes as well. Known for a peaceful and cooperative spirit, its people carried their culture forward across generations while many kept alive ancient handicraft skills. Most residents ranch the valley, raising hay, wheat, and cattle under the elected Shoshone-Paiute Tribal Council.

Carson City, NV

Sitting between Nevada's early settlement at Genoa and the silver riches of the Comstock Lode, Eagle Valley — today's Carson City — became a crossroads of westward travel and communication. The Carson branch of the California Emigrant Trail funneled overland pioneers through here, and the same corridor carried the first overland telegraph in 1859, the Pony Express, the Butterfield-Wells Fargo stages, and eventually the Virginia & Truckee Railway in 1906.

Churchill County, NV

The springs and streams of Edwards Creek Valley made it a vital gathering ground for Native peoples, where Shoshone families moved seasonally for seeds and small game and wintered in camps later shared by Northern Paiutes. In 1854 Colonel John Reese found a route through the valley shorter than the Humboldt trail, and after surveyor James Simpson formalized it in 1859 it carried the Pony Express, the Overland Telegraph, and the overland stages. Serving too as a passageway to the 1862 Austin gold rush, it remained the region's principal commercial artery until 1880.

Boulder City, NV

Eldorado Canyon runs east to the Colorado River, and around 1859 prospectors began digging its slopes for gold and silver, organizing the Colorado Mining District. Its three great mines — the Techatticup, Wall Street, and El Dorado Rand — yielded more than six million dollars, while steamboats and barges freighted goods some 350 miles up from the Gulf of California to the canyon's mouth. In 1867 the U.S. Army planted an outpost here to guard the river freight and the miners; the mines revived in the 1870s and worked on until World War II.