Nevada without giants

DANIEL SENSENEY

In the quarry of the Nevada state prison at Carson City there were discovered, in the old days, a number of fossilized footprints which might have been made either by a primeval man or by a giant sloth. A scientific controversy raged, mildly, for months, until finally one Samuel L. Clemens, a not very highly regarded contemporary journalist, took a hand in it, publishing an article in which he claimed to have been present when the tracks were made by the members of the First Territorial Legislature, adjourning sine die.

Not completely satisfactory, this explanation does have one virtue: it recognizes the existence, in these days, of giants in Nevada—a fact which you will hear expounded by all Nevadans who Have resided in the state for more than thirty years, and many who haven't. Such names as Mackay, Sutro, Flood, Mills—these roll resoundingly from their tongues. They will tell you ol how President Lincoln was in such a hurry to have Nevada a part of the Union, to secure her vote against slavery, that her constitution was telegraphed to Washington for Congress to ratify, because there wasn't time to send it by pony express— thus making it possible for a state with a population of only 40,000 to save the Union.

They tell you, too, of how Virginia City. the queen of the boom towns, was christened by a drunken prospector whose only known name was "Old Virginia," when he slipped and broke his bottle of whiskey upon the stones of Mount Davidson, and thereupon rose and solemnly announced that he had christened the burgeoning city "Virginia." They tell of the lawless years that followed, when killings were such common occurrences that it was the Virginian's boast that he "had a man for breakfast every morning", until the "601" was formed, and men were discovered hanging from the limb???ees, with only white placards lettere ???01" on their breasts to tell the agency of their passing. And you hear of the gorgeous, full-blown days when Modjeska, Booth and Barrett, Richard Mansfield, and Ada Cavendish trod the stage of Piper's Opera House, to "tumultuous applause"; and of how the hearty giants of the Comstock sat down to banquets at $20 and .$30 a plate, of terrapin, and squab, and oysters which cost one dollar apiece when rushed over the mountains from San Francisco by stage-coach; and of how the menus for these banquets were of creamy white satin, lettered in gold.

But those days are past, and the melancholy fact is that there are no longer any giants in Nevada, nor anything wherewith to give them sustenance. The giants have gone into high society, and for years silver hasn't been worth '.enough to make its recovery from the" ground profitable.

The flurry over inflation sent silver from 28 to 38 cents in one week, and Nevada spoke excitedly of the future; then silver slipped hack, slowly, almost to its former price, and the excitement changed to mere hope. Net there is a distinct note of optimism in the1 air: Nevada has been told that something will be done about silver, and she more than half believes it. Perhaps Ogden L. Mills does. too. At any rate, he recently bought up all of the stock he did not own already in the 52-mile Virginia and Truckee railway, which runs from Reno, through Carson, to Virginia, and in which his grandfather was one of the first stockholders. Nevada thinks this may mean that he has inside information on silver; and happily she looks forward to the day when she won't have to depend upon a moribund livestock industry for income, and on legalized gambling and divorce for fame.

Not that Nevada is in any way a pushing or a bumptious state—this, ???n spite of ???overnor Fred Balzar's defiant pronouncement at the Republican convention that In' hailed from the state "where men're men—-'n' women're glad of it!"—a pronouncement not greatly applauded by most Nevadans, who felt that it placed their private affairs in an embarrassingly strong public spotlight. Actually, Nevada's unassuming desire is just not to be quite lost sight of. She realizes, well enough, that her assets, besides the mines, are mostly of the intangible, non-saleable variety: a great deal of bracing air, more than one square mile of desert for each of her residents to brood in, if he likes, alone and quietly, a mysterious and eerie beauty, romantic traditions and history, and that indefinable quality known as "the true Western spirit."

Perhaps her people realize, as well, that Nevada is a land fashioned for giants, where man is forever an interloper. A trip across the state is, or should be to anyone with a spark of decent modesty, a chastening experience. Everything is built upon such a grandiose scale, and the atmosphere, unkindly, is too clear and sharp to hide any of the bigness. With the desert pressing close upon either side, the road cuts for miles across the dun valley caught between long ranges of silent and lonely mountains; then, in dignified curve, it finds a pass through, and emerges into another vast valley, with, perhaps, a huddled and grimy town lost, pitiful, in the immensity.

Even Nevada's displays of color are awe-inspiring. Surely only a giant could comprehend the raucous abandon of a wound-red splash of mineral on a tortured rock-face, the brief, all-for-a-day gayety of a desert Spring, when the ground is blanketed with wistful sand-flowers, or the crowning performance of all—a cloudlorn desert sunset.

Nevada takes a quiet pride, besides, in contemplating a certain belief of hers—a belief, incidentally, which appears to be rather more than less well-founded. It is that Nevada laws have anticipated those of other states by many, many years. In support of this contention, Nevadans point to their passage eight years ago of a request to Congress to call state conventions for the purpose of proposing repeal; to the gradual liberalization of divorce laws in other sections after Nevada was first to enter the field; and to the interested glances cast by neighboring states in the direction of Nevada's lethal gas deathhouse, which accomplishes the execution of condemned men simply, apparently painlessly, and with a minimum of indignity, without gallows, electric chair, or firing squad.

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True, no other state has as yet followed Nevada's lead in legalizing gambling, but Nevada herself is not quite sure she wasn't over-enthusiastic when she passed that law. True again, most other states are still cluttered up with a lot of statutes and ordinances making prostitution a punishable offense, and Nevada prefers to explain this circumstance only by the observation that she never has understood the inclination to attempt to legislate human nature out of humanity.

Meanwhile, she keeps prudently silent concerning the accepted theory that Reno and Las Vegas, the two largest cities, as well as others in lesser degrees, depend upon prostitution for a large part of their civic incomes. Bawdy-houses pay no license fees to these cities, hut they do provide an attractive lure for holidaying miners, ranch hands, and dam workers.

The actual—not the published—attitude of Nevada's best people upon prostitution is best illustrated by the tragic experience of a misguided Reno mayor who shut up that city's "line" a few months before he ran for re-election. Me was thereupon endorsed by service clubs, by business organizations, by parent-teacher associations, by whatnot and whomnot. He was, it seemed, as good as elected. Meanwhile, business everywhere in the city grew more and more slack. When the votes were counted it was found that the reform candidate had been defeated ten to one by the Honorable E. E. Roberts, who had run on an outand-out wide-open platform, and who has been mayor for the ten years since.

There is, in addition, the usual acute political angle, about which well-bred persons say nothing. "The Riverside Securities Company, 'Inc." owns the hull-pen, but nobody knows who owns the Riverside Securities Company— that is, nobody knows for certain. Whoever does, they make a tidy little income from it. Until recently, rental on each of the 67 cribs was S2.50 a night—and a girl either paid her rent or got out. The depression caused a temporary reduction in rent (though not in the cost of services rendered) to S1.50 a night, effective last January; and many of the cribs are, just now, unoccupied. But even so—!

But if Nevada is meek as far as the outside world is concerned, for herself she has never quite forgotten that she is the battle-horn state. Sectional rivalry in Nevada is different from that exhibited in her sister state, California. where the south thumbs its nose at the north, and the north snoots at the south. In Nevada, the forces of every city and county join in a cordial, if hitherto utterly impotent, dislike of Reno, which calmly goes its own way, more or less runs things, and agrees with the rest of the country that Reno is Nevada.

During the last few years, however, a rival has appeared on the scene. Las Vegas, given courage by the Boulder Dam (as Las Vegas, being strongly Democratic, has always insisted upon calling it) which is taking shape in its back yard, has been grooming itself to play Los Angeles to Reno's San Francisco. Reno, exults Las Vegas, is on its way to second place, with its poor little trumpery divorce business, and nothing much to fall back on; Las Yogas' future prosperity will be based on cheap power, not cheap notoriety.

Thus, Las Vegas. Nevertheless, it currently amuses itself by doing its little best to prove that if open gambling and sale of liquor, honky-tonks and hideouts, rape and bloodshed, and a heterogeneous population, make a Western metropolis, it has a better right than Reno to the title. In this noble ambition, it has so far been somewhat hampered by the lack of skillful press-agentry, and of a Tradition. Commit a crime passionnel in Reno, and the news goes all over the country. Commit one in Las Vegas, and only the exchanging papers take note of the fact in their "State Briefs" columns. But Las Vegas is learning how to gain attention, and time, with the proper aid, can always work up a good tradition.

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Nevada, of course, has other "cities." There are Winnemucca and Lovelock, populations less than 2.000, focal points of a once-prosperous livestock district. There is F,lko, slightly larger, where President Hoover made his final campaign speech, and whose newspaper thereupon brayed loyally that it had known all along, of all places in the United States, Elko was the most ideally situated to he the center of activity. The next day, Elko sallied forth and voted, along with the rest of the state, two to one for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And there is Carson City, which enjoys the dubious distinction of being the smallest state capital in the country—population 1.596, counting the Indians. It is also by all odds the most charming town in the state, scenically —except, of course, Reno, which has for years had the advantage of being Nevada's show-window. Like Reno, Carson is on the fringe of the desert, where it melts into piney mountains. A dozen miles behind and above Carson is the crystalline loveliness of Lake Tahoe. Its streets, though unpaved, are hard-packed granite sand instead of fretful 'dobe dust; springs in the hills supply water for plenty of greenery.

So Carson drowses quietly except during sixty days every two years, when the legislature meets. Then it sits up straight and watches what is going on. For Carson has hut one contributing industry of any great importance: the state of Nevada—and taxpayers sometimes have queer ideas about the number of people necessary to run a state Capitol, and the amounts of salaries justly due them.

Therefore, Carson observes the activities of the biennial legislatures with interest, not to say apprehension. Naturally, the people of the town resent the need for this periodic attack of the dithers, and from this it is only a step to resentment of the legislatures themselves. Legislators, says Carson, are often very charming persons to meet individually, hut get them together in two assembly chambers, and they're horrid. The legislators, being tactless, make no effort to assuage this resentment by living in the town: the majority of them commute from Reno, 30 miles away, where there's some fun.

During the political campaign, then, we find liberalism being such a paramount issue that both sides hedge on it very gingerly; and there can he little doubt that it would have occasioned some brisk squabbles on the floors of both houses when the proper time came, but that on the first day of November, it pleased a chain of hanks serving half the state to close their doors, and keep them closed, even after the "moratorium" obligingly declared by the governor had expired.

These hanks were owned by George Wingfield, who had always been considered by Nevadans to he their one remaining giant; to find that he was at least a rather puny one was such a shock that nobody wasted much further thought upon gambling or divorce laws. When the legislature met in January, the hanks were still closed, and for forty-odd of its allotted sixty days the honorable body toyed with an investigation designed to find out if there hadn't been dirty work somewhere, and if somebody hadn't better be fired. In the midst of its deliberations, the hank holiday epidemic hit the nation, and the president issued a proclamation telling the twelve remaining banks they could take a few days off too. Scared, the legislature passed, in one day, laws to allow hanks to restrict withdrawals and to give the governor power to declare emergency bank holidays—a power which, actually, he hadn't had before. It didn't even stop to note with pride or anything else that Nevada had again anticipated history by starting the bank holiday idea.