1949 Beebe and Clegg 1963

Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg Virginia & Truckee: A Story of Virginia City and Comstock Times, Howell-North: Berkeley, California, 1949 (1963), Fifth Edition, 67 pp. 1949, 1963, 1860's, 1850

Sing, therefore, O Muse of Tractive Force and Valve Gear, of the Virginia and Truckee, a railroad of such superlatives that, like the Comstock it served and the San Francisco it enriched, its name will be forever currency in the language of the trans-Mississippi.

     "Tidings of precious metals in Nevada were nothing new to the Mother Lode. As early as 1850 a William H. Moore of Indiana, who had driven the first wagon ever to cross the plains from St. Joseph to California, reported a number of prospectors digging for gold in Carson Valley but that the biggest single piece of ore he had heard reported was worth no more than $15. But when it was reported on the strength of reliable assays that the samples of "blue stuff," long discarded by miners on the east side of Mount Davidson as worthless, ran to several thousand dollars a ton in silver the rush which, a decade before, had carried the tide of fortune seekers westward over the Sierra was reversed and the greatest wave of adventurers the world has ever known suddenly deserted the diggings of the Mother Lode and rolled eastward to the Washoe.

     "Caught up in this mighty landfaring were such millionaires to be as John Mackay, Senator George Hearst, Adolph Sutro, James Graham Fair, Senator John P. Jones, Sandy Bowers, Jim Flood, Jack O'Brien, and mighty, bearded Senator William M. Stewart, perhaps the most persistent of all Nevada seekers and finders, who was to see the rushes to Virginia City and to the Reese, to the White Pine, to Panamint, to Tonopah and Goldfield and, at long last, to the ultimate bonanza of them all, Bullfrog, above the incredible wastes of the Amargosa, well after the turn of the twentieth century." p. 8

     ". . .

     "The passing of the V & T will leave Nevada, in all truth, a graveyard of railroads whose only peer as a necropolis of short lines is Colorado. Forgotten by all but professional railroad historians is the Pioche and Bullionville which was to link that fabulous mining community with Senator John P. Jones' ambitious San Pedro and Salt Lake line. Gone, save in its vestigial remnant, is the Southern Pacific's Owens Valley branch across the state line in California, the once wistful and momentarily opulent Carson and Colorado. With the snows of yesteryear are the Nevada-California-Oregon narrow gauge, the Eureka and Palisade of fragrant memory and the once riotous Nevada Central. Only grade rights of way in the southern Nevada deserts serve to remind of the life that once flowed along the Tonopah and Tidewater, the Bullfrog-Goldfield, the Tonopah and Goldfield and the Las Vegas and Tonaopah. Dead in the surveyor's reports is the proposed Nevada and Utah Railroad that was to run from Tonopah to the southern littoral of the the Great Salt Lake. Closely associated, in California, was the unsinkable Senator Jones' short line, unsurveyed but actually financed, that was to run from San Bernadino over the Cajon to the foot of Surprise Canyon at the height of the fantastic Panamint boom." p. 67

(Back to Sources)

 Kelyn Roberts 2017