So, why Nevada?

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The Biography, by Ranger Dane

When we were a kid, we wanted to be a paleontologist. We were OBSESSED with dinosaurs. Fossils were all we cared about. Our mom told us not to become one. She said we’d be spending months at a time out, in the middle of nowhere, in the desert, alone. We gave up.

When we were a bit older, our mom bought us this thing called the Robo IntelliGlobe for Christmas. It was a globe with a bunch of buttons on the base and a stylus pen. When you pressed a button on the base and tapped any landmass with the stylus, the globe would read out facts. It had some button that gave information about population. I don’t remember what exactly it would tell you. Total population, population density, something like that? We’d press that button and go around the globe tap-tap-tapping remote islands to hear it read out “zero”.

When we were a bit older, we had a subscription to National Geographic Magazine. One of the issues focused on the Trans-Siberian Railway. We read and reread that issue until it fell apart, trying to absorb every bit of information about the train. We couldn’t comprehend the distances between cities it talked about - literally. We couldn’t. They were listed in kilometers and we didn’t know how to convert that. Now that we do know how to convert them into miles, our brain isn’t having any easier of a time fully grasping what they mean.

When we were a bit older, we moved houses. Closer to the farmland surrounding our city, farther from groves of mature walnuts. Wind whipped around our neighborhood and we had to chase our baseball cap down the street on the way back from the bus. There was an empty lot behind our house, past the artificial pond, past the manicured lawns. Torn-apart plywood, twisting rebar, little colorful BB pellets and ancient fossils embedded in cracked dirt. After school, we would run out there to play. We were always in such a hurry we didn’t take the time to put on shoes.

When we were a bit older, our mom told us we’d go on a trip to Las Vegas when we turned 21. She said it’s just what you do at that age. We would see shows, get drunk, buy expensive clothing, and eat at fancy restaurants. We hated the idea. We didn’t want to do fancy things, we wanted to go play outside. (We never took the trip.)

When we were a bit older, we moved away from the town we had lived in our whole life. We didn’t take it well. Our family had to pry us off of a tiny tree we clung to. The place we moved to was very different from what we knew. Economic decline and shuttered storefronts replaced with shiny new skyscrapers and throngs of traffic. We were in Paradise and we sat in our bedroom and closed our eyes and dreamed of the day we would die somewhere else. Anywhere but there.

When we were a bit older, we were at a church camp in Florida. We’d never lived far from a major city. Our view of the night sky has always been blotted out by light pollution. We laid down and looked up at the stars and the view out there was so beautiful that we felt like we had to tell everyone we had seen God up in the sky. The counselors told us there was no way we could possibly have done that. That the very act of saying we did was offensive. We had a crisis of faith soon after.

When we were a bit older, we broke down sobbing in the entryway of our house. Our family came to ask us what was wrong, and we told them we didn’t think we believed in God anymore. Our grandma came and took us to the church she goes to and had us talk to the pastor there. He told us that what we were feeling was okay. If we wanted to leave Christianity behind, or religion as a whole behind, there was nothing wrong with that. He said that if he sees God anywhere, he sees God in what humanity has created. In the Internet, the television, the radio, the power lines.

When we were a bit older, we got really into reading Wikipedia articles for small towns. That old globe is packed up somewhere in our house in a cardboard moving box, so we read the statistics out loud to ourselves. Fingers traced the graphs of population decline, followed the highway a hundred miles out from the city. We started to care about bearing witness. Things only really die once everyone forgets their name.

When we were a bit older, we were at our high school cooking sardine pasta. People speak in hushed voices about the headlines on the news websites. There was a virus sweeping across the country. Two thousand confirmed cases. You could feel the tension in the air and you could cut it with the little plastic knife we were using to pull out the flesh of fish from a metal tin. Everyone was scared, but they told us we would be back at school after Spring Break. We leave an art project, a bottle of olive oil, and some of our family’s Tupperware. We never came back.

When we were a bit older, the country went on lockdown. When we were a bit older, we watched makeshift morgues on our television in our living room while our mom wiped down our groceries with an alcohol-based disinfectant. When we were a bit older, the world ended all around us. When we were a bit older, we started playing a video game.

The Moribund West, by Ranger Cincinnati

I feel like people come out to Nevada when they’re trying to run away from something. What it is they’re running from is different between each person. Tycho and Gatsby tell stories about how people talk about Nevada, and I’ve noticed that as a common thread in them.

When the “frontier was closing”, the changes started in the East and crept their way over to the West. People who weren’t ready for things to settle down and become stable ran away. They found themselves here. There’s a town up in northeastern Nevada. Not anywhere near Warm Springs or Nye County. The people there call their town Jarbidge.

The Nevada tourism people want you to think the frontier never ended up in Jarbidge, and I think once upon a time the residents did too. As the Gold Rush petered out and died, as miners trickled out of abandoned townsites and returned to the monotony of usual work, someone struck gold in Jarbidge.

The miners poured in, 1500 strong. All their efforts combined failed to produce the riches they had imagined. Most of them left just as quickly as they came. Four hundred stayed on and scoured every inch of the land that they could get their hands on. Those miners were shockingly successful. Jarbidge outpaced Goldfield and became the most productive gold mining area in Nevada for three years, 1919, 1920, and 1921.

And then it was done. People found less and less gold. Activity tapered off. The population declined. The gold rush at Jarbidge, Nevada was over.

There would never be another major gold rush in the United States of America again.

The end of the Jarbidge Gold Rush didn’t bring the start of “modern times” with it. In a lot of rural Nevada, time moves a bit slower than elsewhere. Many of the things that are considered useful in the big city take longer to catch on. Sometimes things that become obsolete elsewhere retain their value in the desert. The sheer remoteness of the area can serve as insulation - development can’t happen if it can’t physically GET there.

Jarbidge is, even in 2025, pretty hard to get to! The easiest route you can take to get there involves driving 17 miles on a dirt road. If you feel like taking the road less traveled, you could find yourself on 50 miles of rocky dirt roads that are maintained whenever people feel like maintaining them. Back in the 1910s, a visit to Jarbidge was even more of an adventure.

The roads to Jarbidge were so difficult to traverse that it was impossible for the automobiles of the day to make the trip. To get their mail to Rogerson, Idaho, the closest railroad town, the residents of Jarbidge relied on a man named Fred Searcy and his two-horse wagon. One snowy winter day, Searcy set out to drop off the mail and never came home. A search party found him slumped in his wagon, half-frozen, with a bullet in his head.

The case was brought to the Elko County Courthouse, where people could actually get to the trial. The charges? Murder and robbery. While the evidence collected by the search party was too circumstantial to result in a conviction, the prosecution had a trick up their sleeve. Forensic scientists from California had been brought in to take a look at the evidence. As the murderer searched the wagon for cash, he left a bloody handprint on an envelope. The handprint was linked to the suspect, sealing his fate. He was sentenced to die by the firing squad.

There would never be another stagecoach robbery again, but there would be many, many more forensic scientists analyzing bloody handprints on envelopes. Jarbidge had managed to insulate itself from the outside world just long enough to serve both as the deathbed of the stagecoach robbery and the birthplace of fingerprinting.

Isn’t that funny? This place ran away from modernity so long and so hard that once its legs burned with lactic acid and it had to rest, modernity slapped it in the face twice as hard as if it had allowed itself to let go. Letting go isn’t in its nature. Even if it wanted to, it couldn’t. Jarbidge is at the mercy of its people and the social climate they exist in. People will always want to hold on just a bit too long, just a bit too tightly.