Travel
Nevada
The Quintessential Western Town
Virginia City, Nev., is a Bonanza of Western delights.

By Alan Wilkinson

Virginia City, Nev., thrives on its reputation as a frontier town. In its heyday, when the silver and gold mines were booming, and the Virginia and Truckee Railroad’s 20 locos were hauling their precious metal 17 miles down the mountains to the U.S. Mint at Carson City, it was home to 180 millionaires, 150 saloons, and five churches. The population numbered 20,000 and the rats, they say, outnumbered the people.

A cat in full possession of its faculties fetched $20 in gold coin. Down in the diggings, however, the rodents were tolerated rather than persecuted, being left to clean up discarded scraps of food and any other organic detritus that wasn’t visible in the dark. Not only that, but if there was a cave-in, they’d swarm towards the surface, alerting the miners to the danger.

Nowadays there are fewer than a thousand permanent residents in this picturesque old mining town perched among mountains streaked here and there with brown and yellow spoil from the workings; but there is a huge number of visitors. I’d missed the highlight of the spring season, the Mountain Oyster Festival; and the Camel racing was yet to come, as was the Outhouse Race and the Chile Cookoff.

Nevertheless, the weekend I arrived the streets were packed with people of all ages participating in a biker event, and I struggled to weave a path from the Piper Opera House, where Lillie Langtry once entertained the miners, through the crowds to the offices of the Territorial Enterprise. And that’s another of the town’s attractions: that you can walk everywhere with comparative ease.

The museum there in the old Enterprise offices has the original presses, a front page dated Dec, 17, 1859, and the very desk the tyro reporter, Samuel Clemens, sat at when he spotted the name Mark Twain under a shipping column in the New Orleans Picayune. Remembering his own days as a riverboat pilot, and doubtless feeling he deserved a name like that, he appropriated it for his own use.

Among the many buildings in Virginia City that date from the ‘flush times’ are a number of sumptuous homes occupied by those lucky few who struck it rich. John Mackay (around these parts they pronounce it “Mackey”) had arrived in New York from Ireland in 1840, starting out as a shoeshine boy, then working in the shipyards before heading west to the California gold fields. It was pure hard work and application that propelled him upwards, literally and figuratively. By 1890 he was the richest man in the United States, the mines he now owned around town producing a million dollars a month.

A tour of the house reveals a series of elegant and substantial rooms furnished with the heavy beds, tables, cabinets, and chairs from the 1860s, as well as some of the original carpets. Most fascinating is the original bathroom, the first indoor facility in Virginia City, its tub and toilet supplied by a gravity-feed system.

Far grander than the Mackay place is a building that looks from a distance as though it might be a French maison de ville, with its stone basement, its four stories under a mansard roof, its windows picked out in red against a creamy façade. In fact it’s the beautifully restored Fourth Ward school, built in 1876 at a cost of $54,000, abandoned in 1936, and rescued 50 years later. You might say it reflects the innovative frontier spirit, having drinking fountains on every floor as well as flush toilets.

However, there’s a limit to how much architecture a guy can appreciate when the sound of a locomotive horn is echoing around town. You can ride behind it for a mile or two out into the mountains in an open-sided car, trundling along at maybe 10 miles an hour over a twisting track, bypassing the steel-lined mouth of an abandoned tunnel, crossing the highway and coming to a halt at the little depot at Gold Hill.

There I saw the abandoned pit-head structures dating from the mineral boom, and surprisingly, machines still at work at the entrance to the old Yellow Jacket mine, not a 100 yards from the little balcony outside my hotel bedroom. The Gold Hill Hotel dates from 1859 and still has four original guest rooms with canopied beds and claw-foot baths. Aside from a well-stocked bar whose ceiling is papered with dollar bills, and a restaurant offering a truly gourmet menu, the Gold Hill Hotel puts on a weekly entertainment series ranging from lectures to music and poetry recitals, as well as the occasional theatrical production. You can probably “do” Virginia City in a day, but no way will you do it justice.

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