Comstock Lode

In the desert of western Nevada, we head to the town of Fallon and go into the small, white courthouse for Churchill County. It was built in 1903 and has kept the original, classic exterior. The interior is simple, compact and modern.

This work trip with the Courthouse News Western bureau chief Chris Marshall is both to see if we can resolve access barriers in a couple county courts and also to extend some goodwill, saying thanks to the clerks who have worked with us to cover the new pleadings.

At the courthouse, the clerk is not in, but the young and outgoing woman in charge of the court’s technology comes out to give us an enthusiastic hello. The Courtyard Café is a block away. It is a pleasant and busy lunch spot, owned and run by a woman who has placed green plants around the room and serves plates — in our case, a salad and a quesadilla — in enormous portions.

Unlike some of the towns we had stopped by — Goldfield is on the verge of becoming a ghost town — Fallon is an active, lived-in and well-kept town of 10,000 souls. It started from a shack that housed a post office on a ranch and grew as Forty-niners on their way to California stopped there after crossing the Carson River. It was on the route of the old Pony Express.

From there we drive along Highway 50, going through open desert with sparse, small bushes and low mountains in the distance. We wind up a canyon road, full of green cottonwoods on the creek side and mine tailings on the other, on the way to Virginia City.

The town is the site of the famous Comstock Lode where the early swirl of molten matter that was the earth in formation had deposited a large amount of silver. At its peak, the lode pulled in 25,000 people, many hoping to strike it rich.

Now with a population of about 800 people, it is a tourist town high on a mountain. On the main drag are the 1860 offices of the Territorial Enterprise newspaper. A plaque from the Nevada Press Association is at the front of the building, dedicated to Mark Twain who first began writing under that name at the newspaper.

He describes those times in “Roughing It” where one chapter explains a little bit about the tradecraft at institutions that used to be part of life in America. He said he swapped “regulars” with other reporters in the mining town.

“Regulars are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, and inquests. Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set down among the regulars,” wrote Twain. “We had lively papers in those days.”

I look inside the windows of the newspaper’s office from the 1860s. There were a couple pieces of furniture on a dark plank floor. It is otherwise empty. Across the street nearby, a young woman working the counter at the visitor information center has only one thing to say about Twain despite his rich connection to the region.

“He was run out of town,” she says with apparent relish. She later repeats the statement, saying he had made up a story accusing a rival newspaper publisher of murder.

The most famous trial in Virginia City was the 1867 trial of a French drifter accused of killing Julia Bulette, a madam known as the “Queen of Comstock.” The Frenchman was quickly convicted and hanged.

The town is built on a hillside. So on a narrow street elevated above the main street is the Storey County courthouse. We stopped in to say thanks to the deputy clerk who helps us cover the court, and she unlocks the main courtroom so we can take a look.

We move on from the old mining town and its rich history, headed for Carson City, the state capital. Dinner is at Red’s Old 395 Grill where the rafters are crowded with wagon wheels, mounted animal heads and an actual stagecoach. The elements of an excellent dinner are friendly waiters, wood-fired salmon and fries, and a tasty Leave No Trace alpine lager from a brewery we had just walked past.

The tour of courthouses in Nevada is done, and now it’s time to get home.

Restless, I wake at three in the morning and decide to get on the road for a coffee-fueled, seven-hour drive down U.S. 395 on the lee side of California’s great mountain range. The snow-covered landscapes of the Eastern Sierra are on the right, the empty, dry plains touching Death Valley are on the left, as I descend in one long run from northern Nevada to Southern California.