Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1872. We’ll meet Louis Monaco, who sees beyond the surface of Nevada’s mining towns.
Dear listeners,
Have you ever tried to shift your perspective, to change the way you see the world? Art can do this for us, so can music and poetry. But sometimes we can also force a perspective shift on ourselves, usually by learning something new, or something complicated, or something challenging, that makes us realize the way we saw the world before was missing half its colors.
Louis Monaco has been living in the United States for thirteen years. In that time, he’s tried out many different lives. He’s tried being a miner in California, then in the boomtown of Virginia City in western Nevada.1 Then he’s decided he might be better off in business, and so he’s tried selling groceries like turkey and quail and fresh Lake Tahoe trout to miners and their families.2
None of these lives have been the right fit. So, one year earlier, Louis Monaco has decided on a new life: he will become a photographer.
Maybe the decision is purely economic, just like opening a grocery store or working the mines. But photography isn’t the same as buying turkeys wholesale and selling them at a markup. It’s still as much a mystery as a science to many of the people in front of the lens, and it’s fussy, temperamental, and expensive to the people behind it. Too many clouds can dampen an exposure, and a subject who can’t sit still can ruin an entire negative. Add on top of that juggling glass, chemicals, time, light, boxy cameras, and impatient customers.
But right now, there is really nothing else in the world quite like a photograph. Photographs can freeze life into moments that are reprinted and shared, moments that are instant and eerie in a way no painting can be. Americans have started to see their choices, their lives, their country reflected back to them— first in the mournful war scenes of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, then in the sweeping valleys and mountains of the West captured by Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins.
Monaco’s ambitions probably aren’t that big, at least at first. He’ll make his living as a photographer in town, capturing couples in love, newborns, family reunions—for many folks, the first time they would ever see themselves in a photograph.
And with this new trade comes a new town. It’s time to say goodbye to Virginia City and to embrace a promising new place on the map: Eureka, where he moves his photography studio.3
In the studio, he’s learning to work fast, with an extra pair of hands from his brother and assistant, Marino. The two men capture photographs in a blur of activity—they have just ten minutes to cover a glass plate with a complicated mix of chemicals, capture the image onto the plate inside the camera, then print the image from the plate onto paper soaked in egg whites and salt. Customers would wait in their store, eager to see the results, so the Monaco brothers had to be both fast and precise.4
Now this is a life that Louis Monaco can really live.
He takes out an ad in the Eureka newspaper for his grand opening: “Louis Monaco, late of Virginia, has opened the City Photograph Gallery, on South Main Street, where he is prepared to execute all styles of sun pictures.”5
For picky customers, he goes beyond the photograph that comes off the glass plate. He takes fine brushes, dips them in ink, and retouches the negative, correcting for a little too much light or a smudge on the print, sometimes maybe improving the looks of some of his paying customers.6
And when some customers want their photographs to look like the scenes outside their windows, Monaco breaks out water colors to turn a black and white photograph into color.7
A lot of photographers in towns like Eureka work where the money is, and that is portraits. A marriage, a miner who struck it rich, a business owner, a child’s birthday, yelling at kids to stay still, for God’s sake. And Monaco takes plenty of those, counting 7 seconds for a photograph of an adult and 15 seconds for a photograph of a kid.8
But Monaco is curious about the world outside of his studio, so he takes his camera into the hills and onto the streets, snapping photos of his new home as it grows. He photographs the Western Shoshone who live outside of Eureka, and he photographs the men who work the mines.9
And his camera captures the invisible lines that divide up Eureka by income and by class. This town is fueled by capital, pumped into it by corporations in New York, San Francisco, and London, looking to pull wealth from the earth until there’s none left. The owners will get rich, and maybe a few lucky folks below them will get a share, too.
But most of the people living and working in Eureka will survive on what remains after the real profit has moved out of town. They will work tough, unforgiving jobs and pay stomach-turning prices in this place where everything must be shipped in from somewhere else.
Monaco belongs to that middle class of shop owners and professionals—not bosses like the mine owners but not the miners digging in the rock, either. He’s ambitious, educated, and speaks good English.
But he also comes from a village in the far southern reaches of Switzerland, where people still speak Italian and farm rough soil in the foothills of the Alps.10 When he arrives in the US, his name is Luigi. When he arrives in California, his name is Louis.11 He knows what it feels like to leave behind a home in search of a life.
And as he spends more time in Eureka, he sees men who look and sound like him, from the same Alpine villages he called home. These men don’t live in town, like he does, but instead far on the edges, where they work a dirty and dangerous job. These are the carbonari, the Swiss and Italian charcoal burners.12 The charcoal they make fuels the massive furnaces that the mines need to separate silver, lead, and gold from ore.
Louis Monaco doesn’t want to be a photographer just for Italian Eureka, or immigrant Eureka, or wealthy Eureka. He wants to be a photographer for all of Eureka, and that means keeping his eyes open even as others are closing theirs.
But changing the way you see a place can lead others to do the same—and that kind of change isn’t always welcome from the people who benefit from things staying the same.
If you’d like to learn more about the experiences of Italian Americans in Nevada, take a look at Charcoal and Blood by Silvio Manno. A special thanks to Silvio for his assistance with this series.
Works Cited:
1. Audrey Tomaselli, “Richard Monaco,” Telegraph Hill Dwellers Oral History, 2001
2. Gold Hill Daily News, June 17, 1869
3. Tomaselli, “Richard Monaco”
4. “Introducing John B. Monaco,” The Focus, March, 1938
5. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 10, 1872
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. “Introducing John B. Monaco,” The Focus
9. Tomaselli, “Richard Monaco”
10. Tony Quinn, “Canton Ticino and the Italian Swiss Immigration to California,” Swiss American Historical Society Review, 2020
11. Gianmarco Talamona, “Storie di Fotografia il Ticino,” Edizione dello Stato del Cantone Ticino, 202012. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Summer 1969