Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1873. Charlie is born into an uncertain moment for the Western Shoshone, while Thomas Detter confronts challenges to his family and the town of Eureka itself.
Dear listener,
Have you ever thought about the ways in which the world seems to strive for balance? How new growth springs up after a hard winter? How a forest blooms after a fire?
Since we last visited the Newe in the hillsides and valleys outside of Eureka, Charlie is now one year old.
His mother, the woman under the huge sky that we met in our first dispatch, and her band have been living in a place which is changing fast.
Her tribe now has a new name given to them by white arrivals—the Western Shoshone—and a new treaty that tells them where they can live and what they can do with their land.
And all around them, in the hillsides of pinyon trees where they harvest pine nuts and purple sage, in the valleys where they pick groundnuts and yampah roots, there are now new arrivals—mostly white, mostly men—and the money and towns and roads that come with them. The newcomers call it progress, but there is less food for the Newe to eat and, when the weather changes and it’s time to move, there is less land for them to roam.
Charlie’s father, he’s different, too. We know that he is not Newe, not Western Shoshone. We know that he’s from somewhere else—the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland—and that he’s tall, much taller and bigger than the Newe people.1 And that’s about all we know.
But even those facts can help us make some guesses. Her band of Newe, who called the hilly outskirts of Eureka home, live in the same hillsides and valleys where Swiss and Italian men now work. The men cut down and burn the pinyon pines that the Newe forage for pine nuts.2 They turn that wood into charcoal for the big furnaces that transform ore from the mines into valuable commodities like silver and gold.
Making charcoal is rough, full of choking smoke and dangerous piles of burning coals that have to be watched, day and night. And the Swiss and Italian men who do this job—the carbonari—aren’t all that welcome in town, where they smell like smoke and fire and struggle to speak English. So, instead, they live in huts and houses dug into the ground, on the same land as her people.3
How they met, how they communicated, even how long they knew each other, we don’t know. Maybe she was harvesting pine nuts from the same grove he was cutting down and burning, or maybe she sold him and his colleagues food that she had foraged. Maybe she was curious, or tired, or in love.
However they met, however she felt, we do know what happened next: one year ago, she died giving birth to her son, Charlie.4
Her people buried her in the willows, where they had buried their loved ones before her, on the edge of the town that was becoming Eureka.5
From that point on, we don’t know what became of Charlie’s father, the Swiss carbonari. So here we are, with Charlie’s grandmother raising him among the tight group of family that made up his mother’s band.
Little by little, the Newe are settling down, becoming farmers or raising livestock. But Charlie’s family still follows the old ways. In the warm months, they live in the hillsides outside of Eureka, where they hunt antelope and forage for pine nuts, at least as many as they can get in the groves that haven’t been cut down by men like Charlie’s father. In the winter, they head south, to lower canyons where they can store food and gather water from snow melt, building shelters and staying warm.6
But the old ways don’t truly protect Charlie and his family from the outside world. There is only so much that trusted patterns and ancient cycles can do for his band in a place that’s changing so fast.
The Newe who still migrate with the seasons, like Charlie’s band, need to eat, and that means they need to hunt. There are strong hunters in the band who can run after deer, chasing them down for the kill.7 But the white arrivals have also brought guns, and that makes hunting faster and easier.
Of course, seeing the Newe with guns—even old cast-off pistols and rifles—makes white settlers in towns like Eureka nervous.8 And they find out quickly what can happen when the anxiety spikes in town.
It’s a spring morning, Charlie is safe with his grandmother, probably still in their winter camp. A group of Newe are searching for game again as the land thaws out.
Two Newe men are climbing the rocks of a canyon, chasing after a squirrel. They have five bullets in their pistol. One of them fires off a few shots, and, in the distance, a white man runs away through the rocks.
The man is a mining engineer named C.A. Stanley, and one of the bullets from the Newe gun has just passed through the top of his hat. As he runs away, he swears he hears five more shots echoing behind him.
While the Newe men continue their hunt, unaware they’ve shot at anyone at all, the fear machine cranks into gear back in Eureka. Stanley runs back to town and tells the sheriff that he thinks armed Indians are on the attack.9 Somewhere, as word spreads through the town, the story grows, and now, the newspaper reports:
“Early in the morning word came to town that 200 Shoshone warriors were entrenched in the lava beds of New York Canyon…War talk was all the rage.”10
The sheriff gathers a group to ride out of town to the site of the shooting. There’s no army to be found, just a Newe woman quietly harvesting pine nuts. They take her into custody anyway until they sort out the truth—that the 200 warriors were, in fact, two Newe men with a five-shot pistol hunting for squirrels.11
And this is the world in which Charlie is growing up.
In town, Thomas Detter is also trying to protect his family from something he can’t see, touch, or control.
After nearly a decade on the road from camp to camp, Detter and his wife Caroline are now business owners, property owners, and parents to their 8-year-old son. Detter has published a book and continues writing his letters about life and justice and equality for the San Francisco Elevator and the Pacific Appeal and their readers across the west.
But there’s a little blemish in the picture. Caroline’s health is declining, and no one seems to know why. She needs better medical care than she can find in Eureka, so she is traveling back to San Francisco, leaving Detter and their son Robert behind.12
That leaves Detter doubling down on his business, likely to cover her medical bills. He runs even more ads for his tonics in the local newspaper, promising to cure everything from syphilis to foot pain to hemorrhoids. And he takes over a room in an old bank and converts it into a sort of frontier spa, which he calls his “bathing department.”13
He also comes up with a jaunty slogan for his treatments:
“After you have tried them all, give me a call.”14
Beneath the marketing, though, Detter is worried. In his letters to the Pacific Appeal, he writes about the upcoming midterm elections, but it’s almost as though he’s writing about himself and his sick wife far away in San Francisco.
“Are not the responsibilities of the colored man to provide and take care of his family as great as other men? Are not his hopes as big, his pride no less?”15
He wraps up the letter with some encouragement for his readers, which sounds close to a plea.
“Surrender not a single right.”
He writes about those early days that he and Caroline shared in California when it still felt like this new land could lead to a new chance or a new start. Here’s what he wrote about the clear, sunny day when he first sailed into San Francisco harbor, and how he watched the hills roll into view.
“We beheld the “City of Hills” far in the distance. Its stately edifices and towering domes lent enchantment to the view, which the sunlight of an autumn sun afforded. To our right the far off hills were dressed in the beauties of Nature; dotted with herds of browsing cattle, which indeed presented a lovely scene to the eye of the new adventurer as well as to the romantic.”16
California had only been a state for 2 years when Detter arrived, and you could still feel the rough edges in San Francisco, in the red light district nicknamed the Barbary Coast and beyond. It was a fresh place on the map, still friendly to miners and sex workers and hustlers.17
But it was also a place where a new idea of what it meant to be American might be able to grow.
There were no public schools that accepted Black children in the city and only one Black church, where Detter knew Reverend John Jamison Moore preached.18 Moore had escaped slavery when he was 15, became a famous preacher in Philadelphia, then traveled to California to help spread the gospel.
But progress was slow. California was frustrating for Detter, who thought that the West might be more welcoming than the old, calcified East. You can hear the worn-out exhale in his letters:
“We often petitioned for simple justice. The Democracy, then in power…closed their eyes to our sufferings.”19
This new blank spot on the American map felt all too familiar. Black residents in California couldn’t vote, couldn’t serve on juries, and couldn’t testify in court against white defendants.20
So, Detter and his fellow Black Californians started talking to each other.
Detter would meet and talk about law and justice with men like Mifflin Gibbs, who had once shared a stage with Frederick Douglass and now ran a newspaper in California, or Jeremiah Sanderson, who had headed west from Massachusetts for a better life in California, only to find that he had to fight for it.21
These were the kind of men who, when they hit roadblocks because they were Black, leaned towards the problem. Over time, they started businesses and schools and publications in their adopted state.
Eventually, this group started what they called the California Colored Convention. The idea was simple but effective: each year, Black men from the different counties of California would gather together in one place to discuss, debate, and make plans for change.22
It was at the first two Conventions where Detter started to find his voice as a writer. Here’s Detter during the second Convention, in 1856, where he represented Sacramento County, taking on the restrictions that prevented Black witnesses testifying against white defendants in state courts:
“I may see the assassin plunge his dagger to the vitals of my neighbor, yet, in the eyes of the law, I see it not. I may overhear the robber or incendiary planning the injury or the utter ruin of my fellow citizen, and yet, in the judgement of the law, I hear it not. The robbery may follow, the conflagration may do its work, and the author of the evil may go unpunished, because only a colored man saw the act or heard the plot.”23
Detter closed out his argument by calling on an idea that was so fundamental yet must have felt radical: that the legal system only worked properly when it worked for everyone.
“Under these circumstances who are really injured and losers by the law? It deprives colored men from testifying in cases where white persons are parties. Is it not evident that the white citizen is an equal sufferer with us? When will the people of this State learn that justice to the colored man is justice to themselves?”
So, Thomas Detter was becoming a writer. He got plenty of practice at the pulpit as a preacher, too, serving a congregation in Sacramento.24 And, somewhere along the way, he met Caroline, who had arrived in San Francisco from the East, just like he had, into those chaotic but hypnotic San Francisco streets. He was building a life for himself on the West Coast.
Of course, every writer knows the moment when a story takes an unexpected turn. For Detter, his story turned just two years after he delivered his talk at the second Colored Convention. A fire swept through Sacramento and, as the Sacramento Bee reported:
“We are assured that the colored preacher—Thomas Detter—who was burned out at the fire Sunday morning is in great distress, having lost everything he had in the world, barely escaping from the fire with his life.”25
Add to that, some of Detter’s friends from the Convention had started to rethink their belief that change was likely in California or maybe in the US at all. Mifflin Gibbs and other members of the Convention had even left for Canada, exhausted by the fight.26
Through it all, though, Detter had Caroline, and they got married two years after the fire nearly chased him out of Sacramento. It was the same year that Abraham Lincoln was elected president and that South Carolina seceded from the Union.
Within three years, the couple had left California. They were off to their first of at least 7 mining towns before they finally ended up in Eureka.
Living in these boom and bust towns was unpredictable, as Detter knew all too well.
Just two years earlier, Chicago nearly burned to the ground, and the news made it all the way to the newspapers in Eureka.27
If a city the size of Chicago, full of 300,000 people, could be hit so hard by fire, little Eureka, full of wooden buildings and dry hillsides, wouldn’t stand a chance.
An editorial in the local newspaper basically pleaded for citizens to fix up their faulty chimneys and protect their houses.
“Every day we hear of fires resulting from carelessness. Why won’t people remedy this thing? Stove-pipe is only six bits a joint, and wire very cheap. Buy some and save the town from burning.”28
Since then, there’s been no shortage of volunteers to keep the town safe—so many, in fact, that Eureka now has two fire companies, one which handles the fire hoses and one in charge of the ladders they need to climb burning buildings and the long metal hooks they need to tear those buildings down.29
Eureka loves its fire companies. In a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, there’s a little bit of drama and flourish when the fire crews show up in their matching uniforms, with their leather belts and helmets.
The men on the fire crews—and it’s all men—aren’t professional firefighters. There’s an attorney, a few miners, and the manager of the local Pioneer Restaurant. And there’s businessmen like Joseph Tognini, an immigrant from Switzerland, who owns a saloon and works with the carbonari on the edges of town.30
By now, smoke and fire have become part of life in Eureka. There are now 17 furnaces that churn through the ore from the mines and pump out lead-tinged haze into the entire valley.31 When the wind shifts, travelers jokingly call the town “Pittsburgh of the West.”32 It’s a strange sight to wander the streets of this place and feel like, for a moment, you’re living in some big city in the center of heavy industry instead of a town of just a few thousand people in the high desert.
Keeping all those furnaces burning requires a constant stream of charcoal, even more smoke and fire. The carbonari keep big, sooty piles of charcoal burning 24/7 in the hills on the edge of town.
And, of course, when the winter rolls in, every resident of Eureka gathers by their leaky stoves, trying to stay warm. Sometimes locals even take turns watching each other’s chimneys for loose sparks that can send their flimsy wooden homes up in a blaze.33
No one wants a repeat of Chicago here, and nerves are on edge.
As the fires rage westward, from Chicago to San Francisco to Sacramento to Nevada, some old-timers say that it’s the work of God, still angry over the Civil War.
One old miner tells the local newspaper:
“You see, they threw Greek fire into Charleston, the finest city in the world, now they are getting their pay for it. I tell you it is God. I used to think He left the United States, but I take it back.”34
We all confront our lives in different ways. Charlie is learning the old ways, and Thomas Detter is learning to live as a single father.
But conditions change quickly here in the high desert, even when you’re expecting them.
If you’d like to learn more about the overlooked history of native people in the United States, check out The Rediscovery of America by the historian Ned Blackhawk.
Works Cited:
1. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories, 1993
2. William Falk, “Great Basin Pinyon-Juniper Forests Under Threat,” Earth Island Journal, December 24, 2015
3. Silvio Manno, Charcoal and Blood: Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada and the Fish Creek Massacre (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016), pg. 34
4. Robert D. McCracken, “Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pg. 21
9. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 7, 1873
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Elmer Rusco, Good Time Coming?: Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), pg. 161
13. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 25, 1873
14. Eureka Daily Sentinel, January 3, 1873
15. Pacific Appeal, November 8, 1873
16. Pacific Appeal, November 26, 1870
17. Gary Kamiya, “Barbary Coast’s red light reputation drew throngs to San Francisco,” San Francisco Examiner, July 5, 2023
18. Pacific Appeal, November 26, 1870
19. Ibid.
20. Elmer Rusco, Good Time Coming?, pg. 7
21. Herbert G. Ruffin II, “The Conventions of Colored Citizens of the State of California (1855-1865),” BlackPast.org, February 4, 2009
22. Ibid.
23. Thomas Detter, Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California, Held in the City of Sacramento, December 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th (Cambridge: Harvard University Rare Books and Manuscripts), December 9-12, 1856. Courtesy of the University of Detroit Mercy Black Abolitionist Archive
24. Elmer Rusco, Good Time Coming?, pg. 155
25. Sacramento Bee, February 22, 1858
26. Angela Reiniche, “Mifflin W. Gibbs,” California National Historic Trail, National Park Service, 2016-2018
27. Eureka Daily Sentinel, October 17, 1871
28. Eureka Daily Sentinel, October 13, 1871
29. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 11, 1873
30. Ibid.
31. “Eureka Smelter,” United States Environmental Protection Agency
32. “Eureka Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory, United States Department of the Interior
33. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 28, 1873
34. Eureka Daily Sentinel, October 21, 1871