Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1874. Matilda Ashim picks up the pieces from disaster, while Tone pursues success on the mountain. Meanwhile, Louis Monaco starts to worry about his fellow immigrants in town.
Dear listener,
When was the last time you made a decision without all the facts at hand? And how did it feel when you put your finger down on “yes” or “no” and had to live with the consequences?
Matilda Ashim is familiar—if maybe even comfortable—with this kind of uncertainty. She’s been on the move, in one way or another, for the last decade, at least.
Even back home in South Carolina, life had been unsettled.
Matilda’s father, Wolf, sold clothing and fabrics to well-off shoppers in downtown Charleston—think Irish linens and cravats, cashmere and merino.1 The city was growing, boosted by its port and its merchants, many who made their living trading in enslaved people.2
At some point, Matilda’s husband, Simon, got involved in a business deal with her father, opening up his own clothing shop just a few doors down from Wolf’s. And then, somehow, it all fell apart. Wolf sued Simon, and the sheriff seized Simon’s store and auctioned off its contents to pay his debts.3
Then, one month later, Simon ended up in jail while he struggled to pay off another batch of creditors. He surrendered even more of his belongings in order to be released.4
So, five years after Simon paid off his debts, the Ashim family decided to leave South Carolina for a fresh start in the mining towns of Nevada.5
Since then, Matilda has sold groceries and raised her kids in mining towns like Carson City, Hamilton, and now Eureka, while Simon and his brother Solomon have sold supplies and clothing in one town after another.6
She wants a more stable life for her kids. Her two youngest live with her in Eureka, and her oldest daughter, Elizabeth, widowed just 2 years ago now, also lives in town.7
And then there is her son Baruch. At 23, Baruch is full of young, restless energy and a need to carry on the family legacy as an entrepreneur and a merchant. He doesn’t seem intimidated by the boom and bust cycles all around him, or even the up and down life of his own parents.
Of course, Baruch has always been like that.
Back in Carson City, when Baruch was 13, a man came into town. He was a reporter for the regional newspaper, and his editors asked him to cover the state legislature. This was a bold choice, though, because this man was mostly known for his satire—which really meant that he made things up.
When the news was slow or boring or just lacking a little something, this reporter would write stories that were funny, bloody, or scandalous—and usually entirely fake.8
To help readers figure out when he was spinning stories, the reporter wrote under a pen name: Mark Twain.
But now Samuel Clemens, his professional alter ego—whose job it was to write down actual facts—was facing a problem. Besides being a reporter without much experience reporting on real events, he also couldn’t read his own handwriting.
So, he hired an assistant from a local school to take notes for him: teenage Baruch Ashim. This unlikely pair worked together to cover the legislature, and after the session was up, some of the lawmakers paid Baruch three dollars each for his work. They were probably more upset to see Baruch go than to see Twain walk out the door.9
Now, Baruch, like his parents, is in the merchant business. He’s working with his father Simon and his uncle Solomon at Ashim and Brothers in Pioche, and he’s trying his hand at investing in mines.10
And he’s also developing a reputation as someone who can hold their own in these rough mining camps. When someone swindles him in a charity auction in Pioche, Baruch sends the police after the scammer, then publishes a notice in the newspaper so the whole town can see.11
Still, his mother Matilda knows, as well as anyone, how your circumstances can change out here. Sometimes all it takes is the gust of a dry wind or the circling of a dark storm over the mountains.
And so she stays vigilant, even as she lets her kids grow into this shifting, changing world.
–
When he was young, Louis Monaco would have had only a few ways out of a life in his village in southern Switzerland. One option was to head north, to richer and more prosperous places like Geneva, where he could sell chestnuts and other snacks on the street. The problem there was that most Swiss people outside of his region spoke French or German, not Italian, and especially not his mountainside version.12
Another option was to head in the other direction, where he could get work doing what hundreds of other men from his region already had: cleaning chimneys.13
So, if you didn’t want to sell chestnuts or sweep chimneys, and you couldn’t make a living farming the tough soil in the foothills at home, where did that leave you?
Three years before Monaco left for the United States, a man returned home to his village from California with money he had made as a miner. This must have been a sign to Monaco and others in town that a real future was possible by leaving Europe entirely and risking it all in the United States.14
Now, Monaco keeps in close contact with his fellow immigrants from his home province in Switzerland. And one of those immigrants is a woman named Maria-Albina Liberata Cavalli, who also migrates from the village of Verscio, where Monaco grew up. She is younger than him, 21 to his 32. They are from the same place, the same soil, and their families likely know each other back home.15
She probably migrated to the United States with her older brother George, who sells butter and cheese in San Francisco.16 Where and when she meets Louis, we don’t know. But in the early part of this year, she and Monaco get married.17 She goes by her middle name, Liberata, which means “free” or “liberated” in Italian. She’s probably named after a saint who famously became a nun rather than marry a man she did not want.18
Of course, not every immigration story is the same, even if the immigrants come from the same place. Monaco has spent hours learning and practicing English, so much that he sometimes forgets words in Italian.19 He now has a well-paid, high-skilled job, and he’s just gotten married.
Many of his fellow Swiss immigrants in Eureka have struggled.
Making charcoal takes skill, no doubt. An experienced charcoal burner can detect exactly when the charcoal is ready to be pulled from the oven simply by listening to the pop and hiss of the coals and watching the color of the smoke change.20 And many of these burners use the same knowledge that their parents and grandparents taught them in Italy or Switzerland to carry on the trade in their new home.21
But making charcoal also means living far away from the town, in remote valleys and hillsides. There, the men cluster around stone ovens and massive piles of coals, year round, in all weather, keeping the slow-burning fires alive.
So, unlike Louis Monaco, who lives and works in town, interacting with the highs and lows of mining camp life, the charcoal burners live far away from both new people and new opportunities. In many ways, they are locked into what they do, constrained by language, by expectations, by tradition, and, most importantly, by money.
The smelters and furnaces have been firing in Eureka for about four years now, and there are now at least 17 furnaces and eight smelters in town.22 All this activity means the charcoal burners are busy. But charcoal, of course, comes from fresh wood, particularly the pinyon pine, and the endless demand to feed the smelters now means there are fewer trees to cut down and burn.
Every few years, the state of Nevada produces a report about the mining conditions around the region. Even though the charcoal burners probably don’t see it, the most recent report tells them something they already know. There is much less fuel available to them, and it’s dropping every year. In fact, the report estimates that there are no usable trees left within 20 miles of Eureka, and that the burners would need to travel at least 35 miles from town to find fresh trees to harvest.23
Moving farther out from town is a problem for two reasons: one, the charcoal burners become even more isolated and pushed to the margins of town life. But the second problem is worse. The burners don’t haul the charcoal from their camps to the smelters and furnaces themselves. That’s a job for the teamsters, who pull wagons with teams of up to 10 horses or mules at a time (hence the name). These men are mostly white, English-speaking, and not Italian, and they make more money than the burners do.24
Part of the reason for this is that no one from the smelter travels all the way out to the burner camps to pay them for their charcoal. Instead, the smelter operators pay the teamsters for every load they deliver, of which a cut goes to the burners. Lately, the market price for charcoal has been around 30 cents per bushel. Out of that 30 cents, the burners might get 13 cents per bushel for themselves. And at least some of that payment isn’t even in cash or coin. Instead, the burners get paid in credit at stores run by some of the same businessmen who back the teamsters.25
Of course, the farther away the burners have to go to make charcoal, the higher their expenses. Every time they move, they have to build new kilns, dig out new camps, and haul food out to the new campsites. And their earnings always stay the same.
Louis Monaco has been paying attention to the charcoal burners—the carbonari—since he first arrived in Eureka. And now, like much of the town, he probably reads the local newspaper, which reports:
“The coal burners know that they cannot supply the demand for fuel for more than a year or two at best.”26
There’s simply not enough left to burn. Eureka sits in an austere mountain valley, certainly greener than the deserts to the south but not what anyone would call a forest. And the churn of the smelters doesn’t stop, so there’s no chance for the trees to regrow or the burners to pause production.
The mines, the furnaces, the smelters—these form the lifeline of Eureka. But to keep the town alive could mean killing the land around it and throwing the coal burners into real poverty.
Monaco, more than many people in town, understands this dilemma. He knows the charcoal burners and the people who pay them. He’s photographed the smelters and the complex machinery that takes ore out of the ground. And he’s documented the Western Shoshone, caught in the middle of all this upheaval, watching the pinyon forests that they forage be methodically destroyed.
These photographs aren’t the glamorous studio portraits or staged scenes that people want to buy. But they do capture the reality of a town that lives and dies by what it can extract, burn, and sell.
—
As a silver miner, once you’ve worked over the surface, digging up all the ore you can reach with a pick axe or a shovel, you need to get inside the guts of the mountain. If you’re an independent miner, not working for a big corporation like Eureka Consolidated or Richmond Mining, this means you’re probably digging out your own tunnels.
If you have access to dynamite, creating a tunnel isn’t so bad (providing you don’t blow yourself up or cave in the tunnel, of course). But if you’re truly working by hand, you’ll need to dig narrow, dangerous passageways deeper into the rock—passages that can collapse or flood without much warning.27 Usually the only way to see inside these chambers is the flicker of a miner’s candlestick, where a squat globule of wax dangles from the end of a long iron hook.28
These are the kinds of conditions that Tone would expect to encounter as he works on Prospect Mountain. But being a miner, even with all this danger, beats the alternative for Chinese workers on the mountain: digging trenches or doing laundry.
And so Tone will persist, despite the risk, because there is potential here on Prospect Mountain, if you know where—and how—to find it. The challenge, of course, is being able to withstand the weather, the temperature, the stagnant, wet air of the mine and the dry, thin air of the mountain. And then there is the endless monotony of digging, scraping, sorting, and searching, on and on.
Even the local newspaper agrees:
“There is no man who has the least knowledge of mining insane enough to believe that he can tell anything about a lode with ten to twenty feet excavations…If the mines of Prospect Mountain are worked this season in a systematic manner, until their true character is tested, the owners of them will have sufficient cause to exclaim, “Eureka!””29
But digging 30, 40, 50 feet into the earth is easy to say from the comfort of a newspaper editor’s office. It’s very different when you’re the one with shovel and pick axe in hand.
Tone follows the news from Prospect Mountain, and he knows there are still big ore strikes happening all around. The Industry mine produces six tons of ore each day, and one miner is making about $800 for each ton of ore he sends to be smelted.30
So, at least for now, Tone will continue digging, month after month, season after season, up on the mountain.
—
Fire lurks in the background of life in Eureka. There are always low burning flames rolling in the charcoal kilns on the outskirts of town, and the big smelter smokestacks pump out fumes year-round. Fire is dramatic, visible, and thrilling.
But it’s the opposite element that can be just as dangerous. Eureka sits in the high desert of the Great Basin, once the floor of huge, ancient glaciers.31 It’s high up enough that the tops of mountains and hills can support little clumps of green trees, but there’s still not enough moisture to loosen the brittle soil. That means, when it rains more than normal, there’s simply nowhere for the water to go. So, instead it heads down into the valleys and canyons, where anything that flows downhill can become a river in minutes.
In late July, a thunderstorm hits on the edge of town. The newspaper says later that lightning is illuminating the dark clouds about every one and a half seconds as the storm approaches, followed by thunder crashing and rattling.
About an hour into the storm, a group of men on horseback race down the three primary streets of town. They yell at anyone they can see: a flood is coming down the canyons. And, then, in a soup of dirt and mud and rainwater, the flood hits. In the aftermath, the newspaper says:
“The entire ground was covered by a terrible seething mass of waters, at least three feet in height, bearing heavy timbers, the wrecks of cabins, and even masses of rocks…
For over half an hour, the water rolled on. One house after another toppled and fell and the angry billows beat upon the wreck and dashed it to pieces. Meany houses (some of them with families inside) were lifted bodily up and carried down the might stream. The sight was magnificent in its terror.”32
Some of the largest buildings in town lose their footing and break up into the water. They float like giant shipwrecks down the desert canyon, bumping into buildings and carrying away small wooden houses in their wake.
When the floodwaters pass, it’s time to stagger around the muck and mud to see what remains.
Matilda Ashim and her family escape the flooding, but the water cascades through her store, leaving $200 of damage in its wake.33
Still, it could be worse. One man, trapped in his house, travels with the floodwaters for half a mile. The town blacksmith and the town auctioneer barely escape tumbling down into the floodwaters. And the flood carries a Union Army veteran and his wife straight out of their house and into the current. He survives, pulled from the water by some Chinese workers. She does not.
A wagon driver, a newspaper reporter, a miner, and five Chinese residents—all lost to the flood. And a saloon keeper and a carpenter, among others, still missing.34
Just a year after she relocated to Eureka from Hamilton, which nearly burned to the ground, Matilda is facing another disaster. But this isn’t the Ashim’s first flood, and this isn’t the first time they have almost lost a town. So, for now, the Ashims will rebuild, restock the store, and try to return to normal—whatever that means in this place.
—
Eureka is slowly putting itself back together after the floods two months earlier. After disasters rumble into and out of town, everyone helps dig out the streets, rebuild the broken homes and shops, and raise funds for people who lost it all. And disasters also bring people closer to their faith, to thank their creator for surviving a close call or to ponder why a benevolent god would allow such terrible things to happen.
For years, the small Jewish congregation in Eureka has not had a rabbi to lead them through services or select readings from the Hebrew Bible. After all, there aren’t many religious leaders who are eager to give up their large congregations in cities like San Francisco or St. Louis and trek out to a tiny group of worshippers in Eureka.
But this year, they have persuaded Rabbi Schwartz of San Francisco to travel to Eureka to officiate the High Holy Days, ten days in September that include Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.35 It’s a time for introspection, reflection, and hope for the year ahead. And this year, just a few months after the floods, it may be a time for healing, too.
Rabbi Schwartz is energized by the opportunity. There is no evangelical tradition in Judaism—no one is going to try to convert you—but that doesn’t mean Rabbi S. can’t invite the whole town to his services. And that’s exactly what he does. He chats with the local newspaper about the upcoming High Holy Days and, to be fair, he gets some good coverage, like this:
“In order to commemorate the event, which lasts two days, the Hebrews of Eureka and surrounding districts have secured the services of H. Schwartz, of San Francisco, to officiate the ceremonies…The Israelites of Eureka extend an invitation to all of their sect residing in the adjoining towns, and to all others who wish to witness the exercises.”36
So, as the Ashims and other Jewish residents pack into the Odd Fellow’s Hall for the rabbi’s service, they see that they aren’t the only people interested in the scene. The rabbi’s newspaper outreach seems to have worked—many of Eureka’s gentile residents have shown up, too, likely to see their first-ever Jewish service.
But Rabbi Schwartz is not, shall we say, gifted at the pulpit. He speaks in a combination of English and Yiddish that’s tough to decipher even for the Jews in the audience, and his Polish and German pronunciations don’t help. Eureka’s Jews have been ambitious, bringing a rabbi all the way from a big city to guide them through the High Holy Days, and, well, it’s fallen short. As the services continue, many of the English speakers duck out the door.37
But the small Jewish congregation is always polite. The Ashims invite the congregation and Rabbi Schwartz back to their home, where Matilda cooks an elaborate dinner and they all sing Hebrew songs. They even gift the rabbi with a gold walking cane as a token of their appreciation. He tells them that he’ll never forget the people he calls his “mountain friends.”38
Clearly, it’s time for the congregation to look elsewhere for a religious leader. For one night, though, they have each other, and Matilda will keep them all well fed.
—
It’s been a tough year for Eureka. For a week after the floods, the town would find the bodies of the missing under piles of shattered trees, rocks, and, in one case, the door of a house. Then they would return the remains back to their families, if there were families left to claim them.
Little events that would seem ordinary before a disaster now feel like small blessings. A concert at the courthouse becomes a benefit for survivors. So does a lecture from a traveler recently returned from Japan.
And, as the year comes to a close, a group of little girls take the stage in a production of “Beauty and the Beast.” The girls play many of the male roles, too, and May Ashim is one of the stars.39
Watching these young girls sing and dance and lose themselves in their parts reminds the audience of how resilient everyone is in this town. These girls are tougher than they look, tougher than their age suggests, because this place requires it. But kids also remind us that toughness can leave room for joy and spontaneity. May Ashim, as she dashes across the stage, shows that there is a difference between surviving a place and living in a place. And she, for one, has chosen to live.
If you’d like to learn more about life in the Great Basin of the United States, check out The Sagebrush Ocean by Stephen Trimble.
Works Cited:
1. The Sumter Banner, January 18, 1853
2. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Equal Justice Initiative, 2022.
3. The Charleston Mercury, September 6, 1858
4. The Charleston Mercury, October 6, 1858
5. John P. Marschall, Jews in Nevada: A History (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008)
6. Ibid.
7. Eureka Daily Sentinel, January 12, 1873
8. Territorial Enterprise, April 28-30, 1864
9. Marschall, Jews in Nevada: A History
10. The Pioche Record, September 19, 1873
11. The Pioche Record, May 27, 1874
12. Tony Quinn, “Canton Ticino And The Italian Swiss Immigration to California,” Swiss American Historical Society Review: Vol. 56, No. 1, Article 7.
13. Ibid.
14. John Paul Von Grueningen, ed. The Swiss In The United States (Madison: Swiss-American Historical Society, 1940).
15. “Maria-Albina Liberata Cavalli,” FamilySearch.
16. John Paul Von Grueningen, ed. The Swiss In The United States
17. “California, County Marriages, 1849-1957,” FamilySearch.
18. “Saint Liberata of Como,” AllSaintStories.com
19. Oral history
20. Silvio Manno, Charcoal and Blood: Italian Immigrants in Eureka, Nevada and the Fish Creek Massacre (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016), pg. 21
21. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Summer 1969
22. Lambert Molinelli, Eureka and its Resources (San Francisco: H. Keller & Co, 1879)
23. Phillip I. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War”
24. Brian Frehner. “Ethnicity and Class: The Italian Charcoal Burners’ War, 1875-1885.” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Spring 1996.
25. Earl, “Nevada’s Italian War”
26. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 19, 1874
27. Donald Hardesty. “Mining Technology in the Nineteenth Century,” Online Nevada Encyclopedia, Nevada Humanities, 2010.
28. Paul J. Bartos, “A Light In The Darkness: U.S. Mine Lamps, the Early Years—Candlesticks, Oil Lamps, and Safety Lamps,” Mining History News, Vol. 16, 2009.
29. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 15, 1874
30. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 30, 1874
31. John Van Hoesen, “Great Basin Geology,” Great Basin National Park, National Park Service, 2001.
32. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 26, 1874
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 29, 1874
36. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 11, 1874
37. Norton B. Stern, “The Jewish Community of Eureka, Nevada.” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Summer 1982.
38. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 29, 1874
39. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 23, 1874