Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1877. Charlie and his band find moments of joy, while Thomas Detter grapples with a controversial election. Matilda Ashim makes a big decision, while Louis Monaco and Tone learn who really has influence and control in town.
Dear listener,
When was the last time you felt you had real power over others? And how did you use that power? Did you harm? Did you help?
This year, in this town and in this country, the people with power begin to show their faces to those who know where to look.
But first, we go back to the edges of town.
When white folks in Eureka write about the Shoshone in newspapers and books, they usually write one of two stories. One story talks about the Shoshone who wander into town and are taken in by booze and vice. The other story is about the Shoshone who live outside of town, who practice old traditions in remote places.
But one story about Shoshone life that the newspapers almost always miss is what they do for fun. If you only read the newspapers, you would think the bands were full of silent men and timid women, but in fact, the Shoshone know how to have a good time—away from the eyes of these new white arrivals.
Because the bands live far apart from each other, their gatherings happen mostly at the change of seasons or during harvest time. And when the bands do get together, the celebrations are memorable.
Dancing and singing can go on all night, until the first light of the morning, when the games will start. Maybe some foot races or horse races, and, of course, hand games, a fast-paced competition where teams try to guess which hand is holding sticks or bones.1
This was a tradition that went all the way back to ancient times, when Coyote would get so invested in winning the hand game that he would bet some of his most prized possessions, from his pine nuts to his own life. One time, he won a bunch of pine nuts in a hand game, but only a bird with a long tongue could retrieve them from the pine cone. The bird flew with the nuts off to the region that is now Eureka, which accounts for all the big pinyon pine groves all around.2
When the pine nut harvest is good, the Shoshone celebrate with all-night dancing and singing, followed by long rounds of hand games, often with a wager. Some of the bands have picked up poker from the white settlers, and they might play a few rounds at these gatherings, too.3
Little Charlie is certainly around to watch these festivities, although he probably can’t stay awake all night and join in the games in the morning like his older relatives can.
Still, there’s likely some faint trace that these gatherings leave on Charlie’s sense of himself, some awareness that even in this endless land, where you can go miles and never see another person, that there is always camaraderie to be found. Here, there are always people who will take you in, make sure you’re fed and clothed and safe, and who will join up with you to have a little fun as you take on the world.
—
February is full of sharp and brittle air and bright sun in Eureka. Patchy snow sinks into the mountainsides and the valleys around town. This is usually the time of year when activity slows down, when the miners wait for the ground to thaw and locals wait for the high desert cold to pass.
But this year, it’s all activity in the Ashim house. The Jewish congregation, now less than a year old, receives news that they’ve had their application to join a national Jewish union accepted. This makes them the first congregation from either Nevada or California to get this recognition on a national level. For such a tiny group from little Eureka to get the nod before the far bigger Jewish communities in San Francisco and other Western cities do is a surprise and a thrill.4
And Matilda, as usual, is busy. She’s found a good customer base for her grocery store, and that means juggling imports from all over the country: rolls from California and butter from the East, produce from Utah, fresh trout and oysters from around the west, and tubs of dried fruit, nuts, and candy.5
For years, Matilda has operated her businesses alongside her husband, Simon, and his brother Solomon. The two brothers have juggled stores in mining towns across northern Nevada, and they’ve done well. But Matilda has never been able to truly run a business on her own because, up to this point, whatever money she did make has been the property of her husband. The same is true of her children—if she and Simon disagree over some aspect of raising their kids, his decision will win in court. And, like all women in the United States, Matilda can’t vote or run for office.6
But Matilda has always worked, in a way that many women in Eureka, especially wealthier, whiter, and higher-class women, do not. Many people in town would consider a proper wife and mother to be someone who cares for their children, manages their house, and keeps to themselves. At most, women who really need to work can become seamstresses, teachers, or laundry washers.7 Matilda has never followed those expectations. She’s advertised her groceries, her cooking, her stores in one town after another. Working is a source of pride for her, not a source of shame.
She now has the opportunity to go one step further, and she seizes it. She applies to become a sole trader, meaning that she alone will be responsible for running her own business. As required, she places a notice in the local newspaper, announcing that she is applying to run her store in Eureka. And she goes beyond that, too, applying to buy and sell property and purchase the merchandise she needs for her store. It’s ambitious—and it might lead some folks in town to wonder why her husband Simon is agreeing to it. But Simon never objects, at least not publicly, and Matilda follows through with her plan.8
Having this freedom to succeed or fail on her own is new for Matilda. But she’s become accustomed to taking risks and placing bets. Some, like the very towns in which she lives, fail. Others, like Eureka, seem to succeed, at least for now.
—
A month later, Thomas Detter, like the rest of Eureka, is reading the newspaper.
And here’s what it says.
“The country breathes a long sigh of relief over the settlement of the much vexed presidential question….The moderation of the democracy, under the circumstances, is commendable. There are plenty of desperate politicians who would have been glad to have prolonged the contest, and plunged the country into anarchy in furtherance of their selfish schemes, but the sober element of both parties frowned on all such schemers and demanded a settlement.”9
The process to get to this settlement is confusing, it’s complicated, and it involves a lot of long nights on the floor of the Senate. So, let’s cut straight to the conclusion: after five months of uncertainty around who would be the next US president, a commission of seven Democrats and eight Republicans determine that Rutherford Hayes, the Republican candidate, will take office.10
Getting to this agreement has been messy. While the Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, stories quickly swirled of voter intimidation and fraud, particularly in Southern states.11
Ultimately, after months of debate and an investigation by the commission, Hayes wins the crucial electoral votes that put him over the top. But the fact Tilden had gone into the race needing just a single electoral vote to win and ultimately loses is still a sore point for many voters. They think a deal must have been cut for Hayes to win, and they started calling him “Rutherfraud” as a fun little nickname.12
Whether a secret deal was cut for Hayes to win or not, Thomas Detter has an idea of what’s ahead. All he has to do is read the next few lines in the newspaper coverage:
“It is also rumored that there will be a new departure in reference to the Southern policy of the Administration.”13
–
If you had to find a president that reflects the mixed messages of the United States in this year 1877, Rutherford Hayes is probably your perfect candidate.
First off, he’s from Ohio, once a free state that bordered the South. Coming up the ranks as an attorney, some of his clients were enslaved people trying to evade the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it almost impossible to escape slavery.
He signs up for the Union army, where he’s wounded in action. His wife is a strong abolitionist. And as governor of Ohio, he pushes to allow Black residents to vote, with little success.14
But now, as president, Hayes faces a decision. He knows that he barely won the election and that the national mood is sour and tired and the economy is shaky. Whatever progress the Southern states have made in electing black officials is mostly gone. White Southern lawmakers keep putting up barriers to shut Black voters out. And government troops that once enforced federal law have mostly gone home or off to fight Indians out west.15
And so, on April 4th, Thomas Detter will read the news in the town newspaper, the Eureka Daily Sentinel. First, of course, he’ll have to flip past a page of ads for a sewing machine, a tobacco store, and Pepi Steler’s watch repair business. He’ll probably be annoyed to see two competing barber shops with their ads on the front page—including one that advertises “a first-class physiognomical haircut or an ecstatic shave,” whatever that means.
But eventually, he’ll get to a letter from President Hayes, reprinted on page two, where the president announces that he’s withdrawing federal troops from South Carolina. The president writes:
“I feel assured that no resort to violence is contemplated in that quarter, but that on the contrary the questions are to be settled solely by such peaceful remedies as the Constitution and law of the State provides.”16
Hayes writes virtually the same letter—also printed on page two of the Daily Sentinel—about 18 days later announcing that he’s also withdrawing troops from Louisiana.17
And with that, Rutherford Hayes removes the final guardrails of Reconstruction from the Southern states. The two Republican governors of Louisiana and South Carolina—the last two left in the South—quickly leave office. And, for all intents and purposes, Reconstruction is done.18
This is exactly the kind of moment you’d expect Thomas Detter to fire off a letter to the San Francisco Elevator or the Pacific Appeal, something urgent and passionate, calling on people to challenge the status quo.
But, as far as we know, he doesn’t. Maybe he’s busy with his bathing and barber shop and being a new husband. Or maybe this latest turn feels like a betrayal by the party he has supported for so long. In some ways, it’s the worst kind of betrayal—the kind you can see coming but still can’t stop.
—
The summer rolls into Eureka and Matilda Ashim, as always, is busy. The spring has been full of orders at the grocery store. She’s keeping her shelves stocked with Russian caviar, German sausage, pickled herring, tinned sardines, ham, bacon, and cheese from California. She sells sheep tongues and pig feet, as well as good quality chocolate and ginger snaps.19
As the weather dries out, so do the streets of town, and with every footstep and horse hoof comes a little cloud of red and brown dust. To keep these little whirls from caking the buildings and the locals in dirt, the town runs a cart with a water tank down Main Street, which slowly sprays the road and keeps the dirt in place. Always looking for a new opportunity, Solomon Ashim spots the sprinkler cart and pays for the advertising space on the side as a slow, lumbering billboard through the center of town. Now, in case there’s any doubt, the Ashim brothers have moving proof that they run one of the most successful businesses in the county.20
But selling groceries and buying ad space still comes secondary to everything that the Ashims—that the whole Jewish community—has accomplished. Earlier this year, they threw their second ball for the town, this one to celebrate the festival of Purim.21 If they keep the events going at this rate, the Jewish congregation of Eureka will quickly become one of the town’s biggest party promoters.
In July, a man, probably wearing a black jacket and a white tie, steps off a train onto the rail platform outside of Eureka at 11 o’clock at night. He’s been traveling for at least 12 hours, mostly thanks to the slow traffic on the little rail line that connects Eureka to the nearest Union Pacific stop, 80 miles away.
Though you wouldn’t know it from his late arrival and the three people waiting for him, this is one of the more important people to visit Eureka this year, or maybe this decade. This is Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the same Cincinnati rabbi that inspired the Eureka Jewish congregation in the first place.22
He’s ended up here, in this town with barely 100 Jewish residents, because he’s touring the west, and, maybe out of sympathy or curiosity, he’s agreed to visit the first—and only—Jewish congregation in Nevada. Since the town doesn’t have a synagogue, the local Methodist reverend has lent him his church for a one-night-only lecture.23 Even the local newspaper notes the arrival of the “learned and eloquent Israelite” from Cincinnati.24
But before the lecture, Rabbi Wise has agreed to officiate a wedding. Joe Hausman, a German gunsmith in town, is marrying a Jewish woman—and, for probably the first time in the history of the state, he’s converting to Judaism to be with her. Matilda and Simon offer up their house for the wedding and serve the whole party—Rabbi Wise included—cake and wine to celebrate.25
As she sorts out plates and fills glasses, Matilda must wonder about the odds that the country’s most famous Jewish leader would be drinking wine and eating cake in her home, in this town, of all places.
In the book of Leviticus in the Torah, God tells the Jews: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”26
For years, the Ashims have left towns behind, starting over as the foreigners each time. But this place feels different. It’s almost—almost—as though they can make plans to stay.
—
Most people in Eureka know Louis Monaco. They visit his studio for their portraits, and they wonder how he works with these complex cameras and glass plates and chemical mixtures. He’s become a part of the place, as much as the Ashim family or Thomas Detter have.
But Louis Monaco, while loved around town, doesn’t have real power. He doesn’t own a mine, or keep the furnaces burning, or employ the locals. If he left town, people would be sorry to see him go, certainly, but a new photographer would come along soon enough.
It’s different with men like Joseph Tognini and John Torre. Like Monaco, they’re also Italian-speaking immigrants. Like Monaco, they also stay in close contact with the charcoal burners. But where Monaco sees the burners as desperate people working a harsh job on tough land, Tognini and Torre see a labor force.
It’s hard to say exactly what these two men do, because they do so many different things. They each own saloons in town, and Torre owns a store and once ran a hotel.27
But they make most of their money working as what the locals call “charcoal ranchers” and teamsters. They own all the means of charcoal production. First, they own some of the land on which the burners harvest trees. When it comes time to move the charcoal to the smelters, they also own the wagons and horses that haul it. And, finally, when they pay the burners, some of that payment is in credit to stores and businesses that they or their friends also own. It’s a perfect circle, ensuring they make money from every step in the charcoal chain.28
And of course, Tognini, Torre, and other teamsters own one other massive piece: they hold the coal contracts directly with the smelters. The two largest mining companies in town, Eureka Consolidated and Richmond Mining, negotiate with these men on how much they will pay for the charcoal and the hauling.29 The burners have no voice in the conversation at all.
Tognini mostly keeps a low profile, but Torre likes to be seen around town. He’s a large man who wears bold, bulky overcoats, which has given him the nickname “the Big Russian.”30 It’s a name he likes and uses himself, because it connotes power and maybe a little bit of tzar-like brutality.31 This is a man who doesn’t mind drawing some attention to himself, like when he plays the tuba at town dances, a big man making a big noise.32
Louis Monaco is also very much a capitalist. He buys and sells property, he runs a successful business, and he employs members of his family to work under him. He lives in a place that depends on the influx and outflow of money. But he’s also thinking about the human toll of all of this churning and burning in the mines and furnaces and smelters, and it’s bothering him.
His hero is a man named Guiseppe Garibaldi. 16 years earlier, Garibaldi had been a leader in reuniting 8 squabbling Italian states into a single kingdom. Monaco had grown up, across the border in Switzerland, following Garibaldi’s adventures. The man seemed to have been everywhere—fighting alongside liberal revolutionaries in Brazil and Uruguay, promoting democracy on the docks of New York and England, and then finally returning home to help reunite his country for the first time since the fall of Rome.33
Monaco still believes in Garibaldi’s idea that there is a human need to help people less than ourselves, a goal that goes beyond our short-term gain, profits, and wealth. If Garibaldi could lead revolutions across continents, then Monaco could certainly be a voice for the lesser people in a town like Eureka.
It would be risky, going against the men who run this town, men like Joseph Tognini and John Torre. Monaco is married now, and he runs a business—and this town is small and full of gossip. If you offend someone or cut into their profits, retribution doesn’t always take place within the law.
At the same time, though, what good comes without risk, after all? It’s risk that has gotten him here, risk that has helped him open his studio and meet his wife and now, provide a new life for his younger brother. Maybe another, calculated risk for the good of his people would be worth taking.
—
Eureka is awash in booze. You can find a drink in every saloon and nearly every restaurant in town. The newspaper is jammed full of ads for alcohol: bourbon, brandy, whiskey, wine. There’s a saloon where your beer travels from a barrel in the basement directly into your glass and still stays cold.34
But for most of its history, Eureka has not been a town where taking a drug (outside of alcohol, of course) is common. In fact, the idea of a drug that you would take to escape your worries or disassociate for a while is new. Up until now, doctors have mainly controlled the supply of drugs, and used them mostly for pain. The king of all painkillers—the one that doctors turn to for gunshots and surgery and other maladies—is opium.35
Recently, though, habits are starting to change around town.
There’s a new trend, particularly among young white folks, of smoking opium for pleasure. Starting last year, the depressed, the troubled, and the chasers of thrills in town all have chosen opium as their drug of choice.
Smoking the drug can produce a fast, warm glow, a rush of pleasure in the brain, and the sudden relief of pain. Smokers often fall asleep as their breathing slows. But, because the drug hits the brain and body so quickly, it’s easy for smokers to tip over into unconsciousness, and, sometimes, never wake up.36
At first, the stories start to come from other, bigger towns like Virginia City, which reports:
“Yesterday afternoon one of the habitual opium smokers—a young white man—was seized with illness in a den in Chinatown, and for some time it was thought he would die there. He was finally taken up town, by some of his friends…While he was being taken up, groups of white opium smokers were coming down to indulge in the same hideous vice which had nearly killed…one of their companions.”37
But cases of white men and women smoking opium have started to pop up in Eureka, too. After a few cases of smokers getting into scrapes around town, the local newspaper has had enough. They write:
“There are a great many young sprigs in Eureka and some, we regret to say, of older growth, who have within the last few months endeavored to create an unhealthy fashion of smoking opium…We know by name at least twenty—some, alas, of the gentler sex…who have succumbed occasionally or habitually to the fascinations of the poppy.
We admit the charm of the subtle intoxication when the surroundings are such as to allure the senses…But in Eureka! Let us draw a picture from life of the surroundings of the devotee of opium in a frontier town.
We approach over a path floored with garbage and vile household refuse…We are ushered into an inner apartment where the victims are inhaling their fatal poison…On two adjacent sides of the room are arranged bunks of unpainted wood, furnished with bedding, whose hue and texture time and filth have long since obliterated…
He fills the oft-used, dirty pipe with a loathsome fluid composed of opium and other noxious drugs, inhales the first puff himself to insure it being all right and then turns it over to this poppy drunkard who…inhales pipe after pipe of the curse until soul and senses alike are steeped in forgetfulness, or in what to his feeble soul, may seem pleasure.”38
The locals know just who to blame for the zombified white men and women who chase the pipe. As is often the case, the town says it’s all the fault of the Chinese.
This time, they aren’t totally wrong, but they are missing much of what makes the story of opium so complicated.
Opium had been in China for centuries and had mostly been used as medicine. But as the country opened up to the outside world, British merchants started importing a lot more of the drug into China, and it’s stuck around ever since.
Various Chinese rulers have tried to ban the drug over the years, but this has always been a losing battle.39
For almost two decades, the East India Company, a British corporation, roamed across Asia trading between India, China, and Britain. They were the biggest exporter of tea from China to Britain, and, for a while, they were also the biggest importer of opium into China.40
The Chinese tried to resist the opium trade. Chinese emperors even fought two wars over the stuff, but they lost both times. By the time Tone was growing up in China, people who could afford it used opium to treat pain, to unwind, and to deal with stress and anxiety. And in a country as unsettled and turbulent as China, there was plenty of stress and anxiety to go around.
So, yes, Chinese workers do continue their opium smoking habit in the United States, and plenty of Americans do make their way into opium dens in San Francisco, New York, and even little Eureka to try out the drug.41
But even now, opium is also a common ingredient in medicine, and it shows up in the tinctures and powders and potions that salesmen sell across the country. Doctors don’t always understand its potency or its addictiveness. Women are particularly likely to become addicted because doctors use opium to treat cramps and pelvic pain.42
As with most controversies in life, the opium scare is more complicated than it appears.
Even up on the mountain, Tone likely hears the news when a state senator from Eureka pushes through a ban on opium sales across the state. Now, only pharmacists can sell the drug, and even then, only with a doctor’s prescription.43
As long as the opium use stayed within the Chinese workers, the town had kept quiet. But now, with white Americans trying out the pipe, it appears that it’s time to act.
And so the newspaper now reports:
“Until very recently the smoking of opium in this country was confined strictly to the Chinese. It is now indulged in extensively by the whites, and a careful estimate shows that now one-third of the users of the drug are Caucasian…There are at present in the Chinese quarter of the town seven regularly established places of this kind….About sixty white men and women, one negro, and two Mexicans are frequenters of these places, some of whom consume more in their daily smoke than the Chinese.”44
Growing up in China and working on the western edge of the US, Tone has almost certainly been around opium smokers. Maybe he’s turned to the pipe himself to take the edge off a long day. But up on the mountain, he’s mostly removed from the little dramas that play out in Chinatown and which end up in the local newspapers. He’s here to work, and to steer clear of the messiness of the Eureka streets. And so far, at least, he’s been able to do just that.
If you’d like to learn more about the history of opium and other drugs in American life, check out Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America by David T. Courtwright. And a special thanks to Mike Popovitch for sharing his insights into Eureka’s Italian and Chinese histories.
Works Cited:
1. Norm Cavanaugh, “Naomi Mason Oral History,” Great Basin Indian Archive, April 23, 2014.
2. Joe Ducette, “Clara Woodson & Gracie Begay Oral History,” Great Basin Indian Archive, March 16, 2006.
3. Eureka Daily Sentinel, October 10, 1878
4. John P. Marschall, Jews in Nevada: A History (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008)
5. Eureka Daily Sentinel, February 11, 1877
6. Alicia Barber and ZoAnn Campana, “Historic Context for Suffrage and Women’s Rights in Nevada,” Nevada State Historic Preservation Office, November 2021.
7. Ibid.
8. Eureka Daily Sentinel, February 14, 1877
9. Eureka Daily Sentinel, March 3, 1877
10. “Frequently Asked Questions About the Disputed Election of 1876,” Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center
11. Michael F. Holt, “The Contentious Election of 1876,” History Now, Issue 33, Fall 2012.
12. “Rutherford B. Hayes: Life in Brief,” University of Virginia Miller Center
13. Eureka Daily Sentinel, March 3, 1877
14. Thomas J. Culbertson, “Did Rutherford B. Hayes End Reconstruction?” Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums, February 2013
15. Ibid.
16. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 4, 1877
17. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 22, 1877
18. Thomas J. Culbertson, “Did Rutherford B. Hayes End Reconstruction?”
19. Eureka Daily Sentinel, March 7, 1877
20. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 27, 1877
21. Eureka Daily Sentinel, February 27, 1877
22. Norton B. Stern, “The Jewish Community of Eureka, Nevada.” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Summer 1982.
23. Ibid.
24. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 8, 1877
25. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 11, 1877
26. Leviticus 19:33-34, Holy Bible, New International Version
27. Brian Frehner. “Ethnicity and Class: The Italian Charcoal Burners’ War, 1875-1885.” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Spring 1996.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Eureka Sentinel, January 12, 1889
31. Eureka Daily Sentinel, January 15, 1879
32. Mary Ellen Glass, “Katharine M. Reigelhuth: Memories of a Pioneer of Eureka and Reno, Nevada,” UNOHP Catalog #017, 1967.
33. Tim Parks, “The Insurgent,” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007.
34. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 17, 1878
35. Erick Trickey, “Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 4, 2018.
36. “Opioids,” Johns Hopkins Medicine.
37. Eureka Daily Sentinel, March 2, 1876
38. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 23, 1876
39. Jeffrey A. Miron and Chris Feige, “The Opium Wars, Opium Legalization, and Opium Consumption in China,” Working Paper 11355, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2005.
40. Ibid.
41. Stephen McNulty, “From Deity to Demon: The Social Implications of Opiate Addiction in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century America,” Rutgers University, 2009.
42. Erick Trickey, “Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction”
43. Eureka Daily Sentinel, January 17, 1877
44. Ibid.