Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1872. We’ll meet Thomas Detter, a traveler looking for solace in the mining towns of Nevada.
Dear listener-
Do you remember that feeling when you’ve ground through a long journey and then you look up and you’re home? That melting in your body, that unclenching in your jaw? Keep that feeling of relief in your mind for me.
Let’s start with a count. After at least 7 mining camps, 9 years, hundreds of bad roads, a few long winters, and a handful of fires and floods—Thomas Detter has finally bought himself a little half-lot near Main Street for $312 in gold on a January day.1
Eureka is taking off and he certainly isn’t the only one showing up to buy some land lately. The town is no paradise, but it is growing fast, with 4,000 people clustered around some dirt roads and haphazard houses, four furnaces pumping carbon into the air and making people rich.2
He’s earned the gold that has paid his way to Eureka by preaching, and by trimming sideburns and beards, and by being a salesman of little tonics supposed to make your hair grow back or your cough disappear.3 A few months in one camp, a few years in another, saving up and looking up for a place that fit.
Because Thomas Detter isn’t only a barber or a preacher or a hair tonic salesman. No, starting way back in that Washington, DC classroom for free Black children, the one his father had sent him to to learn to read and write—way back then, he was on his way to becoming a writer.4
Of course, being a writer meant that there are people out there who want to read what he writes by lamplight in those drafty mining cabins and boom and bust towns at the start and the end of the day. He’s taken a big bet that he’ll be writing for someone else to read.
And so far, he’s been right.
A year earlier, when he was still living about 100 miles to the north in a town called Elko, he had published his first short story collection, “Nellie Brown, Or The Jealous Wife.”
He’d sold it through newspaper ads from here to California, like this one:
“Read the celebrated divorce case of Nellie Brown and her conspirators in Virginia, and the eloquent pleadings of their counsel, written and published by Thomas Detter (colored), of Elko, Nevada.”5
The local newspaper called it “a really credible and interesting story” by “one of the colored citizens of Elko…much respected by all our people here.”6
For most white readers, this was probably the first time they had ever heard of this Black writer who made his living in the mining camps out west. It may have been one of the few times they had ever read a Black person’s writing at all.
But for readers of Black-run newspapers like the San Francisco Elevator or the Pacific Appeal, Thomas Detter had been making himself heard for years.
He’d started writing for these newspapers about ten years earlier, when he first began moving from town to town in the mountain west.7 Maybe it had started as a way to stay in touch with friends and family in cities like San Francisco or Sacramento, where he had spent some time.
But somewhere along the way, he had opened the valve that all writers keep screwed tight in their heads, and out came a torrent of words: poems, political manifestos, travel guides, eulogies. It was like this vagabond life from town to town had unlocked something in Thomas Detter, the need to make sense of these new, unfamiliar, and sometimes unfriendly places through letter after letter after letter, stamped into life in newsprint.
Sometimes, his letters would be tough and urgent, pushing for answers. The ending of the Civil War was just a fresh wound from six years earlier.
“I admit that slavery is a dead issue, and can never be resurrected to life again…But, sir, who can deny that its wicked spirit still haunts us by day and by night?…The white man still clings to his prejudice against caste. To be black is a crime. To be white is an honor.
They made us beasts of burden, and to keep us servile, ignorant and secluded…Tell me not to forget the past. Let it ever be recorded in memory. Let us teach our children to hate tyranny and oppression.”8
Other times, he’d stop, reflect about this strange life he and his wife Caroline had chosen, opening their barber and hairdressing stores in one dusty mining town after another. He would write about what it felt like when it was time to leave, one more time, for the hills:
“Every one seems to have the fever—hence I must follow suit. Men are leaving in squads, hence it is useless to remain longer. I know not whether I will better my condition by going, but I am determined to never surrender to adversity until the last hope has withered…I will write you from the place wherever my lot may chance to fall.”9
And look, don’t get the wrong idea here, sometimes Detter could be really funny and a little risque. He wasn’t some humorless middle-aged man writing letters. He would write about divorce and scandal and the funny and awkward things that white people would say to Black folks. He even wrote a limerick about Jefferson Davis, on the run after the war.
So, here he is, settled in Eureka, having left a trail of his beliefs, thoughts, fears, and dreams scattered in ink across these mountain towns.
And, now, when he sits down to write about his new hometown, he’s optimistic.
“I counted 34 whisky mills, about 20 stores, 2 butcher shops, 5 livery stables, a dance-house and large hotel, and about 25 restaurants.
I shall be compelled to cast my lot with the settlers of Eureka, although I am satisfied there is enough there to do the business.
Why should we despair? Let us hope while mountains of silver stare us in the face.”10
There’s no doubt that Thomas and Carolina Detter have reasons to hope.
They had been married in California the same year that the first states had seceded from the Union.11 But now, 12 years later, they own property and a business in a boomtown. Their son Robert, who they have carried along with them through these mining camps, is seven years old.
And yet, so much progress is built on such a shaky foundation. For all his optimism, Detter knows it, and he puts it in writing in one of his next letters. If the federal government—the government whose troops and judges and laws had held the line for Black folks after the war—if they stepped back, let up the pressure on making reforms, then Detter and his family, his readers, his friends, they would all be at the mercy of the states to do as they pleased.
“When the powers to shield and protect us have been curtailed, our rights fall to the ground. The time is not yet for us to experiment with our liberty and rights. They are none too secure.”12
And that means Thomas Detter will be back at his desk, pen in hand, to keep the pressure on, until he and his family were safe.
If you’d like to learn more about the life and times of Thomas Detter, take a look at a history of Black Nevada titled Good Time Coming? by Elmer Rusco.
Works Cited:
1. Elmer Rusco, “Thomas Detter: Nevada Black Writer and Advocate for Human Rights,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Fall 2004
2. Lambert Molinelli, Eureka and its Resources (San Francisco: H. Keller & Co, 1879), pgs. 16-17
3. Rusco, “Thomas Detter,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly
4. Ibid.
5. San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 1871
6. The Elko Independent, March 11, 1871
7. Rusco, “Thomas Detter,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly
8. Pacific Appeal, October 8, 1870
9. San Francisco Elevator, February 26, 1869
10. Pacific Appeal, August 12, 1871
11. Pacific Appeal, February 14, 1874
12. Pacific Appeal, September 7, 1872