Today, a dispatch from Hamilton, Nevada, 1872. We’ll meet Matilda Ashim, a woman making a living and a life in the boomtowns of Nevada.
Dear listener,
Have you ever had the feeling that times are about to change? That there is a great and grand shift of the vibrations in the air? Now imagine that same shift had the power to shut down an entire town.
Matilda Ashim and her family are in the middle of a moment just like that as they sit, 8,000 feet above sea level, in the little mining town of Hamilton.
The locals call the place “Cave City,” because that’s what the old-time miners found when they first dug out the area. But it has a proper name now, and proper streets, and some proper houses made of wood. It even has a proper public school, a proper courthouse, and a proper jail.1
Thousands of miners pass through this town, some on their way to make money and others to lose it. And with mining come the people who make money off the miners—the stagecoach drivers, the bar owners, the cooks, the gamblers, the sellers of shovels and pick axes and boots, the rich men from faraway cities looking to invest in a hole in the ground.
And people like the Ashim family, who make their living selling groceries in boomtowns like Hamilton.
There are a few things you should know about the Ashims: for one, like most of the people in Hamilton, they are not from here. They are from the South, South Carolina to be exact, but their families come from further shores. Matilda’s parents migrated from England to the US 40 years earlier, just another stop on her father’s long journey away from his hometown in Germany.2
Matilda’s husband Simon had ties to Polish territory, where his father was from, but his mother was English and he was born and raised in Houston.3
This roaming was just the way they have lived for the past few generations, looking for new communities, new ventures, new ways to thrive. Being uprooted from home is also part of their identity, because the Ashims are Jewish.
Being Jewish in these mining towns is complicated. On the one hand, most people in Hamilton are here to make money, and if you are able to help them do that, they often don’t care what you worship, when, or how.
On the other hand, actually practicing Judaism is tough in a town in the middle of the high desert. Technically, you need a rabbi to certify kosher foods or deliver an official sermon or oversee a synagogue, and there are no candidates for hundreds of miles.
But for the Ashims, being Jewish is as much who they are as what they do. Their fathers were both from Prussia, an old world place where Jews were often barely tolerated and usually made to speak German. Their fathers were probably merchants, and now so are their children, living and working half a world away.4
When a rabbi had consecrated Matilda and Simon’s wedding years back in Charleston, he had written that they were married “according to the law of Moses and Israel,” making a connection all the way back to the Old Testament. That’s the kind of connection that’s hard to sever, even in a distant mining town in the hills of Nevada.5
In Hamilton, the Ashims are joined by about 30 other Jewish business owners, people like Pepi Steler, a jeweler and watchmaker from Budapest, and John and Regina Moch, who own a restaurant in town.6
And times are good in town—until you can feel that shift in the frequencies, and then it may be time to go.
Look at the White Pine News and you would see a booming little town where you could view the squirrel menagerie at Rowel’s Saloon for the price of a drink or buy everything from blasting powder to shoes to mixing bowls at Everts & Company.7 But look a little bit further and you’d start to see evidence for a place in slow decline: the list of people late on their taxes had started to grow, and there were rumblings that there was far more lead than silver coming down from the mines on the mountain.
Already, some business owners are making the leap to other towns with better pedigrees. The Silver Brick Saloon jumps to Eureka, about 50 miles away, which is having a boom of its own and almost numbers 4000 people. They place an ad in the Eureka newspaper, but they are almost drowned out by the other businesses in town, selling everything from liquor and cigars to fresh oysters to buffalo tongue and German ham. Eureka has at least three doctors and 10 attorneys. They even have a man who specializes in painting signs for all these new businesses.8
And the towns are getting competitive with each other. Even the newspaper in Pioche, rumored to be the roughest town in this corner of the state, gets in on the action with this update:
“The residents of Pioche are pursuing their usual pursuits in an everyday sort of style, everybody seems satisfied with everyone else, the mines are being worked with customary vigor, and nothing seems to be out of joint. No fights have occurred since our previous issue.”9
So, like so many of their fellow business owners, the Ashims are facing a choice: try to predict which way the wind is blowing and take a chance on a new town, or stay in place and hope Hamilton’s boom isn’t an illusion.
That is, until something happens that makes that choice for them.
If you’d like to learn more about the experiences of Jewish families in the boomtowns of Nevada, check out the appropriately named book Jews in Nevada by John P. Marschall.
Works Cited:
1. Russell Richard Elliott, “The Early History of White Pine County, Nevada, 1865-1887,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1939
2. R.D.W Connor, History of North Carolina (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1919), pg. 31
3. Malcolm H. Stern, First American Jewish Families: 600 Genealogies 1654-1977 (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1978), pg. 117
4. Francesco Di Palma, “Prussian Jews: Between Nationalism and Tradition. The “strange case” of Posen/Poznań, 1800-1918,” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History #20, December 2021
5. Photocopy of ketuba marriage settlement (1847) between Matilda Jacobi and Simon Ashim in Hebrew and English, Box: 40, Folder: 4. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim congregation records, Mss 1047. Special Collections, College of Charleston
6. John P. Marschall, Jews in Nevada: A History (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008)
7. The White Pine News, November 12, 1872
8. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 18, 1872
9. The Pioche Record, September 13, 1872