Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1880. Charlie embraces a new path, Thomas Detter confronts town politics, and Louis Monaco rebuilds. Matilda Ashim makes a decision that will change the course of her journey out west.
Dear listener,
When was the last time that you felt that perfect match between what you do well and what fascinates you? It’s rare, but it’s possible—and Charlie is experiencing it firsthand.
He’s now 8 years old. When he was first born into a tight-knit band of Western Shoshone in the hills outside of Eureka, much of the land was still free and open. Now, there’s little land left to forage or hunt. So, more and more Shoshone are following the government’s guidance. They are choosing to settle on the reservation in Duck Valley, about 200 miles north of the region that Charlie’s family has always roamed.1
Charlie’s band has not yet decided to leave their home valleys. Instead, they find other ways to make a living, probably by selling food they’ve foraged or by working for local farmers and ranchers.2
Charlie is still learning the Shoshone ways. He learns how to boil yampah root and cook pine nuts in an underground charcoal oven. He learns how to clean and dress deer and antelope meat, then preserve it for the winter when food is scarce.3
But, as Charlie gets older, he also needs to learn skills that can earn him and his family money. So, around this time, he starts to learn to ride horses and handle a rope.
When you need to move thousand-pound cattle, to brand them or herd them away from danger or keep them corralled, you need more than a cowboy on a horse to make it happen.
That’s where the lasso comes into play. A skilled cowboy can swing the looped end of a rope around a cow’s neck or legs with ice-cold precision. Then they can use leverage from their horse to bring the animal under control. With one swift movement, the cowboy can lasso the cow, loop the rope around the horn on their saddle—watching out for their hands and fingers, of course—and then bring the cow to a stop.4
But roping also has an elegant, almost mythical side to it. Cowboys compete with each other over their form, their style, and their grace in roping cattle on the range or in rodeos. There are legends about the first Mexican vaqueros whose skills will never be matched, and there are rivalries among the new young upstarts who want to prove their worth.5
Little Charlie is probably too young to be roping cattle on horseback. But he’s learning to be a good cowboy. In Nevada and California, they would call him a buckaroo, some long-ago English mix-up of vaquero.
A few generations earlier, Charlie might have been a hunter chasing down game for his band in the hills and mountains. Today, he’s becoming a cowboy, chasing down cattle for ranchers on that same land.
—
A long time back, when he first moved to Idaho Territory from California, Thomas Detter and his friend J.G. Wilson rode out of town to watch a treaty signing with the Nez Perce tribe. When Detter and Wilson would ride on trips like this, they would usually both carry a gun. If the ride was long enough, they would take turns staying awake at night.6
This day, they arrived to find about 3,000 tribal members who had gathered for the treaty signing, along with the US Indian agents. What the two men didn’t know was that the treaty that the Nez Perce were about to sign would become known to the tribe as the Thief Treaty, because it would take back about 5 million acres of land the government had previously promised them.7
Wilson wrote a letter in the Pacific Appeal about what he saw there.
“It is a solemn sight to behold the gray-haired, wrinkle-faced old men and women…Next, the young warriors…then you have the young women, children, and infants, seated upon the ground or standing at the doors of their wigwams. Sadness marks many of their countenances, and yet with a pride enshrined in the freedom vouchsafed by God to all mankind, whether white, black, or red.”8
A month after he attended the event, Detter wrote a warning for newcomers to Idaho Territory:
“It requires a man to be of good resolution to make money in this new country. No other men come here. Every man is for himself, and cares but little about his fellow.”9
The treaty signing that Detter and his friend had watched all those years earlier had been a moment in which the government had gone back on a commitment.
Maybe Detter thinks about that moment now that the government is again backing away from a commitment. It’s been three years since the Hayes administration let the Reconstruction effort fade away, and Detter must wonder about where he fits in the political landscape of the country.
After all, just five years ago, he had gotten up in front of a crowd in San Francisco and told them that his party was the Republican party. And he’d urged other Black folks to support the Republicans for as long as it took to achieve equality.
The situation is different now. And maybe that means he needs to take a different approach to meet the moment.
—
Right now, there are about 46 Black folks living in Eureka. Like Thomas Detter, some are also barbers. Working as a barber in a town like Eureka gets you access to secrets, gossip, and idle chatter about everything: who’s struck it rich in the mines, who’s running for office or who’s dropping out, and who’s about to lose it all on a risky bet. People talk as they get a shave or a haircut, and they let down their guard as they soak in a tub—for many folks, their only reliable access to hot running water.10
As far as we know, what Detter learns in the saloon never leaves his doors. Sure, he’s a successful writer and, now, a public speaker. He gives long and elegant speeches about the state of affairs in the country. But he’s also careful, and that means usually steering clear of the turbulent political debates in the place he lives. In all the upheaval over the charcoal burners, Detter doesn’t write a word about it, as far as we know.
But he has a colleague, another Black barber in town, named J.B. Parker. And Parker, he has a different perspective.
The country is facing, yet again, a big presidential decision. Rutherford Hayes has bowed out of the race for a second term, which leaves an opening for a new Republican candidate. And, for the first time in American history, a former president is considering running for a 3rd time.11
Whether Ulysses Grant will win the nomination or it will go to a fresh candidate is the question that faces Republicans now. And unlike Thomas Detter, J.B. Parker is ready to put his finger on the scale.
Parker is light-skinned, with white folks in his family tree, and, if he wants to, he can probably pass for white. This might make it a little easier for him to step into the power structure in Eureka.12
So, J.B. Parker decides to take an actual step into the rooms where the town’s power brokers make decisions. He adds his name to a list of potential Republican delegates for Eureka and the surrounding county, where he would help to select the state’s preferred nominee for the Republican ticket.13
His fellow delegates on the list—all men, almost entirely white—are familiar names around town. There’s Richard Rickard, who manages the Richmond Mining facilities in town, and George Lamoureaux, whose scrapes in the charcoal business are now part of Eureka’s tall tales.14
And, of course, there’s big John Torre, the hard-charging charcoal king, just a year removed from the charcoal burners’ trial and already back in action. He opens up one of his buildings in town as a polling location for voters choosing delegates.15 This must boost sales of his latest imports from Reno, including the “fresh, fat, and juicy beef” that he advertises in the paper.16
The people of Eureka choose all four of these men—and dozens more—to represent them as delegates. And J.B. Parker, he now has some tiny part to play, some little lever of power, on the big decision that the party faces. And sure, his voice may be drowned out by the bigger players, by John Torre and the men with money and the men cashing in favors, but Parker is in the room where power meets.
Maybe Thomas Detter decides that, if J.B. is going to get involved, so will he. But unlike his fellow barber, Detter doesn’t commit to being part of the Republican machine.
Instead, on Tuesday evenings, he and J.B. start to meet with some of the Black residents of Eureka to talk politics. Perhaps these little gatherings remind Detter of his days back in the California Colored Convention, except now he’s chatting with Eureka’s hairdressers, seamstresses, cooks, and shoe shiners.17
But that, in its way, fits him. Detter is not the ambitious young man that once stood before the Colored Convention and challenged California to open up its juries. He’s older, and he’s lived longer in this country. He’s seen its advances and its retreats, and he’s lost a wife and a son. So, perhaps, at this moment, gathering together a few dozen people, all Black like him, in a friend’s house to talk politics on a Tuesday night represents the best way to meet the moment.
—
It’s Tuesday at 3 in the morning, and Billy Martin is out drinking. He’s at the Tiger Saloon, where he has his choice of liquor, wine, cigars, and beer on draft. It’s been a fun night so far, bar hopping with his buddy Johnny Brent.18
Since the charcoal burner incident at Fish Creek last year, Billy Martin has stayed out of trouble. Earlier this year, he traveled out to another silver boomtown about 200 miles southwest of Eureka, coming back to town with stories to share.19 And he’s donated $5 of his own money to help the Irish recover from their potato famine.20
Now, though, a Tuesday morning at the Tiger is as good a time as any for Billy Martin to stop being the hero for a while. It’s all going smoothly, drinking with Johnny, until it’s time to pay for the next round. And then that side of Billy that comes out after the booze kicks and he’s feeling lit, the side that’s left him in brawls and shouting matches across town, that side comes out to play.
Except, now, Billy has a reputation that precedes him. When he’s sober, he’s one of the fastest and most accurate gunmen in town. He shot a thief off of a moving horse. He likely—although never proven—shot a charcoal burner through the chest. And when he’s drunk, he’s threatened to do the same many times over.
The newspaper says that Billy draws his gun, a Colt revolver, first, but Johnny Brent is taking no chances—drunk or not, Billy has a quick trigger finger. So Johnny Brent draws his own Whistler revolver, a newer model than Brent’s old Colt, and fires twice at his friend. One bullet hits its mark, up through Billy’s chest, breaking his neck and killing him instantly.21
Billy Martin dies on the floor of the Tiger Saloon.
The newspaper reports what many in town probably think when they hear the news:
“Martin’s death in this manner is not unexpected to the majority of those who best knew him, as he has been in the habit of showing his revolver frequently upon occasions when intoxicated, and, people knowing that he was an excellent shot, were not expected to take many chances. Martin was a whole-souled man, and many will regret the manner of his death.”22
There’s no glamor in Billy Martin’s final shootout, just two drunk men fumbling over their guns. When officers arrive at the saloon, they find Johnny Brent still holding his gun, looking at the body of his friend. He tells them that he wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, but that he couldn’t let Billy have the advantage.23
Eureka gives Billy Martin a final send-off with a brass band and a procession to the town cemetery. It’s likely the same route that the charcoal burners took to bury their dead a year before.24
At his photo studio, Louis Monaco is back to work. In the decade that he’s been a photographer, technology has seemed to change year after year. Now, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge is experimenting with the fastest cameras available, trying to capture horses in mid-stride out in California.25 And some photographers are coating their plates with gelatin instead of egg white, which can preserve a negative for much longer.26
Monaco does his best to keep up with the trends, even hundreds of miles from the nearest supply store. Lately, he’s been trying out stereoscopes, in which he places two photographs of the same scene side by side to create the illusion of a three-dimensional view. He’s captured these stereo views of the mining works around Eureka, and they’ve become popular souvenirs for folks to send to their families far away, a little glimpse of what life is like in this remote place.27
He is working steadily, in part, because he will soon be a father for the first time. Some of his most popular works are photographs of the Richmond Mining and Eureka Consolidated smelters and mines, which show off just how industrialized this little town has become. The company men like the prints so much that they order copies to be sent to their headquarters in San Francisco and London.28
In spring, he and Liberata welcome their son. They name him Louis Primo, honoring him as their first-born.29 In this town, there is always work to be done, and Monaco doesn’t get much time to be with his son. By July, he is back on the street, taking photographs of the town’s 4th of July celebrations.30
If there is a rule that governs life in this place, though, it is that change is not only inevitable but unpredictable. When his son is just three months old, a fire starts at the back of a grocery store on Main Street. It spreads in less than five minutes, jumping from wooden building to wooden building, until it gnaws its way through 300 buildings in town.
One of these is Louis Monaco’s photo studio. He loses other buildings that he owns in town, too, and almost loses his home, saved only by local furnace workers who rush to put out the flames. When the fire is done, Monaco faces almost $15,000 in damage, with only about $5,000 of that covered by insurance.31
When confronted with a similar junction, some folks have decided to pack it in. The costs of living here are just too high, and the returns too low. If it isn’t a fire, it’s a flood. If it isn’t a flood, it’s a blizzard or a heat wave. The mines are risky, the market is shaky, the town itself is flimsy.
But Louis Monaco has invested time, money, and energy into this place. He’s photographed everywhere, from the charcoal burner valleys to the Shoshone camps to the miners’ halls. And now his brother, his wife, and his son all live in this town.
So Monaco doubles down. Even facing thousands of dollars in losses, he decides to reinvest back into Eureka. He finds a new space, with better light and more room. He orders new backdrops—as nice as any you’ll find in San Francisco—for his studio portraits. He invests in new equipment for capturing and enlarging images.32
The newspaper cheers:
“Mr. Louis Monaco, the artist, has sent for an entire new outfit for the resumption and carrying on of his business. Mr. Monaco has unlimited faith in Eureka, and has fully determined to remain here and grow up with the town…Enterprise will beat the worst of ill luck.”33
Louis Monaco has decided to put that principle to the test. If Eureka thrives, so will he. If Eureka falters, his business may go with it.
—
There are a few old-timers that Tone can follow on Prospect Mountain. And one of the most successful of these, at least lately, is Maurice Hartnett.
Hartnett is what the locals call a “pioneer”—that’s someone who’s been around the Eureka mines for a long time. He’s had some major strikes and he’s had some major losses, and he’s still here.
He’s made a career—a life, really—out of following the mines. Before he ended up in Nevada, he worked as a miner in California, and before that, he dug for gold in Peru and Chile.34
Even now, more than 10 years since he arrived in Nevada, he’s still up there on the mountain. For Hartnett, there’s no respite from the desiccating sun and the scouring frost, the rough scrape of the rock and the stale breath of the underground.
He spends the spring overseeing work on the Industry mine, only to get caught in a late season snowstorm that dumps two feet onto the work site.35 In the summer, he works with a team of miners to carve out the Industry another 90 feet into the earth. This is slow, painful, methodical work, but it’s starting to produce results: his crew hauls up 22 tons of ore.36
Amid all this work, this weather, and this endless digging, there’s one occasion he won’t miss: the gathering of the Irish in Eureka to fundraise for the Land League.37
Though he became a US citizen back in California, Hartnett still feels a responsibility to his birthplace.38 He hails from County Cork, in the far south of Ireland. It’s a place that proudly calls itself “the rebel county,” dating all the way back to the 1400s. That’s when the people of the county supported a Belgian fraudster to try to overthrow the English king. They failed, but the nickname stuck.39
Since then, landlords, many English or with English roots, have subdivided the countryside of Cork into rentable farmland. Tenant farmers, many poor and Catholic, live out bleak years struggling to pay rents they can’t afford. The potato blight which had swept the country 30 years ago is back again, and farmers are once more going hungry and being evicted from their properties.40
The Land League is a group of Irish activists who are pushing back against this landlord-tenant system, and Hartnett is proud to fundraise for them. Their tactics can be tough—strikes, lease burning, marches—and their speeches can be fiery, and many Irish immigrants in the western US, like Hartnett, love it.41
When the Irish activist Michael Davitt visits San Francisco on a speaking tour, he’s met by thousands of locals who pack into the opera house to hear him speak. The San Francisco branch of the Land League sends a telegram back to Dublin that reads:
“One hundred thousand people welcome Michael Davitt. Hold the harvest. No surrender to landlord tyranny.”42
Eureka’s town newspaper covers the ins and outs of the Land League drama obsessively. Here’s one report in the paper, when the British government announces it will prosecute the heads of the Land League:
“Recent dispatches from Dublin tell fully of the great excitement that has been provoked here by the determination of the British government to prosecute the head men of the Land League.
What was the other day only an agitation for resistance to the payment of rent has suddenly become a moral revolt not only against the payment of rent but against obedience to all laws…
Schemes for resistance to British “misrule”—and all rule is misrule in this sense—are the staples of popular eloquence. One speaker is apparently disposed to consider that it will be an ideal condition of things when landlords are “shot like partridges” and Mr. Parnell proposes “legislative independence” and advises his hearers to appeal to this country for organized assistance for “the purpose of breaking the yoke” of British oppression.”43
This is not Hartnett’s first go-round with Irish independence. 15 years ago, when he was still in California, he headed up a chapter of the Fenian Brotherhood.44 This was a group of Irish immigrants, mostly living in the United States, that sent money and funding to rebels back home. The rebels then tried, unsuccessfully, to overthrow British rule in Ireland.45
As it turns out, being a miner may have trained Hartnett well for the fight for Ireland. The same slow grinding away that makes progress in a mine also makes progress in a country.
—
For the past year, Matilda Ashim has pushed to make her Epicurean Restaurant succeed. She’s entertained locals and travelers,46 she’s gotten positive write-ups in the town newspaper,47 and she’s even sold ice cream in the summer.48
But no business success can change what is happening to her body. At the beginning of this year, she’s knocked down again by a bout of rheumatoid arthritis, and she’s confined to her bed, this time for a few months. Matilda has always regrouped and built back up after every move, every fire, and every flood.49
But there are some situations that she can’t outpace through her own force of will. As the arthritic symptoms become worse, she realizes that, maybe for the first time, she can’t keep up with the volatility of life in a boomtown.
So, as the year starts, she closes the Epicurean and begins the process, once again, of selling off the furniture, the dishes and plates, and the glasses, piece by piece. Except this time, she won’t be starting over. This time, she might be done.50
—
We don’t know when she and Simon finally make the decision to leave Eureka. But it’s been a tough few years for them both. Last year, one of Simon and Solomon’s businesses failed. The bank stepped in and seized the store’s assets.51 Then came the charcoal burner trial, which seemed to freeze the town in place for months. Then, the fire burned through the east side of town. Then, Matilda’s illness struck again.
The Ashims have, for maybe the first time in Nevada, made a real home here in Eureka. They have started a congregation here, they have hosted marriages and parties in their home here, they have seen their sons and daughters live mostly happy, busy lives here. But the Ashims are also practical, and they know when their balance sheet is starting to tip dangerously into the red.
It’s May when Lizzie Baymer shows up in Eureka with her bicycle. She has a reputation as the country’s leading female cyclist, and she tours the west putting on exhibitions of her skill. In Eureka, she rides more than 70 miles inside one of the town’s theaters in just over 7 hours, establishing a new national record.52
We don’t know if Matilda wanders over to the theater to see Lizzie Baymer in her 7-hour pursuit, riding endless loops in a cavernous theater chasing some invisible accomplishment.
But if she does see her, she might recognize something in Baymer. She might appreciate that, the day before, Baymer had crashed spectacularly, and then had to regroup for her record-breaking ride.53 She might have seen a woman, nothing like her in some ways and so much like her in other ways, riding forever, pushing, unable to stop—and she might have thought of her own time in these mining towns, and what it would feel like when this was all over, when she could finally bow out of the race.
A few months later, Matilda auctions off the rest of her supplies, then she sells the furniture from her home—the kitchen table on which she cooked, the pantry where she stored her food, the bed in which she slept.54
With the final items carted off from the auction, she is, at last, done.
If you’d like to learn more about the role that Americans played in achieving Irish independence, check out America and the Making of an Independent Ireland by Francis M. Carroll.
Works Cited:
1. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 21, 1880
2. Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pg. 31
3. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories, 1993
4. Tania Millen, “Roping 101: Cowboy School,” Horse Journal, June 18, 2021.
5. Phil Livingston, “The History of the Vaquero,” American Cowboy, June 10, 2022.
6. Pacific Appeal, July 18, 1863
7. National Park Service, “The Treaty Period,” December 29, 2022.
8. Pacific Appeal, July 18, 1863
9. Pacific Appeal, August 1, 1863
10. Elmer Rusco, Good Time Coming?: Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1975), pg. 127
11. National Park Service, “Ulysses S. Grant and the Presidential Election of 1880”
12. Logan Camporeale, “Charles Stewart Parker: Community Leader, War Hero, and Accomplished Botanist,” The Local History, February 26, 2023.
13. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 25, 1880
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 2, 1880
17. Eureka Daily Sentinel, October 15, 1880
18. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 4, 1880
19. Eureka Daily Sentinel, March 12, 1880
20. Eureka Daily Sentinel, February 11, 1880
21. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 4, 1880
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows (New York: Penguin Group, 2003).
26. Cornell University, “Dawn’s Early Light: The First 50 Years of American Photography,” October 2011.
27. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 11, 1880
28. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 26, 1880
29. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 8, 1880
30. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 7, 1880
31. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 18, 1880
32. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 6, 1880
33. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 4, 1880
34. Tonopah Daily Bonanza, October 27, 1910
35. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 23, 1880
36. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 1, 1880
37. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 22, 1880
38. Appeal-Democrat, October 12, 1865
39. Ann Wroe, “Perkin Warbeck,” Richard III Society.
40. Cressida Annesley, “The land war in west Cork: the boycott of William Bence Jones,” Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 1994.
41. University of Delaware, “A Terrible Beauty is Born: The Easter Rising at 100,” 2016.
42. Eureka Daily Sentinel, September 21, 1880
43. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 4, 1880
44. Appeal-Democrat, August 20, 1865
45. Jessie Kratz, “Celebrating Irish Americans: The Fenian Brotherhood,” National Archives, March 20, 2021.
46. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 26, 1879
47. Ibid.
48. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 23, 1879
49. Eureka Daily Sentinel, February 19, 1880
50. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 25, 1880
51. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 23, 1879
52. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 9, 1880
53. Ibid.
54. Eureka Daily Sentinel, July 17, 1880