Today, a dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1885. Charlie meets someone new, while Thomas Detter embarks on a journey and Louis Monaco pays tribute to a personal hero.
Dear listener,
How do we choose the people we love, the people we admire, the people who motivate us? Do we actively seek them out or do they enter and exit our lives when they are needed? Consider this while you listen.
As he gets older and spends more time among white ranchers, Charlie spends less time with his Shoshone band. Over time, he gets a new name, too. This is when people first start calling him Charlie, his Shoshone name put aside.
He also gets a new last name, too. The ranchers start calling him Charlie Allison, named after Allison Creek, a little stream that runs through a valley to the south of Eureka.1
A new name and a new passion. Charlie Allison is becoming a buckaroo—a decision that will, for better or worse, change his relationship to the people who raised him.
As he becomes a cowboy, he’s learning that there are some horses that are hard to break. They look at you out of the corner of their wild eyes and their nostrils flare and their back legs kick and you have the rope in your hand, and then, the work truly starts.
Saying “you broke” a horse, that isn’t quite right. It’s really more of a test of mutual willpower and negotiation. It’s persuading a prey animal to let a full-grown adult ride on its back and control its movements, to trust that the rider won’t lead it into danger or disaster or worse.
Little by little, Charlie is learning how to coax mustangs—wild horses that roam the desert—into becoming work horses. There are different philosophies, some gentle, some harsh, but all involve getting the mustang accustomed to a rider—sometimes with a saddle, sometimes without. The goal is that the horse will eventually get so unfazed by the whole thing that having a rider on their back becomes just another day on the range.
When they are nervous, upset, or worked up, horses buck, trying to shake off a rider or kick away a predator. So, one of the keys to breaking a horse is to get them tired, content, or desensitized, and there are lots of ways to do this. Exercising a horse by having them run through water or sand or letting them munch on grass until their bellies are full and they are feeling drowsy and relaxed, these tactics often work.
And cowboys in a hurry to break a horse, they just wait out the bucking period, refusing to get off the horse until it gets accustomed to the rider. This is the kind of skill that a bronco rider might show off in a rodeo for fun.2
As he learns to break horses and rope cattle, Charlie is also learning what a cowboy does and doesn’t do—and a cardinal rule for most cowboys is that they will never run sheep.
Sheep have been around the west longer than cattle. Some say they came with the Spanish, but the tribes in the Southwest have been herding sheep for as long as anyone can remember. There’s a big rivalry between cattle herds and sheep herds. Cowboys see sheep as noisy, dirty, and bad for the range, because their little teeth and sharp hooves can strip the land of grass. Shepherds see cattle as destructive, dumb, and invasive, their huge herds requiring too much space and too much food and water for this fragile land.3
And then, of course, there’s the question of property. Cowboys usually work for ranchers who own thousands of acres, all carefully marked off by fences and property lines, then graze their herds mostly on land owned by the government.
On the other side of the spectrum, shepherds live with their flocks, moving them from valleys to mountains across hundreds of miles, sometimes crossing property lines and boundaries as they go, from government land to private land and back again.
Maybe cattle fit better in the new west, where settlers own parcels of land laid out in neat grids and written up in legal documents. And maybe sheep fit better in the old west, where people like Charlie’s band migrated with the seasons across a land mostly free of borders.
For now, at least, Charlie is living in the new west, learning to move cattle across land that is often surveyed, bounded, and controlled—not unlike his own people. Now, more Western Shoshone bands are moving to the Duck Valley reservation.
And this means the annual gatherings to celebrate harvests or mark the change of the seasons are changing, too.
When Shoshone bands were spread out over the vast expanse of Mother Earth, their gatherings would be smaller and regional, a few bands gathering together for dancing and hand games. But now that the bands are much farther apart, the gatherings become much bigger, almost like gigantic family reunions. Now many different bands all converge together on a spot to celebrate for 5 days at a time.4
The newspaper writers start calling these gatherings “fandangos,” after a Spanish dance, and they notice that they are getting larger and louder.
A few years ago, the local newspaper in Eureka noted:
“There is a big dance under way on the road to the Italian Ranch, some two miles out of town. The Shoshones are having it exclusively to themselves. It’s “Woo! Woo!” with them all night, and sleep and sweat all day for a week.”5
Now, these fandangos have become a tourist attraction of sorts for Eureka residents, who go out to the all-night gatherings to watch the Shoshones dance. Sometimes, they get a little too caught up in the moment or a little too liquored up and join in the festivities, and the Shoshone dancers have to escort them out. Eventually, it gets so annoying that the Shoshone go to the Eureka town sheriff, asking them to keep their nosy neighbors away from the fandangos—and especially the whiskey they bring with them.6
For Charlie, now a teenager, the fandangos are a chance to mingle with people outside of his usual circle of country ranchers and close family. The chants, the dances, the drumming, the all-night ceremonies, they are a good fit for a teenage boy full of unsettled adolescent energy.
At one of these fandangos near the mining town of Hamilton—we don’t know exactly when—he meets a girl a few years younger than him. She is quiet, petite, and her skin and hair is dark, darker than his. She is small but she carries a power about her. She speaks only Shoshone, and she tells stories about a life far away from here. And Charlie, he must listen to her stories, maybe even feeling the crowd drowned out by her words.
The white people call her Mary, and they call her younger brother Dick. They come from Shoshone lands farther south, maybe as far south as the edges of the California desert.7
She tells Charlie about how she left her land, and it’s a story that’s hard to forget.
One summer, not long ago, she and Dick left their home and headed north. She said that white people had come and burned their encampment. No one could say exactly where it was.
Mary took her little brother Dick and carried him on her back, along with two horses for the journey north. Then, they rode, slowly, accompanied by a few other members of her band, away from the wreckage of their camp.
Mary said it took them an entire summer to cross the dry valleys and hills and reach greener, higher elevations to the north. When they would run into a river or a lake, Mary would put Dick on her back, then let the horses swim in front of them. She would hold onto their tails as the cold water poured all around them.8
While Charlie is outgoing and eager, Mary is quiet and reserved. While Charlie is learning from the white ranchers in English, Mary still recites the old prayers in Shoshone. While Charlie’s father is an immigrant, Mary’s family is forever tethered to this land.
And yet, they connect at a busy, crowded fandango, and Mary becomes part of Charlie’s ever-changing life.
—
Three years ago, Louis Monaco’s hero, Guiseppe Garibaldi, died. As the champion of Italian reunification, Garibaldi was well-known and well-loved among the Swiss and Italians in town.
The town decided to hold a memorial for the old revolutionary. They asked Louis Monaco to deliver a eulogy for the great man in Italian, and attorney Robert Beatty to do the same in English. A procession on horseback would run down Main Street, and one of those riders would be John Torre, the charcoal king.9
It was a reunion of former adversaries, three years after the events at Fish Creek. Much had changed since that day, and yet much had not.
Louis Monaco remained the town’s most popular photographer. Beatty, who had helped to represent the charcoal burners in front of the grand jury, remained one of its most successful attorneys.
John Torre’s business had only grown since the Fish Creek shooting. After the trouble three years ago, a few of Torre’s fellow charcoal ranchers had cashed out, and Torre had purchased their acreage. He now owned more property for charcoal production than he had before the shooting. Not to mention that he also served as a Republican delegate for the county and ran several businesses in town.10
We don’t know if Monaco and Torre spoke much after the hearings. Certainly Monaco had not held back in criticizing Torre and others for their treatment of the charcoal burners. But all those letters, all those objections, all those hearings hadn’t done much to change the status quo around town. Torre was still the “Big Russian” and the charcoal burners were still underpaid.
On the day of the memorial, Main Street was jammed with locals to watch the memorial parade. How many actually knew who Garibaldi was, we’ll never know. Before the procession began, a man rode through the middle of it all on a mule that tried to buck him off—”such is life,” the newspaper said.11
The parade ended at the Opera House, where Monaco had his chance to speak.
It was easy to cheer Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the kingdom of Italy. But Monaco still believed in Garibaldi’s deeper, more fundamental principle of equality, the principle that made powerful people nervous. This memorial might have been his last chance to share that message with the town and, in a way, to have the final word on all the unrest from three years earlier.
So, when it was his time to speak, he was direct, addressing the crowd in Italian, then later giving the newspaper an English translation so the whole town could read:
“Garibaldi was the very type of liberty, the champion of the downtrodden, the paladin of humanity. He fought and spilled his blood whenever and wherever the despots abused and oppressed. He was never deaf to the wailing of the unfortunate people of other countries. Although Italy was his country, the world was his field of action, and the redemption of humanity from the chains of despotism his purpose…
Italians, honor the ashes of the great patriot and follow in his path. The most precious tribute you can offer, the loftiest monument you can rear in memory of the illustrious dead, is to imitate his virtues.”12
It was a final public testimony from Louis Monaco to his town, and to the Italians living there. A Garibaldi revolution did not happen here, but that didn’t mean it never could.
But whether the Monaco brothers will be around to see it is an open question. Monaco’s younger brother JB is, first and foremost, an artist. While he works as a retoucher for Monaco’s photographs, his real passion is portraits, sketched or painted.
And, now, he’s starting to test the market for his art outside of Eureka. There are, after all, only so many people in this town that can afford—or even want—original art. So he travels to San Francisco to show his work.
The Mechanics Institute there hosts annual fairs to showcase new inventions and trades. They also make room for art. JB shows up with a crayon portrait of Ulysses Grant, who had died just a month earlier. It makes the cut, and it’s exhibited at the show alongside a new type of bicycle, an assortment of street lamps, and thirty square feet of produce from Ventura County.13
There’s nothing like this in Eureka—rooms full of inventions, rooms full of fruit and vegetables, and rooms full of art. And maybe, as he heads back to the small town in the desert, JB Monaco is thinking about what is there for him in Eureka.
—
It’s been a productive three years up on Prospect Mountain. Tone has made some good money, although he still hasn’t hit record-setting ore strikes or made enough to put down the shovel for good. But his proceeds from the last decade on the mountain have been enough to buy a little miner’s cabin in the nearby canyon, a place to sleep and cook and retreat from the weather.14
Maurice Hartnett, now one of the old men of the mountain, has had a better few years. Three years earlier, on a January day, he hit a big ore strike in one of the mines that he owned. And that same day, he led a three-man digging team to go work on another mine which showed promise. Now, after much more excavation, he’s confident that he’s poised for yet another ore strike.14
Because this is backcountry mining, there have been setbacks along the way, of course. A few years earlier, he was out with a three-man crew when a sudden spring snowstorm deluged the mountain, burying the western face in eight to fifteen feet of powder. The men barely made it to Hartnett’s cabin before the snow sealed them in.15
Then, a year after that, he came close to losing an eye when he was hammering at some rock and a chip flew into his face. Never someone to leave the mountain unless circumstances were bad, he begrudgingly headed into town to see a doctor.16
Such is the life of a miner on Prospect Mountain.
All in all, though, Hartnett’s multiple decades on the mountain are finally paying off. The newspaper sends a reporter up the mountainside to look at the progress, and Hartnett turns on the old Irish charm. Here’s the reporter:
“I rested myself after a long climb just above…the Industry mine to take a good look around me. I was watching the smoke gracefully curling and rolling away in small clouds from the Richmond and Eureka Consolidated furnaces, and thinking where I would next turn my steps, when, with a “What the devil are you doing here?” And a “come here, I’ve something to show you,” I was accosted by Maurice Hartnett. This, of course, decided me, for there is magnetism in the dulcet tones of Hartnett’s voice that no one can resist. Indeed, he had something to show me, for where only two weeks ago a mere scratch marked a stain of ore, a hole…showed a fine prospect of ore that covered the bottom and came half way up the sides.”17
Sure enough, just four days after the reporter’s visit, as he expected, Hartnett and his crew hit a rich ore vein in another of his mines. The newspaper congratulates him:
“We hope it will prove even more extensive and richer than its present appearance indicates, for Maurice is worthy of all possible riches.”18
News doesn’t reach the mountain quickly, especially from the outside world. But by now, Tone, Hartnett, and other miners have certainly heard the news out of Washington. There’s a new immigration law—basically, the first time the United States has passed a law on immigration at all. And it affects, to no one’s surprise, the Chinese.
The law says that the government will not allow any more Chinese workers—which includes miners—to immigrate into the country for 10 years. And if any Chinese workers currently in the United States leave and want to come back, they will need special certifications—which everyone knows they probably won’t get.19
So, Tone faces a dilemma: when he’s ready to come down off the mountain for good, he can choose a cloistered kind of life in the United States, unlikely to get married and unable to become a citizen. Or he can choose a life in China, where he will almost be guaranteed to never return to the United States again.
For now, at least, there’s work to be done. He’ll have to worry about his future after the digging is over.
—
One year ago, Thomas Detter received an invitation in the mail. It was from Blanche Bruce, a former Senator from Mississippi. Bruce was a legend in the Senate for a good reason. Born into slavery, he had gone on to become the first Black senator to complete a full term in office. Now, he had a glamorous life in Washington, DC with a fancy house and a fancy wife.20
And he was writing Detter with a proposal.
“To Thomas Detter: You are hereby appointed Honorary Commissioner for Nevada in the Department of Colored Exhibits at the World’s Exhibition. Take all exhibits tending to illustrate the progress of the race, but take only small quantities of any one article. Exhibits will be collected, packed and shipped free of cost to exhibitors. Free transportation to and from the Exposition will be furnished you.”21
We’re living in an era of these great fairs. It all started in London 30 years ago, at the glamorous Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, where the British showed off their wealth and power to the world—and exhibited the first ever flushing toilet.22
Since then, countries have raced each other to throw more and more elaborate World’s Fairs and Expositions, inviting representatives from all over the world to share what makes their countries unique.
Sometimes the results could be a little awkward, like watching people eat a hamburger for the first time at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876.
Other times they could be almost transcendent, like the massive head of the Statue of Liberty or the first telephone, both on display in Paris in 1878.
And sometimes they could be just plain embarrassing, like the exhibition they called the “Negro village” at the same event.23
New Orleans wanted to get in on the action. As a major hub for cotton exports, the city was already connected to the outside world through trade. So, with support from an association of cotton farmers and the federal government, which gave the organizers a million-dollar loan, New Orleans had its own world’s fair. And sure, purists said it didn’t rise to the level of the grand exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York, but who’s really counting when it comes to world’s fairs anyway?24
The plan for the Exhibition was familiar to anyone who had been to one of these lavish events before: massive, temporary buildings, sweeping gardens, and room for exhibits from every state in the country, plus dozens of other nations.
One of the attractions of these fairs is just how huge everything is. In a time when lots of people live in small, tightly-packed homes, having room to roam—especially inside—is worth the ticket price. The fair advertised that their Main Building was the largest ever built for a fair, and that visitors could see from one end to the other over a massive space, all connected by 20 elevators.25
Each of the buildings at the fair had a theme. There was the horticultural building, where a 90-foot-tall glass roof sent sunlight showering over 20,000 fruit plates and exhibits of flora from Mexico and the Caribbean. The factory building featured the latest in cotton picking machines, while there was also a dedicated livestock area and a working saw mill. Mexico had its own building, where the legendary 8th Cavalry Mexican Military Band—what most people just called “the Mexican band”—drew a crowd and introduced the city to new rhythms.26
And then, of course, there was the States Exhibit building, where Thomas Detter was invited to join the Colored Peoples’ Department representing Nevada.
It had been a tough few years for Thomas Detter leading up to the invitation.
A fire broke out in the back room of his home, not long after he had cut his insurance policy down to just $400 in coverage. Possibly to help cover expenses, he sold his half-lot property off Main Street not long after.27
Then he received the news that the Supreme Court had overturned the Civil Rights Act which had passed Congress eight years earlier—the same law that he had celebrated with that big speech in San Francisco, now gone.
The local newspaper had interviewed him about this thoughts on the Republican Party in the aftermath of all this turmoil. He didn’t hold back his thoughts on the political party that he had supported for his entire adult life:
“The protestations of affection bestowed upon the colored people by that party, Mr. Detter sees clearly enough, is only a pretense by which to catch the votes of his race…Mr. Detter does not advise his people to become Democrats altogether. He gives them advice that is not partisan in any sense. He urges them to vote for the best men.”28
So maybe the invitation to the exhibition had come at the right time for Detter. He accepted.
—
Deciding what represents the place you call home is a tricky proposition.
Some of the states invited to the New Orleans exhibition made some unique choices. California chose to exhibit a pair of gloves made from human skin. Indiana displayed the different types of corn they grew in the state. And Michigan unrolled a big blue banner with statistics about the number of square miles inside their borders.29
Nevada had a little something for everybody, like chunks of gold and silver, plus raw ore to show what miners dug up out of the earth. They also brought a good amount of petrified wood, including a few pieces with bird’s nests and fence posts stuck inside, plus a woolly mammoth fossil. And they proudly showed off photographs of Sutro Tunnel, the literally groundbreaking 4-mile long project that kept Nevada’s richest silver mines dry.30
We don’t know what Thomas Detter chose to represent the Black people of Nevada. He did put out a notice in Nevada newspapers before he left:
“He asks and expects that the colored people of Nevada will assist him to represent them by sending him any statement of facts concerning their condition, anything of their history while in Nevada, any specimen of their industry in farming or mining—in short, anything that will enable him to speak intelligently for them in New Orleans.”31
What he got in return, we don’t know.
There wasn’t much coverage of the Colored Peoples’ Department at the exhibition, although one of the guidebooks did suggest that visitors check out the oil paintings from Minnesota, the crazy quilts from Iowa, and the tablecloth from Indiana featuring three wise owls. Detter’s Nevada collection didn’t make the cut.32
But, really, whether anyone wandered through his exhibit or not, there was Thomas Detter, more than 15 years after he called Nevada home, acting as the state’s representative for the country—the world—to see.
If you’d like to learn more about the history of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its impact on Chinese immigrants, check out At America’s Gates by Erika Lee.
Works Cited:
1. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories, 1993
2. “How did Indians break horses, as opposed to the cowboy way?”, True West, September 12, 2009.
3. Adam M. Sowards, “Why Sheep Started So Many Wars in the American West,” What It Means to Be An American, October 5, 2017.
4. Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pg. 60
5. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 12, 1882
6. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 22, 1885
7. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella.”
8. Ibid.
9. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 10, 1882
10. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 16, 1879
11. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 13, 1882
12. Ibid.
13. San Francisco Examiner, September 19, 1885
14. Eureka Daily Sentinel, August 1, 1880
15. Eureka Daily Sentinel, March 5, 1882
16. Eureka Daily Sentinel, January 25, 1884
17. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 10, 1885
18. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 14, 1885
19. “Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)”, National Archives, January 17, 2023.
20. “Blanche Kelso Bruce House”, National Park Service.
21. The Daily Appeal, November 23, 1884
22. Donald G. Larson Collection on International Expositions and Fairs, Fresno State University.
23. Ibid.
24. Cosette Zacarias, “The World Visits New Orleans,” ArcGIS, March 2024.
25. “The World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition,” 1884.
26. Ibid.
27. Eureka Daily Sentinel, December 2, 1882
28. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 3, 1882
29. Daniel W. Perkins, Practical common sense guide book through the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition at New Orleans (Harrisburg, PA: L.S. Hart, 1885).
30. Ibid.
31. Walker Lake Bulletin, December 3, 1884
32. Daniel W. Perkins, Practical common sense guide book through the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition at New Orleans.