Today, a final dispatch from Eureka, Nevada, 1895. Charlie works the range while Louis Monaco looks for opportunities farther west. And Tone continues his search for opportunities buried deep underground.
Dear listener,
Have you thought about how life unspools over the places in which we live? How we can track the paths of our own lives by tracing the changes in the land around us?
Charlie and Mary Allison are parents to two boys, 5-year-old Tom and 3-year-old Frank.1 They live a few miles outside Eureka in the small mining town of Ruby Hill, in the same mountains where Charlie would have grown up with his mother’s band. Now, there is a small town there, with about 700 people working what remains of a few mining claims. The mines have mostly run their course, though, and the town is slowly fading away.2
But maybe Charlie doesn’t mind the hillsides and valleys emptying out. Maybe he still feels a connection to the place where he learned to cook pine nuts and celebrated the change of the seasons. Maybe, some nights when he’s back from the ranch, he might even sit on one of those hillsides and look down at Eureka asleep below, remembering when it glowed red with fire.
These days, though, Charlie doesn’t spend much time at home. A cowboy’s life is spent in the saddle for days and weeks at a time, moving cattle across big open expanses and up narrow, tricky canyons. He runs cattle for some of the largest ranching businesses in the area, and he breaks mustangs for sale, too.3
He’ll be the first to tell you that he doesn’t see many Shoshone anymore, apart, of course, from his wife and kids.
Instead, his friends are mostly the ranchers and cowboys he rides with, some who have been on this land for at least a generation or two, and others who are new arrivals from places like Italy and Mexico.4
When people ask him about being Indian, Charlie says that the Shoshone have trouble accepting that his father was not native. Now in his early twenties, Charlie is six feet tall. He can grow a dark beard or a thick mustache, and he speaks fluent English. He says he’s ready to leave behind the Indian ways.
But there are moments when the old ways still peak through. When he takes the herds up Nine Mile Mountain, he still watches for the spirits of the dead. Once, in the middle of a rain shower, his hat brim shading his eyes, he glances over and sees the spirit of a native man standing in the horse track that winds up the mountain. He’s the only one who sees it. His horse doesn’t flinch.5
Back at home, because she doesn’t speak English, it’s hard for Mary to get work in town cleaning homes or doing laundry like some of the other Shoshone women do. Instead, raising her two young boys keeps her busy.
But when she feels adrift, or homesick, or alone, she speaks slowly in Shoshone. Then she moves her hands outward, pushing her sadness or worry or stress out of her body, through the desert, past the mountains, and into the ocean she’s never seen, where they disappear amid the sea and the fog.6
—
Seven years ago, the Monaco brothers decided it was time to go. Louis Monaco had lived in Eureka for nearly 20 years, and his younger brother JB had lived there for more than a decade. Monaco’s son was eight years old and had spent his whole life in Eureka.
At the same time, the mining boom that had kept the town afloat for so many years was starting to bust. An out-of-town reporter had visited and submitted this update to the local newspaper:
“Last evening, on strolling along Main Street, I was surprised at the absence of the crowd I used to see on a Saturday night a year ago, when I was last here. Then the sidewalks were covered with people. The drinking saloons were filled, and the gambling houses were crowded, and so were the hurdy-gurdy shops. Now on a Saturday evening but few people are seen on the streets. The stores and saloons are vacant, and the gambling houses and hurdy-gurdies cannot be paying expenses. A steady but quiet exodus is taking place.”7
Even still, the brothers weren’t hurting for business. JB had a profitable side hustle as a portrait artist with crayons, pastels, and oil paints. He sold his work out of the Monaco studio, where he showed off his portraits of the governor of Nevada, Napoleon I, and his brother Louis.8
JB had become a master of retouching photographs, using his brush skills directly on the negative to make hair look perfect and skin look blemish-free.
But, ever since he exhibited his work in that show in San Francisco, JB felt there were opportunities for the brothers in other places, cities that were more stable and less dependent on a good year in the mines. He’d already started scouting and working on jobs in Virginia City and Reno.9
And eventually, the two brothers agreed: it was time.
But not before they had one last go-round in the studio. In the spring, once news hit that the Monaco brothers were closing up shop, there was a crowd of locals waiting to be photographed. And so, one last time, the brothers did what they had done for a decade: they arranged the subject in front of a backdrop, they kept the subject still, they gauged the light, they exposed the negative, and they rushed to develop the print. By then, it was a choreographed routine between the two men, Monaco working the camera, JB refining the negative.
Maybe as they worked in unison, in a rhythm, they remembered the faces they had captured, the naive young couples and the hard-bitten miners, the charcoal burners and the Western Shoshone in the canyons outside of town, the newborns blinking up into the afternoon light. Maybe they thought about all those faces, all those moments, all those lives frozen onto glass plates, day after day.
The town newspaper wrote:
“We regret to notice that some of our most esteemed citizens are leaving us for new fields, in which to seek the fortunes that in Eureka are hard to find at present. We were at Monaco’s photograph gallery a few days ago, and it surprised us to see the amount of work that this excellent artist was turning out. Now that it is known that he has determined to leave here, everybody that wants to be remembered by their friends is sitting for a picture.”10
Photography can be a science of absence: when to shut out the light, when to close the shutter, when to step into a dark room. Yet, at its heart, what it captures is almost too full, a world of tiny details that make up a single image, printed from glass to paper.
This is what the Monaco brothers did for Eureka, creating a new way of looking at this place that so many people had overlooked.
But all that’s done now. The photographers have left town.
—
And now, the mines have started to run dry.
Everyone knew this day would come, eventually, when the earth simply gave up. But most hoped it wouldn’t happen for a generation, at least, so that Eureka could continue to justify its existence on the map.
But here we are.
About five years earlier, the Richmond Mining Company stopped operating in Eureka. A year later, the Eureka Consolidated did the same. These were the two corporate powerhouses which once held sway over hundreds of miners and contractors and charcoal burners. They froze their operations in the hills, their smelters and furnaces in town, their slag heaps and their tunnels—all went quiet.
Miners, engineers, furnace operators, charcoal burners—the workforce that supported these massive companies froze, too. Workers that had once flooded the streets of Eureka with noise and laughter and cash left town, heading to mining camps in Colorado, Montana, and Arizona, looking for work, starting over.
In the bland terminology of the annual report, the Eureka Consolidated president summed up the situation:
“We can very much reduce our expenses at Eureka and can dispense with the employment of a considerable portion of our staff at that place.
If we should be so fortunate as to open up a substantial supply of ore in that ground, we would be encouraged to again start smelting and refining. I confess, however, that the prospects of finding a considerable body of ore are not very encouraging.”11
Mining didn’t stop entirely, though. Just as they had before, small-scale miners and independent owners kept going. After all, mining breeds optimism, no matter how misplaced.
So, as the market contracted, three years ago, Tone decided to concentrate his time and effort on one mine, probably the most recognizable on Prospect Mountain: the Eureka Tunnel.12
Since the first group of miners dug it out almost 20 years earlier, the Eureka Tunnel has alternated between profit and controversy.
There’s the man who funded the mine, to start—Patrick Connor, who traded in his army commission for a chance to become a mining entrepreneur. He brought with him a long trail of blood. As a soldier, he was stationed out in California, where he chased down the Mexican “Robin Hood” Joaquin Murrieta. Moved to Utah, Connor fought and killed native Americans, including a mass killing of more than 200 Shoshone that almost wiped out an entire band.13
Connor died five years ago, but his Tunnel mine continues to grow. This was his final legacy in Nevada, but not his only one—he had traveled this way before, about 30 years earlier. His mission, at that time, was to punish Western Shoshone for attacks on wagon trains crossing Nevada for California. He wrote in a letter to his troops:
“You will destroy every male Indian whom you may encounter in the vicinity of the late massacres. This course may seem harsh and severe, but I desire that the order be rightfully enforced, as I am satisfied that in the end it will prove the most merciful.”14
The miners working the Tunnel mine today probably don’t know much about the man who created it. But whether they know it or not, this tunnel that burrows towards the heart of the mountain stands like a gash into the side of Mother Earth, one final insult from Major General Connor to the Western Shoshone.
The other controversy around the mine is that it sits in a very crowded neighborhood. The Eureka Tunnel is deep, nestled into the base of the mountain, running about 800 feet into the earth and growing. Just 700 feet to the west is a profitable mine, which is producing gold. The Tunnel passes underneath another mine, and edges close to a mine owned by Thomas Wren, the high-flying attorney who represented the teamsters in the charcoal burner case.15
All of this makes for a delicate operation. Dig too shallow and you’ll never find ore, but dig too deep and you’ll bump into your neighbor’s claim, leading to lawsuits and bad press in the newspapers. And so, for many years, the man in charge of overseeing the work on the Eureka Tunnel was none other than our old friend Maurice Hartnett, who had a precise mental map of the claims crisscrossing the area. He gave up the job about a decade ago when his own mines started to turn a profit. But he likely knows the Tunnel as well as any miner on the mountain.16
So, three years ago, Tone decided that working the Eureka Tunnel mine would be his best chance at making a profit. The mine had already been productive and its massive depth meant Tone would have a head start on any new excavations.
But Tone knew that working one of Prospect Mountain’s most well-known mines wasn’t as simple as showing up and asking for a lease, especially as a Chinese miner. So he came up with a clever plan to get access to the mine in a way that no mine owner would object.
Using the proceeds from other ore strikes, he bought the boarding house where the miners lived near the mouth of the Eureka Tunnel. This gave him easy access to the mine—but also a valid reason for being around, watching the miners enter and exit on their long shifts.
We don’t know how long he worked his plan, but eventually he noticed something. He realized that few miners descended into the depths of the mine during the winter, when snow drifts, slicks of ice, and stinging cold made work both unpleasant and unproductive.
So he approached the owners of the Eureka Tunnel mine with a proposition: he and another Chinese miner would stay on-site all winter long, maintaining the boarding house and the mine outbuildings. And in exchange, they would receive a lease to work the Eureka Tunnel during the winter months. The owners, including one of the town’s most successful teamsters, said yes.
So, Tone and his mining partner went to work. They knew they had to be careful where they dug, and that they couldn’t extend the main mine shaft much farther without running into a neighboring claim.
So, they dug sideways off the main tunnel instead. This cutting through ice-cold rock and dirt in the thin, stale air of the mine was slow, boring, uncomfortable work. But, by the time the winter ended, their bet had paid off: they hit a rich vein of ore—what the newspaper estimated to be about 300 tons of potentially profitable rock.17
This was a big win for two Chinese miners working in the heart of winter on a lease given to them as a favor. Since then, Tone has taken that momentum—and some of the proceeds—to explore other mines.
One of these is the Ethel, a mine on Hoosac Mountain, a lower peak to the southeast of Prospect Mountain. Just as he did with the Eureka Tunnel, Tone has negotiated a lease with the mine owner, a man named McGarry. Under the terms of the lease, if Tone hits ore, he’ll turn it over to McGarry who will sell the ore on Tone’s behalf. Then, McGarry will turn over the proceeds to Tone.18
This all sounds good, in theory, until Tone actually does hit valuable ore in the Ethel mine, about ten tons, worth about $250 per ton. As instructed, he turns the ore over to McGarry for sale.
But the two men hit a snag. McGarry should return about $2,000 in proceeds to Tone. Instead, he returns only about $1,300 from the sale of the ore.
When Tone pushes back on McGarry’s math, the mine owner says that there’s one small detail he never mentioned: he only owns two-thirds of the mine. The remaining one-third belongs to his wife, and McGarry can’t just give away her share of the proceeds to Tone.
If this all sounds a convoluted and contractual excuse for not paying Tone what he’s owed, that’s what Tone thinks, too. So he travels into town and he finds himself a lawyer who will give him a second opinion.
The lawyer that Tone picks is Robert Beatty. You might remember Beatty for his role in defending the charcoal burners in court against charges of riot and conspiracy almost 20 years earlier.
Beatty agrees with Tone that McGarry’s excuses for not paying the full sum don’t hold up, and he agrees to represent Tone in a lawsuit for the remaining $600. So Tone files suit.19
Tone is not the first Chinese worker in Eureka to turn to the courts, but the outcomes aren’t exactly in his favor. After all, many people still remember the court case of Chew v. Nevada.
About 15 years ago, Sheriff Matt Kyle arrested Chew, a Chinese resident of Eureka, on charges of illegally selling opium to a white man for 50 cents.20
Chew, represented by a local lawyer, challenged the arrest in court. One of their central arguments was that Chew could not have a fair trial with a jury of his peers because Chinese men couldn’t serve on juries in Nevada. And, since the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law, the trial itself was violating Chew’s constitutional rights.21
The case ended up going all the way to the State Supreme Court, which made its beliefs plain. In their words, the Fourteenth Amendment simply didn’t apply to Chinese residents of the United States. In fact, the court argued, the Fourteenth Amendment really only existed to protect the rights of Black US citizens in the aftermath of the Civil War.
“Their object was to secure to the African the civil rights which the white persons of the United States enjoyed, and to give to that race the protection of the general government in that enjoyment whenever it should be denied by any state.
The language used necessarily extends some of the provisions to all persons of every race and color; but their general purpose is clearly in favor of the African race…”22
Chew had tried to defend himself under the Constitution, but he instead received a slap from a judge, who told him that he really had no equal protection rights at all.
So, now, Tone is taking a risk turning to the courts again. As a Chinese worker, he doesn’t have the legal foothold of the men who own the mines. A court case that goes wrong could place him in far more trouble than a missing $600 payment is worth. But he presses ahead.
The legal challenge ends up in court, and now there are familiar faces lined up in the courtroom once again. Robert Beatty represents Tone. McGarry chooses one of Eureka’s most successful attorneys—a name we’ve heard before—Thomas Wren.23
In a roundabout way, Tone has reassembled the same cast of characters from two decades earlier, when Robert Beatty defended the charcoal burners against Thomas Wren’s support of the teamsters.
There had been no clear winner out of those hearings 20 years earlier. The court had dropped the charges against both the teamsters and the charcoal burners. But in an unspoken way, Thomas Wren had won that round. He had preserved the status quo—the teamsters back at work, the charcoal burners underpaid, the corporate mining operations returning to full capacity, and no consequences for the killing of five men.
The landscape is much different now. The two corporations that Wren supported are basically defunct. There’s much less money coming from the mines. And for his part, Thomas Wren believes that the only way to revitalize the slumping economy in Eureka is to bring silver back as a currency in the United States. He writes this memorable column in the local newspaper about his latest crusade:
“Thousands of women and children in this State are now suffering for the necessities of life on account of the demonetization of silver. What they want is bread for themselves and children and not the right to vote.”24
So, here we are: two attorneys facing off in the courtroom, with Tone hoping to recoup his lost $600.
The first round goes to Tone and Beatty. The jury finds that McGarry can’t prove his claims about his wife’s ownership of the Ethel mine and that he does, in fact, owe Tone the $600.
But McGarry and Wren aren’t done. They appeal, and the case makes its way up to the Nevada Supreme Court, the same court that shut down Chew’s constitutional argument a few years earlier.
There, McGarry tries a different approach: he says he was not just working as Tone’s sales agent, but actually representing his own wife in the transaction, also. That means both parties should get a cut of the proceeds.
The Supreme Court sides with Tone, again. McGarry still owes him the $600.25
It’s a small case, in many ways. There’s no constitutional question at stake, no big breakthrough on a person’s rights. It’s just a simple civil dispute between two men over $600.
But it’s also a rare win for a Chinese miner. Time and time again, when Chinese plaintiffs end up in court, they are told that their rights aren’t protected under the Constitution, that the language of equality doesn’t apply to them, that the laws that feel aimed directly at them are, in fact, neutral to everyone.
But when it comes to a simple civil dispute about who owes who what, Tone is able to claim a victory. It’s a big achievement over something so small.
Tone takes his victory and returns, as always, to the mountain. He’s been mining here for two decades of his life. He’s ground out success from the rock here. And now, he’s back under the earth here, searching.
He still has that lease on the Eureka Tunnel mine, and he believes there’s more to be uncovered there. And as he digs, the old man on the mountain, Maurice Hartnett, works a neighboring claim. At times, as they dig, the two men are hundreds of feet away from each other, separated by walls of bedrock. They can probably hear each other scrape and shout and shovel from time to time.26
By now, Tone has probably picked up some English, and maybe Hartnett has picked up some Cantonese. Or maybe, when they do talk, they just communicate with the miner’s universal language of nods and points and grunts. Maybe Hartnett tells Tone stories he can’t understand about his days on other mountains in other countries, or his memories of Ireland’s green hills long ago. Maybe Tone tells Hartnett stories he can’t understand about life on the other side of the world and why he left home in the first place.
Or maybe the two men just work in silence, digging two tunnels into the heart of the earth, looking for something together.
—
A woman rides into Eureka, dressed like a miner. She’s pulled her hat over wide eyes that are probably dry from the dust.27
Whether she’s in town for supplies or for company, she won’t stay long. Maybe a few of the locals wave in her direction as she rides past. Then she’s gone, heading back to Cortez.
She sees no contradiction in being a Black woman and being a backcountry miner. And she expects the same treatment from everyone else.28
Her name is Maggie Johnson, and many years ago, she was likely born into slavery in Louisiana, to a father from Africa. But she’s spent much of her adult life in Nevada, where she’s worked as a maid in the boomtown of Virginia City, far to the west.29
About 20 years ago, she witnessed a crime there—a local police officer beat up a woman that didn’t return his affections. Maggie went on the record with what she had seen.30
Whether the incident changed her, we don’t know, but something did. A few years later, she left her life in Virginia City for the outskirts of Cortez, where she opened a boarding house for the local miners.31
Maggie watched the miners come through her building, full of enthusiasm at first, and then worn down by the digging, by the sun, by the seasons, by the desert. Over time, she married one of these miners, in a ceremony that they had to officiate on their own because there was no one qualified to do the job in Cortez.32
Eventually, her first husband died, and she remarried. Then her second husband died, and her boarding house closed. The mining boom that had swept up Cortez in its wake fizzled out.33
But Maggie still has that prospector’s eternal optimism, and she’s earned enough to buy some mining claims of her own. Cortez and the surrounding area is mostly worn out and picked over, but Maggie persists. Even as she enters her fifties, and it becomes harder for her to shovel and pick through heaps of rock, looking for ore, she makes her way out to the mines to work.34
From time to time, the man who singlehandedly ran Cortez for all those years, Simeon Wenban, will return. He’s long since relocated to a three-story mansion in San Francisco, far removed from the days when he and his family etched a life out of this land and his daughters wore furs wrapped around their feet.
Maybe, in some small ways, Wenban sees a reflection of himself as a younger man in Maggie. He ensures that she always has food to eat and supplies available to her at the local store. And legend has it that he arranges to have her only photograph taken by his son-in-law.35
Back in Eureka, Maggie is a bit of a local legend, this woman out on her own amid worn-out mines and little else. The locals say: this is no place for a woman to live, and mining is no job for a woman to work.
But Maggie is still out there, digging, sorting, hauling. Like so many who have chosen to begin anew here—like Tone and Hartnett in the mines, like the Ashims in town, like Thomas Detter at his desk or Louis Monaco at his camera, like Charlie Allison on his horse—Maggie has come to love this place and its clean, spare beauty. This place does not discriminate based on your gender, your skin color, your education, your wealth. It strips you down to your essence and, if you survive, it builds you back up.
One day, it may be time for her to move on. But for now, she is where she needs to be.
—
Have you been wondering, what happened next to the people we followed during their time in town? Today’s dispatch closes the circle.
Charlie and Mary Allison raised their sons near Eureka while Charlie worked as a cowboy.36
In 1907, Charlie and a few other Western Shoshone riders met a stocky man with a big camera on one of the ranches outside of town. His name was Billy Bitzer, and he was a New York cinematographer traveling the west capturing footage.
Charlie and the other cowboys showed off their bronc riding skills and their fancy footwork, and Bitzer captured 3,000 feet of moving pictures.37
Eight years later, Billy Bitzer would be the director of photography for D.W. Griffith’s film “Birth of a Nation.”
Mary died at 75 in 1948, and Charlie died at 86 in 1958. Along the way, he lost a thumb while roping cattle and became known around town for his trademark pipe, which he smoked while on horseback.38
Their descendants still live in the Eureka area today.
—
As Eureka’s fortunes faded, Western Shoshone bands continued to gather at their fandangos. There, they would perform a different kind of song and dance. Lit by firelight and arranged around a pole in the center, this was the Ghost Dance. It was a practice spread from the Paiutes to many of the tribes across the west. The dance could mean different things to different bands, but at its core was the renewal of the earth and the departure of white settlers from the sacred places.39
Still, the white world continued to arrive. Today, the Western Shoshone have reservations throughout Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, but non-native groups continue to use and develop the land governed by the Ruby Valley Treaty without the blessing of the tribe.
In the 1980s, the US government offered the Western Shoshone $26 million to settle their claim to the land, but the tribe overwhelmingly said no.40
Since then, Western Shoshone members have protested against ongoing development, industrial-scale mining, and nuclear testing on their land. In 2006, the United Nations argued that the US government’s ongoing refusal to negotiate with the Western Shoshone was a violation of their human rights.41
—
Thomas Detter did not make it home from New Orleans. The same year he left for the World’s Industrial Exhibition, he turned the deed of his home in Eureka over to his wife Emily.42
What happened to Detter after the Exhibition, we don’t really know. He must have found New Orleans, with its strong Black traditions and its music and its food, a respite from frontier life. He likely died there about seven years after he first arrived for the Exhibition.43
His wife Emily stayed in Nevada, at least for a little while, where she worked as a nanny for a local politician. Six years after Detter left, she sold the house and disappeared from the record.44
Thomas Detter did not write for the public again after arriving in New Orleans, at least as far as we know. But his earlier letters, like this one, are now eerie echoes of what was to come in American life.
“We claim this to be our country and our home, and nothing less than the rights of free men will satisfy us…
We still believe that we shall see the glad day when every man shall be equal before the law.”45
The glad day that Detter envisioned has taken its time arriving.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875—the law that Detter had pushed for, and then celebrated with that speech in San Francisco—that was overturned by the Supreme Court just eight years later.
In ‘Plessy v. Ferguson’ in 1896, the Supreme Court declared the policy of “separate but equal” spaces constitutional. This would lead to segregation and discrimination in different forms nationwide until at least 1964—almost 100 years after Detter wrote those words.46
Today, Thomas Detter is remembered as one of the first Black authors to have published their work in the American West.
—
Matilda Ashim and her family relocated to San Francisco. True to his word, her son Baruch opened the Southern Pacific Pharmacy in the city.47
Solomon and Simon Ashim both died within six years of leaving Eureka.48 Two years later, May Ashim married into another Jewish merchant family, and Baruch walked her down the aisle.49
Matilda outlived two more of her children—her daughter Elizabeth50 and her son George51 both died within one year of each other at age 35. Matilda lived long enough to see the launch of the first airplane, the debut of the first vacuum cleaner, and the invention of air conditioning.
She died in San Francisco at age 82 in 1912.52 Baruch, who Matilda had shielded with her own body in the gunfight at Carson City, died a year later at 61.53
Today, their descendants still live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
—
Louis Monaco and his brother JB opened a photography studio in downtown San Francisco, though the business faced stiffer competition than they had had in Eureka.54
The brothers found their footing eventually until Louis became sick and died in 1897, about nine years after arriving in California. He left behind his wife Liberata and two boys.55
His youngest son Dante died three years later when he and a group of spectators were killed in a roof collapse during a football game between Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley. Those two teams have played each other more than 118 times since that day.56
After Monaco’s death, JB relocated his studio to San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, the heart of the city’s Italian community. When an earthquake devastated the city in 1906, he captured some of the most stunning images of the aftermath.57
JB’s photography of the earthquake—as well as life in the city—is stored in the collection of the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library. You can see much of his work at jbmonaco.com.
At the end of films like “James and the Giant Peach,” “Toy Story,” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” you might notice Monaco Labs credited for effects and color processing. That was the work of JB’s grandson Richard, who ran a film production house in North Beach, the neighborhood his grandfather had also called home.58
—
In 1983, the Eureka Historical Society placed a commemorative plaque in the town cemetery recognizing the five men killed at Fish Creek. It lists the men’s names and then reads: “Charcoal burners massacred August 18, 1879 by a sheriff’s posse southwest of the Fish Creek ranch.”59
—
When Tone won his court case against the Ethel mine owners for the $600 he was owed, they put the mine up for auction. He bought it. But a year later, he ended up back in court, where the mysterious Mrs. McGarry won the mine back.60
He focused instead on exploring the Eureka Tunnel for at least five more years. Like all miners, he had highs and lows. One winter, an avalanche swept away one of his fellow Chinese prospectors. Tone and the other miners formed a search party, but Maurice Hartnett eventually found the man’s body months later in an abandoned mine shaft.61
Tone bumped into Hartnett again as he worked the Eureka Tunnel. In fact, the Irishman took him to court for allegedly digging into his mine.62 But the neighbors settled, and they agreed to work the Eureka Tunnel together.63 By the end of the year, Tone and Hartnett had already pulled more than $600 worth of ore from the mine.64
After nearly 30 years on Prospect Mountain, Tone left for San Francisco en route to China in December 1900. He brought with him a few thousand dollars in profit and a mention in the Eureka Sentinel:
“Although well along in years, he is still quite vigorous. Tone is regarded as a competent miner and is said to be particularly well posted regarding the formation of Prospect Mountain. He has always been honorable in his dealings and has a number of staunch friends in this camp.”65
Whether he brought his earnings home to China or stayed in San Francisco, we don’t know.
—
Restrictions on Chinese immigration to the United States stayed in place until the 1960s. In 2011, the US Senate officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act and decades of other restrictions. In a resolution, they wrote:
“The Senate acknowledges that this framework of anti-Chinese legislation, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, is incompatible with the basic founding principles recognized in the Declaration of Independence that all persons are created equal.”66
—
Do you have time for a few more? If so, stick with us.
Maurice Hartnett spent the rest of his life working the mines of Prospect Mountain. In his later years, he was known for his Fourth of July celebrations, where he would fly the American flag from the highest point on the mountain and fire off 13 shots as the sun rose over Eureka. The local newspaper reported:
“Prospect Mountain will be kept in the Union as long as Maurice Hartnett has a habitation in that quarter.”67
In 1910, 10 years after Tone left for California, Maurice Hartnett was killed when dynamite stored in his cabin accidentally exploded. He was 74 years old and still working the mountain when he died.68
—
Hartnett did not live long enough to see a free Ireland, but after much pressure, British control over the country loosened by the 1920s. In 1949, Ireland officially became an independent republic.69
—
Thomas Detter’s friend and fellow barber J.B. Parker left Eureka four years after he served as a Republican delegate for the county.70 He settled in Spokane, Washington, where he opened a barbershop.71
His son Charles co-founded the city’s first Black newspaper, then served in World War I, fighting in France. He ended his career as a botanist at Howard University. Students can still study his collection of plant specimens there today.72
–
Thomas Detter’s old friends from the California Colored Convention stayed committed to Black civil rights.
Mifflin Gibbs, who left California for Canada, lived for many years in British Columbia, where he invested in mining and railroads. He returned to the United States to work as a lawyer and ended his career as the head of the US consulate in Madagascar.73
Jeremiah Sanderson taught Black students across Sacramento and San Francisco. His daughter would go on to serve as the first Black teacher in the Oakland public school system.74
–
Not long after he covered the state legislature with the help of Baruch Ashim, Samuel Clemens and his Mark Twain alter ego left Nevada for California.75 It was there that he gained a national reputation as a writer. Seven years later, back on the East Coast, he wrote about his adventures in Nevada in his book “Roughing It.”76
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The Perasich brothers, who tangled with Baruch Ashim in Nevada and California, struggled in the aftermath of their brother Nick’s death. George, who had confronted the Ashims but never faced charges, was later arrested in Carson City for a fight with another shopkeeper.77 A few years later, he and his brother Michael were arrested again, this time for fighting with the rival Ivancovich family, who also ran a fruit and vegetable store in town.78 Their brother Peter Perasich, who had been shot during a jailbreak years earlier, later stabbed and killed a man in Tombstone, Arizona.79
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The rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who visited the Jewish citizens of Eureka, served as the leader of his congregation in Cincinnati until he died in 1900 at age 81. He helped establish the Hebrew Union College, the first religious training school for Jews in the country.80
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The Great Wizard of the World, J.B. Macallister, never became as famous as his perhaps-uncle, Andrew. He died in a county hospital in San Francisco in 1899, 23 years after he gave his sold-out show in Eureka. His body was buried in a potter’s field.81
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The actor Amy Stone continued to play the mining towns of the West for a few more years. Eventually, she returned to New York, where she performed in plays produced by David Belasco, an actor and playwright who had also worked in Nevada as a young man. When she died in Brooklyn in 1922 at age 86, Amy Stone’s obituary referenced just one part—her role as Little Eva in the stage version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which she would have played when she was 16 years old.82
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Matilda Ashim’s brother Nathaniel Jacobi lived in Wilmington, North Carolina, for the rest of his life.
About 30 years after the end of the Civil War, he became a loud voice against efforts to vote out the city’s old Confederate loyalists.
On the night of a major election in 1898, Nathaniel and 450 other white Wilmington residents attended a meeting. There, they signed a document called the “White Declaration of Independence.”
The next day, about 500 white residents of Wilmington rioted. The rioters killed at least 14 Black citizens, burned down buildings, and forced the mayor, the city council, and the chief of police to resign.83
Nathaniel succeeded after the riot reshaped Wilmington. His sons gradually took over his business, and he helped found an orphanage outside of town. When he died, his obituary read, “It was a life…full of charity and affection for his fellow man.”84
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About 10 years after the shooting at Fish Creek, the charcoal king of Eureka, John Torre, became a state senator. He served four terms. As mining faded, he became a successful rancher.85 Later in life, he moved to California, where he and his nephew invested in a vineyard. Today their original building and some of their acreage are part of the Ridge Monte Bello winery in Cupertino.86
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Deputy Sheriff J.B. Simpson, who led the sheriff’s posse to Fish Creek, later worked as a mine foreman. He relocated to Salt Lake City and died there at age 62. His obituary was full of tales from his younger years as a sheriff in Eureka.87
Bob Brown, whose testimony at the inquest cast doubt on his fellow posse members, lived for only 2 months after the grand jury announced their verdict. He was killed in a gunfight with a rancher over squatter’s rights to charcoal burning land.88
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Thomas Wren continued working as an attorney and mine owner in Nevada for the rest of his career. He died in Reno in 1904.89 Today, he’s best remembered for his push, early in his career, to ensure people charged with crimes in Nevada can receive representation in court even if they can’t afford an attorney.90
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Simeon Wenban died a multimillionaire in San Francisco at age 76. He left his fortune to his wife and two daughters who had accompanied him years earlier in the backcountry. Today, the popular steakhouse House of Prime Rib operates where his mansion once stood.91
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George Hearst, one of Simeon Wenban’s early backers, continued investing in mines for the rest of his career. He purchased the San Francisco Examiner newspaper and gave it to his son, William Randolph Hearst, to run. It was the first publication in what would become the biggest media company in the world.92
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Maggie Johnson worked the mines near Cortez until 1920, when she was more than 70 years old. She finally retired and spent her remaining years living in a county hospital. She’s buried next to her two husbands in the Eureka town cemetery.93
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Starting in 2012, the US Environmental Protection Agency found evidence that lead and arsenic had leaked into the soil in Eureka from mining and smelting in the 1870s and 1880s. Ultimately, the EPA remediated more than 100 contaminated locations in town.94
Today, Eureka is a town of about 400 people off Interstate 50. It’s worth a visit to walk the streets, to step inside the Eureka Opera House where Louis Monaco gave his speech, and to see the County Courthouse where jurors weighed in on the Fish Creek shooting. If you travel into the backcountry, you may even find a clump of pinyon pines slowly returning to life, or a ruined charcoal oven where the smell of burnt wood still clings to the bricks.
Thank you again for joining us on our journey together this season. We’ll be back soon to follow a new set of people as they start new lives.
If you’d like to learn more about the history of Nevada in the words of the people who once lived there, check out Uncovering Nevada’s Past, edited by John B. Reid and Ronald M. James.
Works Cited:
1. Charles “Charley” Allison, FindAGrave.com, accessed at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/133612279/charles-allison
2. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories, 1993
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 11, 1882
8. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 12, 1887
9. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 21, 1888
10. Eureka Daily Sentinel, March 31, 1888
11. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 7, 1891
12. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 27, 1889
13. Brigham D. Madsen, “Connor, Patrick Edward”, Utah History Encyclopedia (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994).
14. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, United States War Department, 1880, pg. 144
15. Eureka Daily Sentinel, February 1, 1883
16. Eureka Daily Sentinel, January 12, 1882
17. Eureka Daily Sentinel, April 27, 1889
18. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 6, 1893
19. John R. Wunder, “Law and the Chinese on the Southwest Frontier, 1850s-1902”, Western Legal History: The Journal of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society, Volume 2, Number 2, Summer/Fall 1989.
20. Eureka Daily Sentinel, May 2, 1880
21. Andrea Pugsley, “As I Kill This Chicken So May I Be Punished if I Tell an Untruth: Chinese Opposition to Legal Discrimination in Arizona Territory”, The Journal of Arizona History, Vol. 44, Number 2, Summer 2003.
22. Nevada Supreme Court, “State v. Ah Chew”, January 15, 1881.
23. Reno Gazette-Journal, April 17, 1895
24. Eureka Daily Sentinel, December 22, 1894
25. John R. Wunder, “Law and the Chinese on the Southwest Frontier, 1850s-1902”, Western Legal History.
26. Eureka Sentinel, August 5, 1899
27. Nevada State Journal, July 14, 1957
28. Ibid.
29. Sally Zanjani, A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West, 1850-1950 (Lincoln: University of Nevada Press, 1997).
30. Virginia Evening Chronicle, February 18, 1876
31. Janice Hoke, “Maggie Johnson”, Nevada Women’s History Project, September 2017.
32. The White Pine News, January 23, 1886
33. Nevada State Journal, July 14, 1957
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories.
37. Eureka Sentinel, September 21, 1907
38. Robert D. McCracken, “An Interview with Lucille Allison Estella,” Eureka Memories.
39. Kristin Jean Carroll, “Place, Performance, and Social Memory in the 1890s Ghost Dance”, The University of Arizona, 2007.
40. Steven J. Crum, The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pg. 181
41. “Western Shoshone”, James E. Rogers College of Law, The University of Arizona.
42. Elmer Rusco, “Thomas Detter: Nevada Black Writer and Advocate for Human Rights,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Fall 2004
43. Ibid.
44. Eureka Sentinel, June 9, 1888
45. San Francisco Elevator, October 2, 1868
46. “Plessy v. Ferguson”, Oyez.org, accessed at www.oyez.org/cases/1850-1900/163us537
47. San Francisco Chronicle, December 12, 1901
48. Eureka Sentinel, May 28, 1886
49. San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 1888
50. Eureka Sentinel, February 15, 1890
51. Eureka Sentinel, December 15, 1894
52. San Francisco Chronicle, November 12, 1912
53. San Francisco Bulletin, July 24, 1913
54. Richard Dillon, “J.B. Monaco: The Dean of North Beach Photographers,” North Beach: The Italian Heart of San Francisco (Novato: Presidio Press, 1985).
55. Eureka Sentinel, June 19, 1897
56. Eureka Sentinel, December 8, 1900
57. “About J.B. Monaco”, J.B. Monaco Collection, San Francisco History Center, 2009.
58. “Monaco Film Laboratories”, Logopedia.
59. “Charcoal Burners Massacred Aug. 18, 1879”, The Historical Marker Database, accessed at https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=89510
60. Eureka Sentinel, September 19, 1896
61. Eureka Sentinel, February 27, 1897
62. Eureka Sentinel, August 5, 1899
63. Eureka Sentinel, August 12, 1899
64. Eureka Sentinel, September 2, 1899
65. Eureka Sentinel, December 29, 1900
66. Sen. Scott P. Brown, et. al. “S.Res.201 – A resolution expressing the regret of the Senate for the passage of discriminatory laws against the Chinese in America, including the Chinese Exclusion Act.”, 112th United States Congress, May 2011.
67. Eureka Sentinel, July 6, 1889
68. Tonopah Daily Bonanza, October 27, 1910
69. Bruce Gaston, “Timeline of Irish history”, Irish History Compressed, 2012.
70. Eureka Daily Sentinel, October 16, 1884
71. The Spokesman-Review, February 14, 1912
72. Logan Camporeale, “Charles Stewart Parker: Community Leader, War Hero, and Accomplished Botanist,” The Local History, February 26, 2023.
73. Angela Reiniche, “Mifflin W. Gibbs”, National Park Service.
74. “Jeremiah Burke Sanderson”, New Bedford Historical Society.
75. “Timeline of Mark Twain’s Life”, Mark Twain Museum.
76. Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1879).
77. Eureka Daily Sentinel, June 23, 1876
78. The Daily Appeal, May 11, 1880
79. Eureka Sentinel, June 1, 1889
80. Seymour Brody, Jewish Heroes & Heroines of America: 150 True Stories of American Jewish Heroism (Hollywood, FL: Lifetime Books, 1996).
81. Conjurers’ Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, September 1906-August 1907
82. Brooklyn Eagle, December 27, 1922
83. Leonard Rogoff, “A Tale of Two Cities: Race, Riots, and Religion in New Bern and Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898”, Southern Jewish History: Journal of the Southern Jewish Historical Society, Volume 14, 2011.
84. I.J. Isaacs, The City of Wilmington: The Metropolis and Port of North Carolina, (Wilmington: Wilmington Stamp & Printing Co., 1912).
85. Eureka Sentinel, August 23, 1913
86. “Historic Monte Bello: The Historic Vineyards of the Monte Bello Estate”, Ridge Vineyards.
87. Eureka Sentinel, June 12, 1915
88. Eureka Daily Sentinel, November 23, 1879
89. Reno Gazette-Journal, February 5, 1904
90. Sixth Amendment Center, “Reclaiming Justice: Understanding the History of the Right to Counsel in Nevada so as to Ensure Equal Access to Justice in the Future,” The Nevada Supreme Court Indigent Defense Commission, March 2013.
91. San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 1901
92. “George Hearst (1820-1891)”, Hearst Castle, California State Parks.
93. Nevada State Journal, July 14, 1957
94. “Eureka Smelter”, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed at response.epa.gov/eurekasmelter