Hi, and welcome to the first season of Dust and Dispatches. My name’s Matt Hansen. In 2024, I visited the town of Eureka, Nevada, in the high desert about 300 miles west of Salt Lake City.
I’d always been curious about this part of the country, with its worn-out mines and whispery old towns—places with names like Broken Hills, Rhyolite, and Treasure City.
Eureka is still alive, a stopover on Route 50, the Loneliest Highway that winds through the west.
The town is full of artifacts from its heyday—a courthouse, an opera house, an old main street. Yet as I talked with the folks that still live there, I heard about a past that was different than I expected.
Of course, this was a mining town, full of frontier saloons and Old West caricatures. But it was also something more—it was once one of the most diverse places west of the Mississippi, where people from the old world and the new one worked together to create something new. In a way, the story of Eureka helps illuminate the United States today, where Americans are still figuring out exactly how to live with each other.
Working for many years as a writer and a reporter, it’s been easy to see what’s happening in front of us, what we consider new or unprecedented or transformational in this moment. But the bigger question that’s always haunted me a bit is: how did we get here in the first place? Why do we live the way we do?
The story of why a few hundred people decided to start over in a remote place in the middle of the Nevada desert can help us answer some of those questions. As we go through our own period of change, the stories of the people who came before us may provide us with guidance, or clarity, or at least a little empathy.
So, I hope you’ll stick with us over the next 20 episodes as we explore how 5 people navigated their lives in this place, more than 150 years ago.
We’ll see you in Episode 1.