A Nevadan Writes About Nevada

I’ve been posting the Chapter One’s of my books on Substack, but today I’m going to switch it up a little by posting the last chapter of “A Sheriff in Nevada: Downfall” because I have a not-so-subtle confession to make.

I’m a Nevada nerd and have been for as long as I remember:

• Completed schooling at a Nevada elementary school, junior and senior high schools, and a community college and university (Go Pack).
• Thirty-ish years of public service to the Great Citizens of Nevada.
• Voted in every Nevada election that I can recall.
• Been to all 17 counties. Not a small feat.
• Lived at both ends (Carson City, as well as Washoe and Clark counties).
• Wrote several Nevada-centric novels loaded with Silver State trivia.
• Married the Senior Archivist at the Nevada State Archives (okay, she started there long after we were married, but I’m still counting it).

Being a pragmatist on top of a nerd helps me to see the state’s weaknesses on top of its strengths, and one of the biggest is the near-criminal underfunding of services to our fifteen* rural counties, often referred to as the Cow Counties. I suppose it’s understandable when you have a Las Vegas in Clark County sucking up most of the attention with Reno in Washoe getting it’s fair share of crumbs.

Life in the rurals is not for the faint of heart. There is a lot of ranching and some farming, and not enough water for everyone. Distances are vast: Ely in the east is 240 miles from Vegas, 320 miles from Reno, and 250 miles from Salt Lake City. Internet access is not guaranteed for some stretches, though this is improving. The buildings for most K12 schools are many decades old and teachers can be hard to come by.

On the other hand, the people are as honest and reliable as the day is long. It’s these folks that drew me to write my Nevada-centric novels, and I used a specific fictional character to outline the below local history of fictional Davis, Nevada. I made special note that this person is a Mormon, the demographic most responsible for populating the Nevada Territory other than miners. I sometimes wonder if they get enough credit for their influence and presence.

One piece of trivia: the mountains in the above cover can be found outside of the aforementioned Ely, Nevada. The Silver State is home to the most mountain ranges in the Lower 48.

“A Sheriff in Nevada: Downfall” is the second of three “Sheriff” books, and the series has been compared to “Longmire,” “Yellowstone,” and “Justified.” Tropes: Nevada, Small Town, Law enforcement, Murder, Romance.

It is available in our online bookstore and across the major platforms. You can find the links on our website. The first book of the series in electronic format is available on Amazon for 99¢.

(*I don’t know if the city-county conglomeration of Carson City is technically a rural county, but it’s not Clark or Washoe, so I’m sticking it in the rurals. Speaking of which, I wrote a fun op-ed years ago about Tonopah in Nye County. Check it out.)

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University of Nevada Oral History Program

An Interview with Eugene Holmes Interviewed April 2010
Published May 2010
Interviewer: Kyle Ramos

Description: For good or bad, much of Nevada’s printed history for the rural areas dwindles to almost nothing in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, yet the “cow counties” are the source and the strength of Silver State’s unique pioneer character. This interviewer reached out of the nursing homes in far off regions of Elko and Ely to hear from Nevadans who witnessed our state’s evolution from the Era of Flight to the Internet Age.

Eugene Holmes is the quintessential rural Nevadan and a member of the Greatest Generation. He was born and raised in the mining and ranching area of Davis, Nevada, and worked his family farm almost all his life. He served during World War II, received two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for bravery, and lost a son in Vietnam. He was raised a Republican and says he will die as one, has immense respect and admiration for President Obama, the office holder at the time of this interview, and hopes the next president carries forward his good work.

This interview took place over a span of five days, as we had to be flexible in respect to Mr. Holmes health care needs.

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We have the recorder going, Mr. Holmes, so if you could start with the basics, please. Your full name, your date of birth, the usual facts.

My name is Eugene Halley Holmes and I am one hundred years old. I was born on April 15, 1910, and I’m named after my father and after the comet that was in the sky above us when my momma pushed me out. I was born in Davis, Nevada in the little hospital on main street just before it shut down. I had ten surviving brothers and sisters, we being a small Mormon family, but I’m the last one. My junior wife Maura died last year, Gladden and almost all of our kids are gone, and I expect to be joining them soon.

The grandkids and great grandkids don’t visit. They got real lives. I don’t mind. They’re in Salt Lake and San Diego and Houston and Orlando and Atlanta, but we all get together over the internet. We Facetime at Christmas and my birthday. That internet is a wonderous thing. Don’t ever take that stuff for granted, son. It’s amazing.

Let’s see. I’m a farmer. Worked the original stake from the day I could walk until the day I couldn’t. Married Gladden when we were young, just kids. She was a Davis, one of the first families in the area, and my folks were homesteaders or stakeholders. I don’t know what you’d call us, but I spent my life working that one corner of the Davis land and…

Mr. Holmes?

Sorry, I think I’m saying this all backwards. You said you wanted Davis history, but not mine.

It sounds like it’s one and the same.

Just about. Just about. I’ve been thinking about what to say when I read your letter. You want my best memory of things and the history will catch up later.

You can say it however you want.

Okay, let’s try this. You can’t talk about Davis unless you talk about the horse barn. Yeah, now I know better that you put horses in a stable, but we called it the horse barn. It’s a fixed point in the history of the town because it was one of the first real buildings up on the hill that ended up being called Davis. It’s always been there, one way or the other. My grandfather said he remembered the horse barn was first used for horses, cattle and tools. The town grew up around it, even the houses they built for the people moving in.

The horse barn started like every building starts: wood and nails. Trees were chopped down, stripped and shaped into planks, and nailed together with whatever is handy. It’s not like you could run down to the hardware store. You stuck things together back then in all sorts of ways. It all worked out for what was needed at the time, with an open space in the middle, and stables and rooms for tools and storage on three walls. Second floor was sort of tacked on for hay and kissing your sweetheart when you needed a private place out of the sun. Biggest building in these parts for the longest time. Got expanded over the years whenever someone had the gumption and the money.

The wood rotted as it does, and it was reinforced and covered by bricks from the surrounding open pits that we called quarries, sounding all fancy like. Sandstone was cheap and handy back then, and if Nevada had a state brick, that’d be it. I mean, go to Carson City. The capitol building, the old mint [now the State Museum], and half dozen other important buildings are sandstone, but that ain’t the most stable of building material, you know.

Folks like to compare Davis to Tonopah, with both of them perched on hills over flat valleys, but Davis is like Yerington or any other farming town, too. We’re surrounded by ranches and farms in the flatlands all around, though not so much to the south. That’s where the pit mining started, and pit mining is what first drew people to the area.

I ain’t no geologist, but I heard talk that the hills to the south of Davis are strange. Just plain strange. One guy from the Mackey School of Mines [at the University of Nevada] told a town meeting in the Fifties that they were like different scoops of ice cream on the same plate. One hill was vanilla, the other was chocolate, and one was Neapolitan, with all sorts of minerals and crap mixed in. The one thing they all had in common was they were unstable to mine, which made drilling too dangerous. We ended up with a bunch of pits instead of normal miners, like in Virginia City, with hundreds of tunnels hidden under the streets.

Before I was born, we got miners, we got ranchers, we got some farming, and we got people selling stuff to all of them. They need a town, so Davis was born, starting with the horse barn. Am I making sense?

Of course you are.

Appreciate the politeness. I feel like I’m blabbing. Okay, the horse barn.

Davis was probably largest as it’s ever been around the Great War. You call it World War One. I remember the town was crazy with people, but I was seven or eight, so I didn’t know better. But I do remember the horse barn was still being used for the same things, like storage and stuff, but the open inside space was used for Friday night dancing, too. My folks didn’t approve of that kind of recreation, not by a long shot, but they weren’t stupid. I love my sisters, but they were best kissed in the dark, bless their souls. My folks got grandkids because they turned a blind eye to some of the teachings in our Good Book.

Being in the center of town, the horse barn occupied prime land, but that was also its fatal flaw. People wanted the building and land for their own purposes, so it changed hands about every two years when I was a teenager, almost like clockwork. It housed all sort of businesses until the Great Depression, then it sat empty for years, rotting in the ten-month summers that eastern Nevada is famous for.

Davis nearly died itself when the banks crashed and lost my neighbors’ hard-earned money. People were leaving in groups in the middle of the night and never coming back. The one railroad we had from Elko (or was it Ely?) stopped without warning, and if you know any train history, that was a big blow. The only good thing was no one starved.

You probably can’t imagine how bad it was, even with this last crash. People were hurting, lost their pride, doing things to stay alive that no respectable person would have thought of in normal days. They would have sold their children to keep them fed and clothed. Maybe that happened in other places but not Davis. We hunkered down, pooled our resources, and made sure people got the food they needed to survive, but Good Lord, them years were rough.

Let’s see now. I got drafted…no, wait. I volunteered and enlisted because it was the right thing to do, and I left Davis in early 1942, just before my birthday, so I must have been thirty-one. Yeah, that’s right. Lots of people didn’t understand, but my wives did. Right thing to do at the time. I was the oldest guy in my company, older than most of the sergeants and officers except for the white-hair colonels. Walk onto a couple of beaches and marched across France, always the oldest non-com [non-commissioned officer, a sergeant]. My war ended a few miles outside Berlin when Hitler killed himself. Got scratched here and there along the way, but nothing like some of my buddies. Got all my fingers and toes and most of my brains. Can’t complain.

Came back to Gladden and Maura and the kids in 1946, twice as old as when I left. Lots of changes. Davis was busy again, though not like it was before the first war. People were starting to learn that silver and gold weren’t the only profitable minerals in eastern Nevada. Technology needs all kinds of mines, and Nevada has a lot of rocks, so my senior wife and the Davis family got rich by leasing out mining rights and stuff. Me, I kept my head down and worked the farm.

But Nevada was still a poor state, before and after the war. Heck, when I was a kid, my grandfather told me there was serious talk in his day about making Nevada into a territory again. That’s how poor we were.

Our state leaders invested in a new business to keep the doors open: S-I-N. You might think that’s strange for an area that was settled by Mormon farmers and ranchers, which describes almost how almost all of Nevada got settled by the white man in those days, but desperate people do desperate things.

Gambling became legal in Nevada in the 1930s, but Jefferson County held off for as long as it could. I heard somewhere we were the last or one of the last Nevada counties to open a casino, but it finally happened, and it happened while most of us were fighting a war. Take a guess where the first real casino opened in Davis.

The horse barn?

Right in one. Davis’ oldest building became a sparkling fountain of sin on the side of the hill. I was disappointed when I got off the bus, me in my Class A uniform, getting dropped off on the curb right in front. The barn had a fresh coat of paint and all sorts of pretty lights, but I could see the barn behind the façade. Anyone could, if they knew what to look for. It was still there, I mean. The new owners did everything on the cheap and tacked on their stuff on the frame of the barn, not bothering to take out the old walls or roofing. And they stopped calling it the horse barn, of course, though they came close to keeping the old name.

That was Davis in a nutshell, sorry to say. Cut corners where you can. Them shortcuts aggravated me over the years. Now I love my hometown as much as anyone loves theirs, but I ain’t blind to human weakness. For instance, whenever the casino wanted to grow, it grew, end of story. The county commissioners should have told them to pull down everything and start over. But I also know every time the casino got bigger, two or three commissioners got brand new cars. Like I said, I ain’t blind.

But I’m not stupid, either. Gladden and Maura and I laid down the law. We told our kids to stay the hell out of the barn or we’d all take turns tanning their hides up one side and down the other. They listened, except for Eugene, Junior, but no one could tell that boy nothing. At least he died a hero in Asia.

I’m gonna join him soon. I know it and there’s no point in pretending otherwise. I’m happy and glad for ninety percent of the choices I’ve made, so I got no complaints. I’ll be back with Gladden and Maura with our kids around us. Fair reward for a hard day’s work, in my mind.

And the horse barn. When the walls and the roof of the horse barn collapses like I know it will someday, I’ll welcome those good people to my new home in Heaven with open arms. Ain’t their fault if the owners of the Corral Casino ain’t got the good sense to protect their customers and their investments.

[End of first interview.]

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Cassidy Carson and JT Hume (“CC & JT”) are independent writers, publishers, and co-owners of Two Moore Books, LLC out of Carson City, Nevada, USA. Our growing book catalog can be found on our bookstore and the major platforms. Our podcast mission for “The CC and JT Amateur Hour,” is to “help writers write.” We received the 2024 Women in Podcasting Award in the “Best Authors and Books Podcast” category from the Women Podcasters Network. We also support “The Nevada Author Network” with the Sierra Arts Foundation out of Reno, Nevada.

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