A Great Basin Mosaic: The Cultures of Rural Nevada by Hulse James W

Author:Hulse, James W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Nevada Press

Low in the Snake Valley [on the east side] there is little plant growth except scattered greasewood shrubs. When you move up the gradual slope, you soon find shadscale, followed by sagebrush, rabbitbrush, and other shrubs. In less than ten horizontal miles, you can climb from cactus desert into pinyon-juniper woodland, mountain mahogany, ponderosa pine, white fir, aspen, Engelmann spruce, limber pine, bristlecone pine (the oldest living trees), and on above the timberline where the plants are only a few inches tall as in the far northern tundra.

COAL-FIRED POWER?

A long-standing controversy has existed over whether a coal-burning electrical power plant should be built near Cherry Creek. A southern California utility company, constrained by antipollution standards in effect in its home territory, proposed a White Pine solution for generating power with coal transported from mines hundreds of miles to the east in Utah or Wyoming. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) purchased the Northern Nevada Railway right-of-way from Kennecott on the assumption that this could be arranged. After months of negotiations, the plan was blocked by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada because of environmental concerns. As of 2015, the proposal was in abeyance.

A STATE PRISON

Early in the post-Kennecott era, when White Pine County business leaders searched urgently for new economic incentives, many landed on the idea of a state prison. The overcrowded conditions of the original prison in Carson City forced the government to consider a new venue for a medium-security facility. The state eventually decided on a site in Smith Valley, about 9 miles from Ely. Construction proceeded in two phases in 1988–90 at a cost of more than $54 million.

This addition to the region’s economy not only brought new jobs during the construction phase but also a work force of 400 or more employees on a continuing basis for more than twenty-five years, with the promise that it would continue indefinitely.

OTHER TOWNS

Other communities in White Pine bring additional diverse images into the mosaic. McGill’s post Kennecott experience may be told briefly. It rests on a wide alluvial fan looking westward from the Schell Creek Mountains. Most of its buildings are neglected and decaying. Its population had dwindled to about 1,000 in 2015, the county’s more prosperous activity having moved to Ely’s closer satellites—the clusters of homes in the Steptoe Valley north, east, and south of the commercial center.

Another, even sadder story has emerged in Cherry Creek. It appeared in this narrative earlier as boomtown that tried to become the county seat in the 1880s. That camp and its artifacts have long since disappeared. In the early twenty-first century, it has become, unfortunately, a rural-industrial junkyard, retaining the debris of two or three generations of contemporary prospectors who have brought their industrial earth-moving hardware and have left much rusting in place, along with used furniture, washing machines, tires, and other items not worth taking away.

And finally, the tiny town of Baker near the Utah border deserves mention. A recent count recorded a population of less than a hundred, but it sits near the entrance to the Great Basin National Park.

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