The earliest pioneers that occupied the Nevada region were such men as might be expected to inhabit a land of rock and sand and sagebrush swept from season to season by hot sand-blasts and bitter blizzards, wresting a little gold from the gravel, or a meager crop of beans from the bottomlands, and sustaining life upon these beans, bacon, flapjacks and whisky. The worst of them settled their differences and established their rights in personal encounters with knife and pistol. The best of them petitioned Congress to form the Territory of Nevada, and provide a lawful government. Among the first pioneers were Mormon emigrants from Utah, who came to Nevada by wagon train. Camping in Carson Valley to rest and recuperate their animals, they also devoted a little time to prospecting. In the spring of 1850, they discovered a little gold at the mouth of what later became known as Gold Canyon. Knowing nothing of geology, they did not understand the significance of the deposit there. They abandoned the search shortly for what they believed to be greater opportunity beyond the Sierras. But snow in the mountains drove the party back to Carson Valley, where William Prouse, Nicholas Kelly and John Orr passed the time by continuing a casual search for gold. Orr in fact dug a quarter ounce nugget from a crevice in the rocks and was sufficiently thrilled to christen the place Gold Canyon. He failed to appreciate that gold in the canyon indicated a source of far greater riches higher up the slopes. With the advance of summer and the opening of the passes across the mountains the entire party of Mormons moved on into California. In the meantime, Congress refused to accept the Deseret boundaries as specified by the Mormon Church, and the elders were confirmed in their decision that they must control the area by colonization.
In those days, Mormon Station was established directly on the old Hangtown (afterwards Placerville) Road, then the principal route over the Sierras. There was a thriving trade with the thousands and tens of thousands of adventurers who were then pushing their way westward toward the gold-fields of California. Seeing that there was money in this trade, more than a few adventurers, principally from Salt Lake and California, established posts on the line of the road to the eastward of Mormon Station and Eagle Ranch, a few even pushing out a considerable distance into the deserts. The majority of these traders, however, returned to California each season, following in the wake of the last emigrant-trains that came in over the Plains, and there remained until the tide of emigration began to pour in again the next year.
The Mormon men who discovered the gold knew but little about mining, and had only pans with which to wash the gravel, they found gold sufficiently plentiful to enable them to make small wages. It does not appear, however, that the discoverers worked them very long, before they decided to continue on their journey to California. Other emigrants coming in and encamping on the river learned of the discovery of gold in the canyon, and, being anxious to begin gold-digging as soon as possible, did some prospecting along the bed of the ravine. But the gold being fine (like dust in fine sized particles), and the quantity not being up to their expectations, nearly all pushed on to California, where they expected to make fortunes in a few weeks or months; as all believed, that they, through their superior acuteness, would find places in some of the dark and secret gulches of the Sierras where they would be able to gather pounds of golden nuggets.
Some men were attracted to the Nevada gold find, and although the find was not rich, it supported a number of prospectors for several years. By the spring of 1852 a considerable number of men began working on the lower part of Gold Canyon, most of them using rockers in their mining operations. As these men did well, making from $5 to $10 per day, the number of miners on the canyon was considerably greater in the winter and spring of 1853, there being as many as two or three hundred men at work. As there was little water in the bed of the canyon except during the winter and spring months, few miners were to be seen at work in summer seldom more than forty or fifty. The little village at the placer diggings came to be known as Johntown. The placer miners in Gold Canyon were entirely indifferent to the departure of the Mormons. They worked on, washing auriferous gravel from the bars, or carrying rich earth from dry ravines to the nearest stream. They lived in little brush huts, or tents, in summer, and in cabins of rough stone in winter. Gambling and drinking were their only amusements. The work was very hard and monotonous, and often the men hardly made a living.
In 1856 the Mormons made their last efforts at aggressive colonization, sending sixty to seventy families to Carson Valley, and smaller parties to other portions of Nevada. A second station was established in Carson Valley, and a second time the lure of gold destroyed it. Arriving before local elections, and being well organized, they placed Mormons in nearly every office. However, the miners held squatter meetings, and began to talk about secession from Utah. While things hung thus uncertain, Brigham Young, in 1857, suddenly abandoned the struggle, partly because Salt Lake had trouble of its own, partly because the astonishing growth of California seemed to nullify all his efforts along the eastern base of the Sierras.
But before the territory of Nevada was established, western Utah had lost even the momentary importance which it had enjoyed in the mid 1850s through the Mormon trading posts on the main travel route to California placer mines. The California placers appeared to be nearing exhaustion in the late 'fifties. Travel through the Carson Valley had decreased to one-tenth of the maximum which it had reached in 1854. Chinese laborers had taken over the abandoned claims and farms of the whites at the original "Mormon Station," on Carson River. The settlement had even come to be identified as Chinatown, much to the disgust of the few whites who remained, 'and who advised the occasional travelers that the town was actually named "Mineral Rapids." The name failed to register. They changed it to "Nevada City." That too failed. In the days of its resurgence, however, it became Dayton, and that name remains upon the maps of western Nevada, though the town itself almost vanished.
In those days the real center of activity in the district was Johntown, a settlement of a dozen shanties and a score of huts, tents and dugouts, located some four miles from Dayton, up Gold Canyon. From about 1856 up to 1858, Johntown was the "big mining town" of Western Utah at least was the headquarters of most of the miners at work in the country. There in the shadow of Sun Peak, later identified in government maps as Mount Davidson, a hundred miners wielded pick and shovel, pan and rocker, to extract a meager living from the earth. From this primitive settlement they wandered into adjacent canyons upon the slopes of Mount Davidson, taking a poke full of dust here and there along the gravel bottoms. Up Gold Canyon on the south side of Mount Davidson they worked. Up Six-Mile Canyon to the eastward they labored, stripping the surface of such gold as their pans and rockers might reveal, but apparently never realizing that this gold must have come from a richer source in the decomposed outcroppings above. From month to month as they ascended the slopes their gold became less fine. The bankers in Placerville, California, who bought the dust, reduced the price gradually from eighteen to thirteen dollars an ounce, explaining that it was mixed with a growing percentage of silver. The miners complained, and still failed to understand the significance. Still they worked upward, probably because they knew of no better way to provide their beans and bacon and whisky. The mining region had two rather curious newspapers soon after 1854. One, the Scorpion, was published at Mormon Station; the other was the Gold Canyon Switch, published at Johntown. Both were written on sheets of foolscap, and were passed from hand to hand up the gulch until they reached the most distant prospector in the range.
At times the miners suffered greatly from lack of the necessaries of life. One winter many Gold Canyon miners were without boots. All that were obtained had been carried across the Sierras by the famous "snow-shoe Thompson" on his Norwegian snow-skates. He often took one hundred pounds upon each of his journeys between Placerville and Carson, which he made in three days one way and in two days the other. To add to the miners' discouragements, the placers were nearly worked out by 1857. In the years between 1850 and 1857, inclusive, the total number of miners at work in Gold Canyon had varied from twenty to two hundred. During this time the average of the daily earnings of each miner had diminished from more than five dollars to about two dollars.
Johntown, in the days of its glory, was a great place for the game known among pioneers as "bucking the tiger' or "wrastling with the beast of the jungle." Jacob Job, the leading merchant, says Dan De Quille, "used to give the boys all the faro they could take care of, and often a good deal more." He dealt "out of hand," never using a faro box. Old Billy Williams, of Carson Valley, another enterprising gambler, came into Johntown with the card game of "Twenty-one." A few days of free-hand faro and Twenty-one during the Christmas holidays generally sent all the luckless and reckless Johntowners back to toms and rockers, each man "a total financial wreck." Johntown in those days had also a Saturday-night ball every week at " Dutch Nick's saloon," and the three white women in town, together with Sarah Winnemucca, the Piute princess, made up the set and provided a foretaste of the night club of to-day. On the rare days when the Placerville stage came in with the coined reward of their toil they gathered in the store of Jacob Job, the camp's only merchant, and bucked the tiger until Job had traded experience for cash and sent them back to their picks and shovels.
Among the men mining there were names which, despite the curse of Apostle Orson Hyde, have not been forgotten. There was Henry Thomas Paige Comstock, a lanky, loud-voiced, boastful, bullying prospector with a short chin beard and a shaven upper lip which gave him a sanctimonious air entirely out of keeping with his real character. He was known familiarly as "Old Pancake," because he subsisted chiefly upon flapjacks, insisting he was always too busy to make the sour-dough bread of the miners. There was James Finney, the Old Virginia who had drifted into the region as a teamster with the Mormon expedition of 1851, and remained to become as famous as he was bibulous. There were Peter O'Riley, Patrick McLaughlin, Manny Penrod, Jack Bishop, Joe Winters, and a few other choice spirits with some claim to fame. The placers did not last, and when the year of 1859 began, western Utah still remained a comparatively unknown region, and its pioneers were losing hope. Trade had departed with the close of the placer-gold period of California. Most of the scattered trading posts, mere tents pitched in the desert to meet the pilgrims, disappeared and their owners were now on cattle ranches or running saloons in a few gulches whose small deposits of placer gold were fast becoming exhausted. Nevada seemed to be a "played-out country" with little to offer.
It didn’t take long for that outlook to change…..
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