Spring Valley Watercolors on paper by Thomas Kennet-Were

Elko City on U.P. Railroad Watercolors on paper by Thomas Kennet-Were

“The distance we had to travel to Elko, which was at the time the Eastern terminus of the Californian Railway, was about 450 miles, but how long a time this would take nobody could say. Travellers who had come in from the West begrimed with dirt described the roads as wretched and the mud so horrible, that before leaving Salt Lake City we took the precaution of buying some long Indian rubber boots, called ‘gumboots,’ which afterwards proved of great service. All coaches in the States are called ‘stages,’ and that species of the genus stage in a specimen of which we left Salt Lake City was called a ‘mud wagon’.”

Street in Elko Watercolors on paper by Thomas Kennet-Were

“Elko, when we were there, was a canvass town of no very long existence, which it owed entirely to its being the terminus of the line, and the starting point for White Pine.

To judge by the number of drinking saloons, dancing-halls, and temples devoted to the worship of Faro and Monte, it must have been in a flourishing condition, though I could only hear of one shooting affair, in which nobody was killed. Some of the houses were made of sticks, placed horizontally in wooden frames, supported on posts driven into the earth, the interstices being filled up with clay, and the whole whitewashed. The town was full of Indians of the Shoshone tribe, who sat at the corners of the streets playing cards.”

California

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