The middle of everywhere

Sunset, Sept, 1998 by Peter Fish

The middle of everywhere

"We have the best of the basin," Mike Bunker says. "The best mountains, the best silt valleys. The best deep dust in the dry summer and the best mud when it rains."

We are driving in Bunker's Bureau of Land Management pickup west from Ely, Nevada. We are attempting to parallel a ghost route, that of the Pony Express as it came through this empty quadrant of the West known as the Great Basin.

I'm here because I don't want to be. Both the basin and the trail are hard sells. There are places in the world where you never feel at ease, and for me the Great Basin has always been one of them. In fact, it gives me the shivers. Those faded mountains and silt valleys, the alkaline washes with their sparse growths of greasewood, most of all the overwhelming sense of space in all directions - these are beautiful to some eyes, but not particularly to mine. It is the least hospitable landscape I can imagine, one whose every square mile announces that mankind is here on sufferance.

In the same way, I never quite understood the Pony Express. In 1860 a freight company started it to move mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California: young riders rode 75 miles at a stretch, changing horses each 10 miles, so that the mail traveled the 1,900 miles in 10 days. To me the most salient point seemed to be that it was an utter bust: the express survived only 19 months, made pointless by the completion of a transcontinental telegraph line. Like the basin, it has the aura of futility about it, yet it has stood for more than 130 years as an exemplar of gallant American enterprise. Mike Bunker will hear none of these criticisms. Five years ago he and a BLM archaeologist were studying aerial photos, surveying a possible site to sell for oil drilling. "I saw a straight line in the brush," he recalls. "Straight lines are products of man, not nature."

What they had found was the lost Pony Express Station at Jacobs Well. Bunker turns off the highway, and we drive to the site. Like a lot of archaeological sites, it doesn't look like much. But for the last four years, Donald Hardesty, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada at Reno, has been leading digs of Jacobs Well, and the archaeologists have recovered remnants of a vanished world: a coffee grinder, bed springs, a drill bit, red silk ribbons. Jacobs Well was in operation in 1861, and was used as a district station for the Overland Trail. It is thought to have burned and been rebuilt at least twice. "People think everything in the world has been found," Bunker says. "But that's not right."

Where I look at the Great Basin and see an unsettling vacancy in the world, Bunker sees half-forgotten epics of heroism and avarice and adventure. He points south to the White Pine Mountains. "Down there was the most intense and short-lived mining boom in the United States," he says. "When silver was discovered, they sold 4,000 train tickets in Chicago in one month to come out here. There were 25,000 people in the town of White Pine." It's all gone now. Great Basin ghost towns don't last forever. "The brick gets plundered. A lot of it goes to California as used brick." That's what Bunker is working against. He wants the Great Basin and Jacobs Well to be remembered.

We get back in his pickup. When Bunker drops me off at my car, he's still selling the Great Basin. "You get used to all the space," he says. "Other places start feeling a little cramped."

I consider this as I follow U.S. Highway 50 west. The road crests at Pinto Summit, then slows as it runs through the middle of Eureka, Nevada.

"We were called the Pittsburgh of the West," Wally Cuchine tells me. Eureka is the kind of small, self-contained town where one man can be dubbed Mr. Eureka, and Wally Cuchine is that man. "We were the leading lead producer in the world. Sixteen lead and silver smelters. Nine thousand people."

That was in the 1880s, more recent than the Pony Express or the White Pine boom, but still some time ago. Today's Eureka is a smaller if, without its smelters, a more salubrious place. Cuchine shows me around. The first stop is the Eureka Opera House, which he manages. It's a gilded, curlicued building whose fire curtain teases desert sensibilities with a lush scene of gondolas being poled along Venetian canals. Cuchine shows me the offices of the Sentinel newspaper, now a museum, and the Jackson House hotel and the Eureka County Courthouse.

What is obvious, yet must be remarked upon, is that all these Eureka landmarks are still standing. They haven't toppled into the greasewood or been shipped brick by brick to California. Instead the opera house and courthouse have been expensively restored; the hotel, too. All this is due to mining money - there are big gold mine operations in Eureka County, one just south of town - and, perhaps, sheer stubbornness. "We've always maintained our population," Cuchine says. "We never got lower than 300. There has always been a viable community here."

Over bourbon at the Owl Bar and Steak House, Cuchine explains that he has lived lots of other places, but Eureka is home. "From the first time I saw Eureka, I always wanted to come back. I call it the middle of everywhere. You can go everywhere from here."