 |
 |
 |
||
|
||||
|
February 17, 2006
Boom Town event a successFIVE DAYS OF REGIONAL HISTORY HELD AT LONGSTREET INN
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
It began: "Take one man with money and a desire to plunge, / one man with a reputation as a prospector, / mix this well and sprinkle over a few newspapers throughout the country. / Make a rich crust with plenty of nerve, / a little more money and a few damn fools / and set in the desert to bake." One hundred and one years later and a boomtown of another sort is in the oven baking, only today it's known as economic development - or in this case, history-based economic development. These days, the "mining" activity needs quite a lot more than just "one man with money" to grubstake a lone single-blanket, jackass prospector. It needs sponsoring organizations and businesses. And newspapers today are only one way to publicize a prospective venture's bonanza or borrasca - Spanish for, in the first instance, fair weather or the discovery of a rich vein of ore and prosperity; that, in contrast to stormy weather and disillusionment. The biggest change is that the "damn fools" today might be anyone mad or foolish enough to be fascinated with Mojave Desert lore and history. Apparently there are quite a few of them. Recently, EDEN, the Economic Development Authority of Esmeralda and Nye counties, reported to the Nye County Board of Commissioners on the bonanza in the desert two weeks ago with the first Nevada Boom Town History Event. The diggings - that's to say, the five-day conference - took place at the Longstreet Inn. EDEN, represented by Paula Elefante, was one of seven corporate sponsors. She informed the commissioners of how 193 people from around the nation - some from as far away as New York and Florida - came to Southern Nevada, individually paying $40 per night, plus restaurant expenses and the admittance fee covering the cost of the conference. For almost a week attendees listened to amateur and professional historians alike talk about aspects of the southern and central Nevada and southeastern California's claims on Western U.S. history. "That 200 people would come from all over the country ... to the middle of nowhere just to have the chance to spend some time with other people who understand their own fascination with this kind of history" was remarkable, said Robin Flinchum, a freelance reporter with the Pahrump Valley Times and an organizer of the event and longtime historian of the region. "Like any specialized hobby or interest, it's the kind of thing only other people who share your interest really understand," Flinchum said. "For me, one of the most significant features of this particular event was the number of people who showed up in period clothes, especially for the Saturday night dinner," she said. "I've never seen anything like that, and I thought it was really wonderful." Mind you, the historical frame for this rump of the nation, roughly 1900-1970, represents what has traditionally been regarded as post-frontier history, the period after the 1880 census when the government declared the American frontier of agricultural settlement closed. By that time, statistically speaking, there were more than two people per square mile living in the West. The "Wild West" had been essentially tamed. Yet on the mining frontier, at the turn of the 20th century Central Nevada and the Death Valley region were just becoming known for their mineral wealth as prospectors poured in. By the end of its first decade, Nevada had seen some of the greatest mining strikes and the most populous boomtowns as any place in the history of the West. Rhyolite, today a desolate ghost town, had 10,000 people living there in 1906. Where precious metals are concerned, it seems - to mix metaphors somewhat - it's not over until it's over. "Rhyolite stands as physical evidence of the fact that the West was a place where pioneers met the forces of urbanization and industrialization head-on, not a place where innocents and individualists escaped those unsettling forces," said University of Colorado Western historian Patricia Limerick in an essay published some years ago. "This fact is seldom recognized by scholars." Limerick caused a revolution in Western historiography during the 1990s as professional historians began to rethink their assumptions about the significance of the Western frontier in U.S. history. Rhyolite, Limerick said, serves as "a useful corrective to our usual models of progress, growth and development as the fated course of the U.S. empire in the 19th and 20th centuries." Rhyolite was an abject failure, she says, but it can be profitably studied to understand "the interplay between ambition and outcome, the collision between simple expectation and complex reality, the fallout from optimistic efforts to master both nature and human nature." Back at the ranch, the Boom Town History Event organizers are regrouping, talking about this latest bonanza and deciding where to hold the second annual Boom Town Event, hoping it will be as much a success as the first. Tonopah is the favorite son, but Pahrump is also in the running, according to sources close to the decision makers. The plan is to hold the conference in a different place each year. Sponsors this year were: numerous regional historians; the Death Valley '49ers; Death Valley, US; the Nevada Mining Association; Longstreet Inn and Casino; National Park Service, Death Valley National Park; Amargosa Valley Chamber of Commerce; Billy Holcomb & Queho Posse Chapters of E Clampus Vitus; Tonopah Historic Mining Park, as well as EDEN. "I think the real story is not the content of the individual presentations so much as the overall coming together of these wildly different people who all share a common passion," concluded Flinchum. "Nevada owes her statehood to her boomtowns." For more information on the Nevada Boom Town History Event, go to the Web site nvboomtown@earthlink.net. |
|
