BOB MCCRACKEN Nye County History Advertisement

Most children nowadays experience a very different childhood compared to youngsters growing up in the 1940s and 1950s.

Children's lives today are much more controlled and regulated than was the case for their grandparents. Today, electronic media -- television, video games, cell phones, etc., whose content is served up by corporations far removed from family and community -- shape young people's lives to a remarkable degree.

Two generations ago, a child's life was characterized by less technology and more freedom to roam about and explore the nearby world. Certainly this was true for children living in Pahrump, Tonopah, Beatty, Round Mountain, and other small towns in Nye County.

As I noted in my last column, Harry "Button" Ford has lived longer in the Pahrump Valley than any other white man. Ford moved to Pahrump with his family at age seven in the spring of 1944 and has resided there since. Recently, he described to me what life for a child was like in Pahrump in those days.

School for kids in Pahrump was, as it is now, a major focus of childhood. There were never more than about 20 children in Pahrump's school during the 1940s; perhaps half of them were Native Americans. Many of Ford's playmates were Indian boys.

"School," he recalls, "was fun." At school, they played "Annie Annie Over," where a ball was thrown over the schoolhouse from one side to the other. They played a version of baseball and had hoops for basketball, which they also enjoyed.

From Button's first days in the valley, there were chores to be done on the family farm that increased as he got older. Ford had four older sisters. "They would throw me out and lock the door," he remembers. "The great outdoors was my summer home. I was happy."

The Pahrump Valley in those days was about as rural as you could get. There weren't many cars on the roads and traffic laws were not strictly enforced. Many children learned to drive early.

"We learned to drive very, very young," Ford said. "We drove tractors," he added, implying that driving an automobile was a natural extension of operating a tractor.

Sometimes there were complaints, however. A car driven by a small child would appear to be moving down the road driverless. Ford would look through the spokes of the steering wheel to see where he was going. "If I sat on pillows I couldn't reach the throttle, brake, and clutch." When he was deemed old enough (even though he wasn't old enough for a driver's license), Ford would drive to Shoshone. "That was where the action was," Ford recalled. "That's where the high school was. They had a real swimming pool and they held dances there. That was real fun."

Two remarkable geographical features in the Pahrump Valley provided endless enjoyment for young Ford and his friends. One was the slough, which is gone; the other was the area of dunes, which have mostly been bulldozed away.

The slough was a slow-moving river formed by water from the springs and artesian wells at the Pahrump Ranch end of the valley. It was about 50 feet wide, and in wintertime, when there was no irrigation, great quantities of water flowed down the slough for two or three miles, halfway to the mountain on the west, where it formed a big pond. When water was diverted onto fields during the growing season, the excess flowed into the slough.

Ford recalled, "It seemed like Florida" because it was so wet and green. "They had the slough blocked off into ponds. It was slough, pond; slough, pond; slough, pond. It was a haven."

Children were not supposed to go down to the slough, but Ford and his friends did anyway. It was too much fun to resist. Cattle grazed at the slough and there were ducks, geese, quail, rabbits and fish, including both small fish and carp that would grow up to 14 inches long. And there were no game wardens.

Ford had a .22-caliber single-shot rifle he bought for $8 when he was 8 years old that he would take to the slough. The fun of going to the slough lay in sneaking onto the Pahrump Ranch, endlessly exploring the place and doing a little shooting. Occasionally, a farmer would see them or hear the shooting and would try to chase them off. "You could hear him coming because he'd have to open gates, etc. We would either hide or get out of there. We never got caught. And you have to remember, half these kids were Indians. Running with the Indians was good training."

Artesian springs and wells no longer flow in Pahrump. Water is precious and the slough has long since dried up.

The dunes, or sand hills, were a marvelous feature of Pahrump geography. Small, conical shaped structures no more than 20 feet tall, they were composed of a very fine-grained windblown material. They were found at several locations in the valley, most notably in an area bounded by Blosser, Wilson, Highway 160, and Blagg. There were no dunes east of Highway 160.

A complex community of plant and animal life thrived in the dunes, including mesquites. The dunes held moisture -- one could dig into them at almost any time of year and the soil would be damp. The dunes were a rich resource area for Native Americans in former times. Indians used to camp at the springs in the valley but foraged in the dunes (there were no springs at the dunes).

The dunes, of course, were a wonderful place for Pahrump children, mainly the boys, to play. "The dunes were so much fun when I was a boy," Ford said. "It was sort of like being in a forest or a jungle. I mean, you could just go out and get lost in there. You'd almost have to stop and say, 'Where am I?' . . . We had cap guns and played war ... After we got big enough to ride saddle horses, we rode a lot at the dunes."

The dunes were easy to dig in and children would tunnel into them and play.

Over the years, people have purchased the land on which Pahrump's dunes sat. Most of the dunes that once stood in the valley have been bulldozed and the land farmed or subdivided. Ford says the soil that formed the dunes made good farmland when disked in with clay-type soil.

He estimates that only about 10 percent of the dunes that existed when he was a child remain. The surviving dunes have become a refuge for many species such as jackrabbits, cottontail, and a variety of snakes. As Pahrump's development progresses, the dunes, like the slough and yesterday's childhood, are destined to become only a memory.

To see some of the dunes remaining in Pahrump, turn west off Highway 160 onto Basin Avenue. Continue down Basin and the dunes will be on your left.