BOB MCCRACKEN Nye County History Advertisement

I'm a great admirer of Nye County Sheriff William H. "Bill" Thomas. Among all the important figures in county history, none looms larger. I believe Thomas was the last of the great Western Frontier sheriffs.

Thomas was born in 1876 in Austin, the oldest of five children, and died in Tonopah in 1966. He was first elected sheriff of Nye County in 1916, and after a two-year hiatus between 1918 and 1920, was re-elected continuously until his retirement in 1959.

Upon Thomas's retirement, Robert A. Crandall, then editor of the Tonopah Times-Bonanza and Goldfield News, wrote:

"But to the people of Nye County, and especially the old-timers who have known Bill Thomas as a stout-hearted sheriff and a friend in time of need or peril, the old court house will never be quite the same without him."

At some point following his retirement, Bill Thomas was interviewed by longtime central Nevada resident Bertha Manhire Cline. The interview was recorded on reel-to-reel tape, with old-time Goldfield Sheriff Ed Kitchen present. The following are passages quoted verbatim from Sheriff Thomas.

"I was born in Austin, Nevada, ninth day of April, 1876. My father's name [was] Thomas Thomas Thomas and my mother's name was Thomasine Thomas. And after [my] being born in Austin, my mother moved out to Ione where my father was working in the mines out there. And we stayed there for a period of time, I don't know how long, and finally came back to Austin and [he] was employed in Austin. He worked at mining, blacksmithing, and hoistman at different times.

"I went to school in Austin till I was around 15, 16, and I got tired of school and wanted to go to work. So the old father said he didn't like it but I told him I didn't want to go back to school ... so it was get out and go to work. So he got me a job down in the butcher shop run by an Englishman, Simon Braid ... I just cleaned up around the shop ... and kept the sawdust in place, and he took me to cutting some kind of piece of meat, you know. The first thing they do is make you trim meat for sausage and bologna ... And then finally you get into cutting; so after a while I got to be a pretty fair meat cutter.

"I went to work for George Dixon. He used to live out in Ione. He had a market there, so I went to work for him and I got to be quite a butcher, slaughterhouse man, killed sheep, beef, hogs, everything. I worked for Dixon for quite a period of time -- two, three years, I guess."

From Ione, Thomas moved to Battle Mountain for a year or so, then in about 1898 purchased a meat market in Salt Lake City, Utah. After about a year there, he moved to Idaho and ended up in the Coeur d'Alene mining region in northern Idaho, until his brother died and Thomas returned to Austin in 1901.

"I had a brother die in San Francisco and my sister was bringing him home up to Austin to bury him, and they asked me to come home. So I came home from Coeur d'Alene County, attended the funeral, and was going to go back up there. And the folks says why don't you go down to this new camp, what they call Tonopah?

"I'd heard some fellows up in Idaho talking about it, but I didn't pay no attention to it, didn't know where it was or anything. So they thought it'd be a good idea for me to come down here [Tonopah]. So there was two fellows up in Austin that come up for Christmas ... And, I asked 'em if I could go back down with 'em and they said 'Yes.' They had one horse and a buckboard ... They had four or five bottles of whiskey when they left Austin. They were pretty good drinkin' fellows. I never could drink much...

"So we was four days from Austin to here. The last day we walked from San Antonio [north of Tonopah] in. There was no road. You know that little buckboard, iron tires cut down pretty deep with our luggage on it.

"So we left San Antonio. In them days everybody was up and had breakfast in [by] daylight -- we was eatin' breakfast by lamplight. So we left San Antonio at six o'clock and we arrived in here at eight o'clock that night. We walked all day.

"We came to a Montezuma well. That was the only water. And there was a big whiskey barrel there hooked onto a wire cable there. I believe the stage used to stop there ... That was the road out in them days. And we tied the cable onto the axle of the buckboard and just snapped the barrel out of there like nobody's business. We all got a drink and struck out for Tonopah.

"[When] we was comin' up the road we met two buckaroos. We could see somebody comin' down the road for a long ways ... And finally they got to gettin' closer. We was goin' towards them and them towards us and pretty soon we could see tops breaking on the horses, you know. It was a couple of buckaroos ... Pretty soon we caught up to 'em. They tol' us, 'You ought to turn around and go back. Don't go up there. They're buryin' like sheep up there. They buried six yesterday [black plague]. Don't go up there at all. No, turn around and go back!'

"'No, we can't go back now. We got to go up there.'

"So we came on and landed here at eight o'clock at night.

"That was my trip to Tonopah. Next day I went to work in a meat market. I was with Isadore Sara. He had a meat market down there. He had a thousand head of sheep out here. . . . So I went to work there and been here ever since. I worked for the Humphrey Supply Company for 18 years. Then I got elected to the office of sheriff and I stayed there for 40 years. . . .

"I got tired of workin' in that butcher shop there. I says I'm gonna hunt a better job than this. I knew everybody in the county and had the biggest business in town. [I] know everybody, I says. I got a chance to get that, I think. So I ran and I got beat. And the next time I run again and I think I won for 29 or 30 votes.

"I ran for the sheriff's office in 1914 on the Socialist ticket and was defeated by Mr. Charles Slavin. I ran again -- it was a two-year term at that time -- and I run again in the 1916 election and ran on the Socialist ticket again. And I got elected to the office. And I was in the office for 40 years, until I retired on the thirty-first day of December 1959."

Sheriff Bill Thomas never carried a gun. One authority on central Nevada history who knew Thomas said, "He was a good talker. He was a diplomatic sheriff."