BOB MCCRACKEN Nye County History Advertisement

The residents of Tonopah and the surrounding area will celebrate Jim Butler Days May 25-28.

The annual Memorial Day celebration is the biggest event sponsored by the community and is named in honor of the man who is credited with the discovery of the fabulous deposit of silver and gold that led to the town's creation in 1900.

The development of Tonopah, of course, was a seminal event in the history of Nevada -- indeed, in Western America.

As I have previously noted, it ushered in the last great flowering of the Old West in the United States. The activity Tonopah generated quickly led to the founding of Goldfield (1902), Rhyolite (1904), Manhattan (1905), Round Mountain (1906), and a long list of smaller boom towns not rooted deeply enough in the desert to long survive the teeth of time, to borrow a phrase from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietszche.

Jim Butler was a Belmont rancher and former Nye County district attorney at the time of his Tonopah discovery in May 1900. Jim's wife was Belle, whom he had earlier married after a shootout in Tybo, in which Jim is said to have killed Belle's husband.

Before marrying Belle, Butler had been married to a Shoshone Indian woman, perhaps with ties to Chief Kawich from the Kawich Range area east of Tonopah. The couple had one, probably two, children.

Shoshone Indians have told me that Native Americans were aware of a mineral deposit at Tonopah and Butler was interested in knowing what they knew.

Chief Kawich informed Butler that such information could be revealed only to family members. After Butler married into the tribe, he was given such knowledge.

The above information was provided to me piecemeal by both Anglos and Native Americans in extremely hush-hush tones, as though state secrets were being revealed.

Norman Coombs was born in Tonopah in 1914. He spent most of his life working in the mines of central Nevada.

Norman (I knew him as Curly) was descended from a long line of miners from Cornwall, England. The miners of Cornwall have long been recognized as among the most skilled in the world. Mining is a traditional occupation in Cornwall that dates back many hundreds of years.

Both Coombs's parents had migrated from Cornwall to Tonopah. He began working in the Round Mountain mines when he was about 15.

He knew more about mining and the miners of Central Nevada than anyone I have met. In my research on area history, Coombs was my go-to man when I had a mining question. He never once failed to provide an authoritative answer to any question on miners and mining I posed. He was blessed with clear thoughts and a wonderful memory. He died about eight years ago and is buried in the old Tonopah cemetery.

In honor of Jim Butler Days, I'd liked to quote from my interviews with Coombs, which took place over a period of years beginning in 1987. Here's Norman, describing what Tonopah was like in the 1920s and 1930s:

Bob: What was the population of Tonopah?

Norman: There were a lot of people here. At one time they figure there were pretty close to 6,000 miners here. A lot of people say this town was 25,000, but my mother used to say maybe 15,000. Most of the miners were single, you see.

Bob: How did the miners live back in the 1920s and '30s?

Norman: [As I say,] they were mostly single. My mother, for instance, had 20 boarders, and I don't think there were two of them that were married--had a wife somewhere else ... You'd live in small houses; they weren't big unless your families were big ... Most were single-wall dwellings. Cold? Yes. It was hard to get wood here. We burned mostly coal, which they hauled in on the railroad.

Bob: How was a cabin furnished?

Norman: It had a bed, a table, a chair, a stove. Just the essentials. There was no sink, generally. They just took a bucket or dish and threw the waste water out in the street. And no bathroom; it was all outhouses...

Some miners batched [cooked and cleaned for themselves]. There were grocery stores and so forth.

Bob: What was a miner's pay?

Norman: My dad said when he first came here [1903] it was around $2 a day in Michigan and you worked 12-hour shifts ... And then Bingham Canyon, Utah, he said, cut the hours -- it was $2 a day for a 10-hour shift ... Mines in Park City [Utah] and over in the Mother Lode [California] paid $2.75 a day in the early 1920s ... And they came here, and of course this was a boom camp, and they were paying $4 or $5 a day for 8 hours ... The dust [in the mine] and isolation [forced the high pay].

Bob: What about the different ethnic groups in Tonopah?

Norman: The Cousin Jacks [Cornish] and Irish fought all the time ... The Irish came by building the railroads here. When they were done they were without work, so they went to work in the mines, and there aren't too many mines around Ireland. The Cornish were hard drinkers [as were the Irish]. The [Yugoslavians] were hard workers and big people. Cornish people are generally smaller.

[The Yugoslavians] died young. They had a different type of lung, a lot of them. Doc Craig here told me that [people from] the British Isles were different. Their lung was more like a wet lung, where [many Yugoslavians] had a dry lung ... The [silica particles] don't get way down in [the wet lung] or something ... Jesus, some of the Slavonians were done in six months.

Bob: Did women work?

Norman: They used to lay off single guys in those days. Women didn't work much, just stayed home and took care of kids or did housework. Schoolteachers were mostly women. [It was okay] if she didn't have a husband. If she had a husband, she would work on the auxiliary or a part-time teacher ... But women like my mother would have boarders in their home.

Bob: Were the miners trustworthy?

Norman: [The miners] were really truthful people. You very seldom ever locked your house ... My dad, I think, was one of the most honest men I ever met in my life. He didn't believe in God, but you could lay out your money and he'd lie there and starve to death before he'd take your money without your permission. But he would take gold [from a mine] ... My dad said, "God put that [gold] there, and the first one that gets it, it's his."

Bob: What about high-graders [people who steal high-grade metals, especially gold, from a mine]? It wasn't a big problem in Tonopah, but it was in Goldfield and Round Mountain.

Norman: Most of the high-graders who worked around would say, "The way you figure this stuff, now, I'm digging it down here. There's none of those bosses or white collar guys around."

One old high-grader told me, "But I always give them a break. You take their high-grade here, and you throw it right up to the back of the drift, to the ceiling. And," he says, "whatever stays up there belongs to the company."

But real high-graders kept their mines going because they believed in take-some and leave-some. They knew that if they took it all, the company would fold up and there'd be no way to get down there.

Bob: Tell me about the silver bars at the train depot.

Norman: [Once they had stripped the silver and gold from the ore] they smelted it. They had their furnaces right here. I can remember when I was a kid at the depot, you'd see silver bars -- I think 500 pounds apiece -- stacked up there. They used to tell us kids, "Go ahead and take one." One of those yardsmen ... We'd get on it and couldn't even budge it.