MARK SMITH / PVT Milton the Mastodon rests quietly during the Shoshone Old West Days History Talks, which drew a packed house throughout Saturday afternoon. MARK SMITH / PVT Harry Ford came dressed in his father's own work clothes when he spoke at the Shoshone Museum. MARK SMITH / PVT Harry Ford came dressed in his father's own work clothes when he spoke at the Shoshone Museum. Advertisement

SHOSHONE, Calif. -- In the end the site of southern Nevada's first and only cotton gin was used as many had hoped it might be, said Tim Hafen.

But the building is gone.

The equipment is gone.

And in its place is a working casino.

Where the one symbolized the initial agricultural economy of the town, the Pahrump Nugget may symbolize the modern economy ... Ching!

Hafen and Harry "Buttons" Ford were among several historians who spoke about the past during Shoshone's Old West Days celebration, and they focused on its neighbor across the mountains, Pahrump.

Each discussed some of the highlights of the town history, beginning with the early Anasazis around the time Jesus Christ was born. Like the later Paiutes, said Ford, no one quite knows how or why they showed up.

Where the latter are concerned, he said, "All we know for sure is that they were here when the white men came."

Ford recalled the baskets with their perfect dye designs and the tanning practiced by the Indians as late as the 1940s. He remembered the Indian agents taking youngsters "like they were puppies" and sending them off to distant schools. And the youngsters' urgent desire to escape those same halls of academe.

An early cattleman named Joseph Yount, credited by historian Bob McCracken as "Pahrump's founding father," showed up from Pahranagat by way of Ash Meadows during a winter in the mid-1870s, a "pretty bleak" time to be settling in. But settle he did and brought down lumber from Mt. Charleston to build many of the early homes and outbuildings and barns.

The Fords moved into Pahrump in 1944, and Ford illustrated their lifestyle by noting that except for his hat, he was wearing his dad's actual clothes -- an old pair of jeans, the belt and a still serviceable denim shirt.

"My dad was Irish," Ford recalled, "so he'd roll his sleeves up like this so he could work or fight."

Each spring they'd move their cattle up into the Charleston Mountains and then bring them back down as fall arrived.

Ford remembered Lois Kellogg, a sort of Howard Hughes of the Pahrump Valley, who knew Frank Lloyd Wright and died, perhaps from tularemia, after being bitten by one of her own dogs in 1944.

Frank "Pop" Buol ran a store in town and used his old Model A to re-supply it. He was known far and wide for his grapes and the wine they produced.

Buol, said Hafen, was a true pack rat and made wine that was "strong as brandy."

Hafen, who sported an injured left arm, moved into Pahrump in 1951 and enjoyed a front row seat as the town exploded from 150 residents to a population of 40,000.

The cotton gin showed up in 1959. It was the only one in Southern Nevada and "set the stage for everything that happened since then," he said.

Progressed followed relatively quickly: electricity in 1963 (electricity, which had brightened the rural South a full 30 years before), telephone service in 1965 and then the highway from Las Vegas.

Dorothy Dorothy -- yes, that was her name -- and her husband Dale "were promoters," said Hafen, and by themselves managed to get the road, at the time Highway 16, pushed through.

"This highway was probably the moost important event in Pahrump's history," Hafen said.

Until then, he remembered, one had to drive north to Johnnie and Highway 95, then turn right and go 70 miles to Las Vegas.

By the time you got there, he said, you'd be so dusty you had to unroll a clean change of clothes.

Dorothy Dorothy was, among other things, a prolific writer who worked as an alfalfa farmer at the Lazy 88 Ranch but also wrote for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun and the Tonopah Times. (One of her columns was "The Land of Ahs.")

Farther back, Hafen said, in 1951 the closest store was in Shoshone, and so was the nearest telephone.

Standard Oil "FlameO" was the fuel of choice -- propane brought up in tanks.

"Cotton," said Hafen, "provided us with one payday each year."

Toward the end of each year, things could get a little lean, and he credited Charles Brown in Shoshone with helping farmers keep their heads above water.

"Charlie Brown carried us months and months and months," he said.

Growing emotional he added, "It's the only way I survived."

But as for the gin, in the early 1970s cotton died as a worthwhile crop. The Arab oil embargo saw to that.

Hafen and his friends talked a lot about saving the gin as a memorial but were never able to put a deal together.

It was eventually sold to the Horseshoe Club owned by Benny Binion.

Later on a massive vault was built under what is now the Pahrump Nugget parking lot -- where the gin once had stood -- and upon Teddy Binion's murder, it was allegedly cleaned out.

But as for the gin itself, it was gone.

(Also speaking on the old days were Don Hendricks, "The Story of Resting Spring"; Robin Flinchum on the "Red Light Chronicles"; and Genne Nelson on "Lilian Malcom, Lady Prospector.")