The Reno Raid — A Post Of Prodigious Proportion

Call it the Butterfly Effect.

Lady Marilyn picked out a particular tattoo artist and a particular style butterfly tattoo at the Evergreen Tattoo Expo in Eugene in 2019, when Ceili was a student at the University of Oregon. The artist’s name is Brian Chambers, and she booked with him for the 2020 Expo. In April. Yeah. Didn’t happen. It wasn’t until March of this year that Chambers was slated to be back in Eugene. She booked with him again. A massive snowstorm made the Cascade Passes virtually impossible, so we aborted the mission.

Chambers is based out of Reno, Nevada. He had an opening on September 3. Marilyn turned 60 on September 7, so we decided this was all meant to be a big birthday celebration. We hit the road to Reno.

The drive itself is a pleasure, taking us mile upon long and glorious mile through spectacular Oregon Backcountry, through Paisely and Lakeview, through the cattle country Craig Rullman depicted in The Outside Circle.

We rolled in to the Atlantis, where we were greeted by a bevy of muddy, bedraggled, worn-out, slightly weepy Burning Man refugees, which was an odd little trip. The next day, Marilyn went and got inked up — a blue butterfly landing on her right forearm.

I wasn’t going to just hang out and watch. I realized I had left all my more covert blades at home, and was walking around Reno indiscreetly with my belt knife — so I figured a trip to 5.11 Tactical was in order. I am, you know,  a master of rationalization. I picked up a decent, cheap, discreet folder and wandered next door to Guitar Center — where I sat for an hour playing guitars I can’t afford. I fell in lust with a  Gibson J-45 (Hawken Horse knows this song). Good lord Lorrie, that guitar played nice and sounded good…

I have a couple of really nice Breedloves. Don’t tell them about this. What happens in Reno stays in Reno…

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The next day we climbed the Geiger Grade Road and descended into Virginia City and the old Comstock Lode. Terraced into a bleak, sun-blasted  hillside, this was once the richest city in America. Gold was discovered in 1859, touching off a classic rush and boom — but it was silver that made the Comstock Lode.

I heard a faint bluesy sound on the desert air as we rolled into town…

Depending how you calculate it, the Comstock Lode yielded between $25 and $38 billion in today’s dollars. These days, Virginia City is a run-down tourist trap, beat to hell by Father Time and high desert sun and wind, perched at 6,100 feet in elevation.

Now, when I describe it that way, don’t take it as a negative. Virginia City is exactly what it oughta be. It earned its scars through hard, dangerous living and from clinging to a harsh spot in the desert with thorny tenacity.

As for the tourist shakedown, well… flim-flam, hucksterism, hoaxes and outright cons were built into Virginia City’s DNA right from the get-go. First thing I did was hit the Visitors Center, where Marilyn got a complementary swig of Cemetery Gin, and I picked up a book titled Monumental Lies, a study of the way folklore developed almost instantaneously in early Nevada, particularly around Virginia City. As we’ve explored in other posts, people on the frontier told whopping tall tales and hoorawed the gullible for sport. Add in the need to, umm… promote… one’s mining interests, and you have all the fixin’s for, well, monumental lies.

We heard the tale of a pair of brothers who pulled a classic — and highly successful — pump-and-dump stock scheme with a mining property on the San Francisco Exchange, before absconding for parts unknown with their ill-gotten gains.

So, when the modern town leans into camel and ostrich races and its haunted status, well, it’s just following its traditions.

Of course, I love fey folklore doin’s in the timbers of Fennario, so all of that trips my trigger.

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We got our bearings with a delightful ride on the railroad, which doubled as a history tour. An added bonus was that a feller named Jim Clark was along for the ride. He’s the feller in the suspenders in the photo below.

Clark is known as The Train Man in Hollywood. Any scene that requires a train movement in a movie likely has his imprint — from Breakheart Pass to Back to the Future. Some 200 movies and TV productions in all. He’s also a renowned railroad historian and historical preservationist. A delightful gentleman.

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Mining was the business of Virginia City, and the ingenuity and grit associated with the work is mind-blowing. There are miles of tunnels honeycombing the Comstock Lode, and they run deep — 2,000 to 3,000 feet in the most extreme cases. One of the museums has a 3D map of the tunnels — and it makes your head hurt to contemplate them.

The men who worked those deep mines were a hardy lot, many of them Cornishmen.

 

At the most extreme depths, temperatures held steady at 120 degrees. They dropped untold tons of ice at the faces to make work just barely bearable. The men worked in 15-minute shifts, which was all a man could stand. Giant steam-powered Cornish pumps were deployed to pump millions of gallons of highly mineralized groundwater out of the deep tunnels.

The gigantic, complex machinery is a Steampunk dream.

Collapse was always a threat. A German engineer (of course it was a German engineer) came up with a system of pre-cut timber boxes that were held together by the earth’s pressure and allowed the men to work at crushing depths.

Bear in mind that there wasn’t — and isn’t — a stick of suitable timber anywhere near Virginia City. All the wood for construction and mining had to be hauled in by wagon from the sierras off to the west. Nothing was easy.

Collapse was just one of the dangers. A feller could get brained by an errant swing of a single-jack or a double-jack, or by a poorly calculated blast of black powder used to break out the rock face. Fire was another acute danger. We heard the horrific tale of the 1869 Yellow Jacket Mine disaster, in which 39 miners perished in a fire that continued to smolder underground for 2-1/2 years, even after the tunnels were sealed.

Skilled miners willing and able to work in the most arduous conditions were in high demand, and commanded good wages — the equivalent to $56 an hour in today’s dollars. The town did its best to empty their pockets with fine dining, drink, and women of negotiable virtue. Virginia City was not as violent as Tombstone, but it was rowdy and wild. It was also high-toned (as was Tombstone). Piper’s Opera House drew the top touring stage talent of an era when live theater was an absolute passion. It was a classy joint. We couldn’t get to it due to construction, but it remains a classy join to this day.

The big boom in Virginia City drew all kinds of folks, including one Samuel Langhorne Clemens — a journalist and teller of tall tales who would soon take the monicker Mark Twain. He worked at The Territorial Enterprise. I stopped to pay my respects, one newspaper man to another.

The massive flow of wealth out of the Comstock Lode was of great strategic significance — it helped mightily to underpin the U.S. economy and the Union war effort in the American Civil War.

Most folks went armed in Virginia City, for obvious reasons, and there’s a fair collection of firearms from the old times on display.

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From Virginia City, we trekked over the mountains to Lake Tahoe. I had never been there, and, man, is it a beautiful piece of country. Stayed overnight and Lady Marilyn and I got in a full day of exploring…

Then we headed off to Carson City to reunite with an old friend from Sisters, Cris Converse, who has moved down there to enjoy the high desert with nearby access to epic water skiing. And skies that look like Maynard Dixon paintings.

The whole raid went off perfectly. Not bad for a trek that started with the flutter of a butterfly’s wings…