I became obsessed with the history of the Nevada Territory and its surrounding environs. An enormous amount of fascinating historical context in the Mountain West has effectively been erased. The State of Nevada is larger than the Nevada Territory, but some of its historical territory was lost in armed border skirmishes with surrounding States, primarily for the purposes of controlling water supplies. Over the years, I’ve developed a hobby of reconstructing the history of the American Mountain West north of the Mexican border regions.
The history of the American West is being lost in great part because the records and documents only exist on paper in the archives of counties and dying towns. No one is digitizing these records. The people I’ve approached for access to their historical archives are lovely, but they are typically in their 70s, their knowledge is slowly dying with them because no one cares, and their archives are rotting. My inquiries were often the first they’d received by anyone vaguely young (and I am not) for many years.
This is where I will take the McCarthy framing of the American West to task, though in fairness he focused on the border regions. To be clear, the border was a violent and anarchic place, but the former not necessarily being caused by the latter, and the border was worse than many other places in the West. The Nevada Territory was, by my view of the documents I’ve seen, an eminently pragmatic and cooperative environment across factions that didn’t necessarily see eye to eye but had common goals. The Mountain West was a difficult place to live. In the historical record you often see Chinese, black, white (which are often factionalized separately as Confederate and Union sympathizers in records) as equal partners at the negotiating table. You don’t even see a visible Chinese political faction today in places where it was politically powerful in the 19th century. I had no idea this was even a thing but apparently that was the norm in many areas and well-documented in local archives. These ethnic/race factions specialized and it was well-understood that they needed each other to survive at the time. It was a respectful coexistence.
Similarly, the relationships with the Natives were complex, and the modern fashion of treating them as a uniform group with uniform interests is historically misleading. Individual groups of Natives had complex motivations which often aligned them with white people. They had agency and understood the complex political dynamics of what they were involved in. They are not given enough credit for playing a savvy game given the hand they were dealt.
Another thing that is often lost in modern American history is that the American West was deeply affected by the social dynamics of the Civil War even though they largely weren’t involved and did not want to be involved. Soldiers from both sides settled/occupied towns in the American West and tried to influence politics toward their own political ends. The consequences of this history are evident today among States in the Mountain West. Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” was written in part about his time in the Nevada Territory when he lived in a town that was named both “Dixie” and “Unionville” at various times.
One of my ambitions, given time and money, is to systematically preserve and digitize the isolated and dying archives of historical records across the American West. What is there is detailed, rich, and almost none of it is online. Americans have an extremely narrow view of this complex and fascinating time and place in American history. It may not be important but it feels worth doing. In many ways the history of the Nevada Territory shows the positive elements of humanity in the 19th century. You had white, black, Chinese, Native, and other factions willing and able to work together for their common betterment with little evidence of animus across these groups in that time and place. In a way, it reinvigorated my faith in humanity.