The Free Press
We’re at the Silver Dollar Club in Elko, Nevada. Neon gleams against the old mahogany walls, and the air is thick with cigarette smoke. Heavy metal plays on the speakers, and gangs of burly, bearded gold miners do shots of whiskey. A rowdy drunk guy had just gotten thrown out; for one long second he flew through the door frame, red-eyed, sleepy, only half-conscious of what would happen next. Then all at once, he tasted the pavement.
“Sorry you had to see that, folks,” a haggard man in a leather coat said as he came back inside and sidled up to the bar.
Where once every town in states like Montana and Arizona had rough old bars like the Silver Dollar, these days many of them have been replaced. The tough old downtowns have metastasized into giant strip malls, and the local ruffians have all been priced out. As one walks through Bozeman, Montana, or Jackson, Wyoming, or Marfa, Texas, it can be tempting to imagine that the original spirit of the West is now only a memory. For though the West may be king-size—a region of our country that is by itself far larger than many nations on Earth—there seem to be precious few parts of it still imbued with the old spirit of what the West was.
But Nevada is a different sort of place, even set apart from the other Western states. A friend of mine who grew up in Nevada’s Great Basin Desert put it this way: "It’s better to think about Nevada as a territory, only tethered to America by historic happenstance.” The extreme desolation of Nevada, even compared with the landscapes of some of the other Western states, sets it apart. Its very geography and nature will always be a long sight “wilder” than the others, owing to unique levels of isolation, aridity, and almost impossibly low population density.
I took a swig of my beer and thought about the phrase “Go west, young man.” Go west—to fortune, to gold, to oil, to fame and money. How going west actually pans out is another question. A young buck could find himself in old Elko cashing in on a six-figure salary to poke holes in the dry desert dirt in search of gold. He could find himself driving a brand-new F-350 truck and sporting a shiny gold belt buckle under a crisp white cowboy shirt—but he could just as easily find himself strung out on meth and liquor, getting his ass beat in front of the Silver Dollar Club in downtown Elko.
Or if a young man from the Eastern states should wish to hitchhike out into the deep West, he may find himself stuck at the intersection of highways US-95 and NV-360, 50 miles from any sort of town—rationing his last few mouthfuls of water. This is where I found myself about 10 years ago, and this was my own introduction to the harrowing desolation of the Nevadan deserts. Heart sinking and petrified at my own thirst, I was rescued after many hours by a young rancher hauling bulls to Fallon. Thankfully, he had plenty of water. But had he failed to pick me up when he did, I was in for one long, cold, thirsty night.
As with most things in Nevada, it’s all a gamble.
Four days before, I sat in the big plush chair in my grandmother’s living room in upstate New York, watching sheets of icy rain freeze onto the spruce boughs over the empty street. The family who’d come for Thanksgiving had left for home by now, but the turkey leftovers were still fresh in the back of the fridge. Everyone else was in bed, and my grandmother was down with the flu.
My corner of America feels elderly. Sodden and dark, sleepy and abandoned, my grandmother’s town was less like a living thread of America and more like a memorial. I will stand by my state no matter how terribly she crumbles, but just the same, I knew it was time to head out into the territories—out west, to the gambler’s territory, where people from all over the world still come to seek their fortune.
The next day we climbed aboard the train at the Utica station. As we wended across Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, the train rocked and swayed; we were simply cargo, wrapped in blankets and watching the snow billow over Midwestern cornfields and the brick-built downtowns of old farming villages. Perhaps there’s no better way to travel from the tired old East to the far West; it’s a journey that Americans have been taking since 1869 when the first transcontinental train tickets were sold.
The further west we headed, the more we came to appreciate the journeys of earlier westbound pioneers. We were traveling at speeds ranging from 55 to 79 miles per hour across the plains. The desolate, lonesome nature of America’s Great Plains is unnerving enough when comfortably ensconced in a train compartment. To do it on a horse-drawn wagon, over rough, vague paths in the grass, and under threat of starvation and illness and cold and Indian raids is almost inconceivable. Many of those settlers plopped down on a random parcel of grassland and said “good enough.”
These days, such implacable optimism is hard to conceive of—but it was exactly what it took to settle these wild and empty portions of the American landscape. Tracing this route felt like tracing America’s mythological backbone. Our nation’s transcontinental Amtrak train system is not simply a mode of transportation—it is an artifact of our history. As the Nebraskan prairies rolled by, I thought about how every American should take this route once in their lives, if only to gain an appreciation for the incredible vastness of the land—and the impossible fortitude of our ancestors who settled it.
After two days of endless plain and prairie, the Front Range of the Rockies came into sight, and after a quick stop in Denver, we prowled up the unsettlingly steep canyons and gorges of those mountains. Beside us in the observation car, an elderly man with a United Auto Workers ball cap on his graying head faded in and out of a nap. He told us that he worked his whole life at an auto plant in Detroit.
“I always wanted to do this,” he said to me. “I have been dreaming to see these parts of our country for 40 years.” He admitted that he teared up when we first ventured into these mountains, that something about the Western skies made his heart ache.
To the Easterner, the Front Range seems so feverishly grandiose that it’d be easy to assume it’s the main course, but it isn’t. The Range gives way to dozens and dozens of isolated, seldom-seen river gorges and mountain seams. Just beyond the mountains, there always seem to be more mountains. Castles of American stone that are mazelike and unending. And later that evening, we began a descent into the hallucinatory land of pinnacles and salt flats and raw, red desert known as the Great Basin. Darkness came down over it, in exhausted-looking, smoky orange hues, and soon, we found ourselves sitting up with the “night crowd”—a motley crew of passengers who’d come to socialize in the viewer car.
Beside me sat an Australian gold miner, bound for Winnemucca, Nevada, and a mechanic from the same town. A Nebraskan boy who was headed to Tahoe for a winter of ski-bumming. He was supplying the table with a consistent stream of beers. Two girls from Europe were also there, one from France and one from Austria, traveling together across the United States. As the last wisps of the sunset died off, laughter spread throughout the observation car.
“The thing I like most about America is the high explosives,” the Aussie declared. “That and your money smells exactly like cocaine.”
As a geologist, he would be brought to a desert to take rock samples, make maps, and present a mining company with an assessment of where gold is likely to be found.
“They pay us to go out into the desert and drill holes, and it’s pretty random. I try to make it less random. And if we hit gold—that’s a ‘honey hole,’ and I get a bonus.”
This phrase struck me. A “honey hole” seemed to say something about a country where a man, with a tycoon-ish ambition, seeks to find hidden gold in unlikely places. The “get-rich-quick” schemes; the “good deals” at garage sales and bargain stores; the “honey holes” of a fleshy variety at the legal brothels, three of which can be found in Elko. The promise of a honeypot haunts the big neon letters spelling out JACKPOT at the casino slot machines—and the real gold pulled from bleak, empty, remote tracts of desert. The American psyche revolves around the honeypot, whether one lives in the West or not.
Nevada simply seems to exemplify this idea in a particularly stark and extreme sort of way—for after all, the Carlin Trend gold mine just outside of Elko is the world’s fourth largest. It produced nearly 126 tons of gold in 2022 alone, valued at several billion dollars. In a county of 54,000 people, this is a major boon. Nearly 23 percent of Elko County’s and neighboring Eureka County’s workers are directly engaged in the gold mining process—drilling holes, running equipment, mapping geological resources, refining gold, and running a sprawling series of auxiliary and exploratory mining operations. The mentality of the Gold Rush is not simply a distant fact of history in Nevada—it’s a present concern.
It should be noted that during the original Gold Rush of 1849, the Elko area was a stop on the California Trail. The hunger for gold that still thrives today among Elko’s miners was central to the first Western settlers. The obsessive search for one’s “honey hole” drove pioneers west by the score, and remained at the mythological core of their descendants for generations after.
Even today, the spirit persists. Whether it was ore or oil, shipyards or timber, or microchips and silicon, the search for gold, for another jackpot out west, laid the groundwork for it all.
The train arrived in Elko at 3:30 a.m. Eerie red lights glowed upon the concrete pad, which was flanked with razor wire and chain-link fencing. We learned then that while this is the desert indeed, it’s a cold desert, as it was barely 12 degrees outside. In the distance, the casino lights flashed. Unable to check into our motel until 2 p.m., we donned every sweater we had with us and walked the empty streets, finally coming upon a McDonald’s at 5 a.m., where we sat up red-eyed and watched the sun rise over the endless strip of motels. The trucks full of gold miners began to pour into the road, on their way to another day of searching for honey holes.
Over the next days we dined at the famous Star restaurant—a place run by the descendants of Basque sheepherders—and wandered the smoky gaming halls of the Stockmen’s Casino, where sleepy-looking men gazed into the glowing screens of slot machines. We dropped into the Legion of Mary monthly meeting at Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church, where I beat the deacon at a game of musical chairs. We were invited to lunch with the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the Coffee Mug diner, where we heard the sorts of religious prophecies one only finds in the shimmering desert. One told me: “We’ve actually been living in the Last Days since 1914—the whole human race is gettin’ purified now. And when Armageddon happens, Nevada is where I want to be.”
I couldn’t blame him—if Armageddon were to happen, I, too, might want to be over 200 miles from the nearest large city, comfortably hidden in the Great Basin Desert.
Everywhere we went, we were heartened to find the most rugged sort of folk—intrepid, resilient, hardworking desert people. The sorts who, by their own admission, often said that they fit in nowhere else but in the harsh hinterlands of northern Nevada. The souls of such men crave the big, open country of the West—and they seem to be allergic to taxes, bureaucrats, and the comfortable normalcy of more “civilized” portions of this country.
Yet in spite of whatever “Opie and Andy” picture one could conjure of the people who live in a small town like Elko, the reality is often quite different. Lip piercings and neck tattoos abounded, and the jukeboxes in many of the bars played not Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, but Limp Bizkit and Insane Clown Posse and Slipknot. Unlike other American states, which hold freedom to be central to their identity alongside a strongly conservative, conformist social ethic, in Nevada, “freedom” includes the freedom to adopt transgressive styles of dress, music, and ideology, too. The result seems to have been—in at least a few cases—the cowboy-boot–clad sons of longtime ranching families headbanging to death metal, and tough young roughnecks with eyebrow piercings.
One man we met at a bar introduced himself as “Elko’s only communist” and told us tales of how he’d “scared the shit out of the right-wingers” in Carson City with his pink AR-15. He suggested that we visit Mona’s Ranch, a legal brothel down the road. Alongside him were the right-wingers he spoke of. Some sported “Three Percenter” tattoos.
Like a strong liquor, rural Nevada might be hard for some to stomach. It’s rough and wild, bleak, and even a little ugly at times. The few settlements in the Great Basin desert are tired, dust-coated affairs flanked by dry, unvegetated mountains; they often look less like towns and more like provisional encampments. But there is something essential here, like the monastery is the distilled essence of the Christian life, even for lukewarm souls. Like how the Special Forces epitomizes the Army, even for the cook and the clerk, Nevada is the America of the extremophile. For the culture of this place cannot hide behind trees nor crouch in fertile valleys; there are no cramped old streets of stone, nor bureaucracies that obscure the true nature of the people and their way of life here, as in the East. Elko is America—naked and raw, honest to a fault, enterprising and wild.
On our last day there, the Christmas parade marched proudly down the center streets. Giant mining trucks covered in Christmas lights growled by. Blonde women on horses rode down the pavement, tossing candy at the children on the sidewalks. A crane went by; from its cable dangled a hanging Grinch—and a blast furnace towed on a trailer spouted tall orange flames that cast a bonfire-like glow onto the revelers.
A man saw me standing by the Elko County courthouse and sauntered up to me to shake my hand and offer me a job in the mines. “It’s a hell of a job; I bet you’d like it,” he said. “We’d take you as early as next week.” It was hard to pass up a chance at finding my pot of gold in a place like this.
Follow A.M. Hickman on X @Shagbark_Hick and on his newsletter, Hickman’s Hinterlands. Read his last “Falling Back in Love with America” installment, on upstate New York, here.