Now it’s true the place
looks the part--both exactly as you’d expect and startling.
As you arrive over the
last little swale into the mountain town, 1875 is suddenly spread out before
you, like a late chromo of Currier and Ives, if Currier and Ives had been
western prospectors: Long wooden sidewalks, their planks athwart the
now-invisible muddy trenches, covered with sloping roofs to make a long colonnade
down both sides of the street. Big airy rooms inside grand picture windows,
with high patterned ceilings and chandeliers of tinted glass, a flamboyant saloon
every 50 running feet, gaudy storefronts emblazoned in the grandiose lettering
of the gold rush.
And it’s true you get
howdy’s from folks in the street, from folks who probably have a right to say howdy,
and wear cowboy hats and dungarees, though stricter gun laws won’t allow the
revolver at the side, which would complete the picture. And, oh yes, it’s true
that Virginia City plays the part of the wild west mining town, wild in action
and wild in speculation, the greatest American boom town of the 1870s, to
perfection for the tourists.
But a great deal
remains unexplained.
Lookit. Here’s a town
lodged high on a mountainside, away above the clouds, like Machu Picchu or
Shangri-La, connected to the outside world by a couple of steep grades almost
useless in the winter, occupying its own atmosphere. It’s one of those places
where the meridians cross or the vibrations resonate or the chakras align, or
however you might want to account for the fact that people arrive here and
their eyes go wide and they settle down in an old shack or a hut and go to work
in the library and depart nevermore.
Perfect example:
Diamond Jim, manning the Visitor Center desk most days of the week, came here
after a double homicide next door in Stockton California persuaded him it was
time to leave. Ditto Terry down at the Silver Queen Hotel, who also came from
California but without a double murder for persuasion.
Something cozy,
something close. Like the wooden sidewalks and their covering of roofs. Or the
narrowness of the street. Or the compactness of the locale, its size
constrained by the rakish angle of the earth at this spot. Or the isolation of
being alone on a mountainside with the world far below, the all-for-one-and-one-for-all
of an exclusive commonwealth whose membership requirement is only that pair of
wide eyes.
Oh yes, there is
history. One of the great silver strikes of the world took place on this spot,
the Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859 and not entirely mined out yet. Remember
the Hearsts, as in William Randolph? That fortune started here. Ever heard of
San Francisco? The money made here largely built it, and then rebuilt it after
the earthquake. Do you know the state of Nevada? Statehood arrived soon after
Virginia opened its first saloon, and largely because of the money here.
And there is fame, yes,
there is fame. Step right up to the curb in the Crystal Bar saloon and view the
tourist brochures mounted on the very wood where George Hearst, Dan DeQuille,
Joe Goodman and Sam Clemens all contemplated the first happy drinks of the
evening. Across the street is the office of the Territorial Enterprise, at one
time the most influential paper in the west, where most of these gentlemen
worked. Clemens devoted a big part of a later book to life in boomtown Virginia
in the early 60s, when mining shares were trading like quarters and a chance
encounter in the street could make you rich.
But the place has other
sorts of appeal.
In the current office
of the Territorial Enterprise, for example, you will find scaling the north
wall a pair of parallel panels and the remnants of a pulley system. These are all
that is left of the dumb waiter that for many years moved copy, printing
plates, galley proofs, and probably whiskey among the three floors of the
building. The foot of this dumb waiter resides in the basement, among artifacts
of the small Mark Twain museum and the ancient printing press, still anchored
like grim death in the bedrock of the basement floor.
It is this dumb waiter
that lets all the ghosts in.
Ghosts, spirits,
phantomlike entities, ectoplasmic exhalations, whatever you might want to call
them, and whatever might be their provenance: Ghosts invest the town as
thoroughly as any deluge of tourists. It is thought—at least by the ghost
hunter TV shows that have made this place a favorite—that the dumb waiter is
their portal.
Well, for some of them,
perhaps. It depends what kind of ghosts you’re talking about. Clearly the
portal would be handy for the dozens of miners still lying in the 750 miles of
mine tunnel beneath the town. But you must assume that many of the ghosts, like
their living co-inhabitants, just found a place in town they liked and settled
down.
The Washoe Club, the
most haunted place in town, during the silver boom the home of the Millionaires
Club, now boasts a museum devoted to many of the ghosts who apparently do not
commute from below but who live in the building year round. The ghost of the prostitute
in the Silver Queen Hotel clearly needs no portal from the underworld, but can
remain cozy and ensconced in the room where she killed herself, and never
trouble to leave the building.
None of the spirits in
the Washoe Club travel so very far outside their domain, though they do remain
quiet for long periods. Perhaps the museum now devoted to them gratifies their
ghostly egos enough that they need not stir nor rattle nor shake but for part
of the year, and can kick back all the rest of it.
Spirits or humans,
ectoplasm or protoplasm, long-term resident or recent arrival, there is an agreement
here that life should pause for a while and progress no further. And so far it
has kept the spirits of all worlds content.
