Pioneer Pieces: Over the Mountains and Through the Sage Brush...

Well, we have overstayed our welcome in San Francisco, so let's move back East over the Sierra Mountains where the availability of recoverable riches were soon to make NV the center of the world's attention.

From the shadows of Mt Davidson, the wealth produced in the mines in Nevada impacted the economy of the country and once again took hold of the pioneer spirit.

Prior to 1859 Nevada held little place in American history.  Green valleys along the High Sierras had been settled by the Mormons but by that time Morman Station (once the area of Deseret and later named Genoa) had become nothing more than a staging station where stages and freight traveled through on the Pony Express route.  Mormon Station consisted of a blockhouse, stables and scattered dwellings by 1859.

The Old Immigrant Trail along the banks of Carson Water was a station for changing the stage horses of George Chorpenning and Absolan Woodward.  Dayton, a four corner township known as "Pause and Ponder" was known as a place where pioneers could pause and make up their mind whether to take a chance on digging for riches in Gold Canyon or travel on to the proven Mother Lode across the mountains in California.

For a decade, poor pioneers earned their Saturday night whiskey in Gold Canyon but little more.  During that decade they mined the five miles of sage brush toward Gold Hill to make a discovery that would change the entire course of history in the West.

Next time...There's Gold in Them Hills!