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Welcome to Elko
Travel & Events
Information
ELKO CONVENTION CENTER.
700 Moren Way. 775-738-4091. At the Elko Convention Center our goal is
to make your meeting or convention go off without a hitch. We provide comfortable
meeting and banquet facilities plus the professional support staff you expect.
Come to Elko where the air and ideas are always fresh. Call 1-800-248-ELKO
for more information.
Shopping
ANACABE'S ELKO GEN'L MERCHANDISE CO.
416 Idaho Street. 775-738-3295. If you live within 150 miles of Elko
working outdoors, you probably shop here already. Western and steel-toed
boots, blue jeans, hats, cold-weather gear: everything for the well turned
out miner, buckaroo, construction worker, outdoorsman, everything top quality.
Stop in just to experience the authentic old-time atmosphere. Since 1937.
1-800-821-3556.
BOOKSTORE.
1372 Idaho Street. 775-738-5342. "This Area's Only Book Source"
New—Used. Elko's largest selection of magazines, Nevada-interest books.
Self-Help, Sci-fi, Fantasy, Cookbooks, Romance, Horror, Adventure, Mystery,
Western. We "Special Order" books. Search Service for out-of-print and rare
books. Call toll-free: 1-800-580-5342.
Special
Attractions
BARRICK GOLDSTRIKE MINES Inc.
790 Commercial Street. 775-738-8381. The Barrick Goldstrike Mine, one
of the world's leading gold producers, conducts daily tours of their mines
from late-May through mid-August. The four hour visit includes a tour through
the assay lab and Mill, along with a view of the mining operations, and can
accommodate up to 14 people.
WESTERN FOLKLIFE CENTER.
Pioneer Building. 775-738-7508. The Cowboy Poetry Gathering (1/26-2/1/97)
is the undisputed cowboy cultural event of the year featuring authentic music,
stories, dance, crafted gear and poetry. All year the historic Folklife Center
is open with exhibits and special attractions. Call us for an information
packet or visit us at www.westfolk.org.
A brief History & Description
of
Elko, Nevada
by
David W. Toll
Founded as a
railroad-promoted townsite and railhead for the White Pine mines in 1869,
Elko has served for generations now as the provincial capital of a cattle
ranching empire embracing parts of four states.
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The big white bear on the Commercial Hotel
is Elko's best-known landmark.
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Fifty years ago Lowell Thomas
called Elko "the last real cowtown in the American West," and until about
ten years ago that was still a good thumbnail description. But sophisticated
new mining technologies permit the harvesting of microscopic particles of
the precious metal from mountains (literally) of rock and dirt hauled 200
tons at a time to the crusher. Half a dozen large mining operations are producing
millions of ounces of gold a year in the region, and now their impact is
transforming the old cowtown into a prosperous young city.
In the decade from 1980
(when population stood at about 10,000 people—city size by Nevada standards)
to 1990, the population had almost doubled and in one hectic twelve month
period beginning in July, 1986, Elko's population increased by 21 percent.
This growth is spread across the city, and across many square miles of
countryside to the south where Spring Valley was developed in the 1970s,
but it is most evident on Elko's east end. Here a bright, new district anchored
by shopping centers and the Red Lion Casino counterbalances the old city
center to the west, built a century and a quarter ago along both sides of
the railroad depot and switching yard
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Elko's events reflect its varied population. These
dancers performed at the Native American Festival
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Elko—conflicting (and
slightly absurd) stories are offered to explain the name; none is
persuasive—prospered rapidly after its founding. By 1870 townsite lot
prices had multiplied three and four times, the population had risen to 2,000
or more, and the place had begun to assume its character as the leading
settlement of Nevada's great northeastern cattle country. By 1873 Elko was
in so soaring and optimistic a municipal mood, largely on account of the
success of the mining discoveries in the districts to the north and south,
that it had bid for and won the State University. The university opened with
seven students in 1874, and closed ten years later with 15, to be moved
unceremoniously to Reno. Elko was following the mining towns it served as
a freight center into decline, and population fell to less than 1,000.
In retrospect, one bright
note appears in the history of Elko in the otherwise stagnant final years
of the nineteenth century. In 1896 G.S. Garcia arrived in Elko to establish
his celebrated saddle shop on Railroad Street. Garcia became one of the foremost
western saddle makers of his time, and his famous American Eagle saddle,
elaborately carved and decorated with patriotic motifs, worked in silver
and gold, won gold medals at both the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the
1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition at Portland, Oregon. Will Rogers and Teddy
Roosevelt rode on Garcia saddles, as did dozens of other western celebrities
of the first three decades of the century, hundreds of international customers
from Argentina, Australia, Mexico and France, and thousands of more or less
anonymous stockmen and buckaroos from Nevada, Oregon, Idaho and around the
west.
Despite the steady growth
in size and importance of the livestock business in the valleys around Elko,
the town's affairs did not brighten considerably until 1907. In that year
not only did the Western Pacific Railroad extend its rails to Elko, but mining
activity revived in half a dozen camps that relied on Elko for freight and
services. The price of beef went from three and a half to eight cents a pound,
and wool from four to 60 cents a pound. In ten years Elko's population had
nudged up toward 3,000.
Prosperity continued until
the devastating one-two of the failure of the Wingfield banking chain and
the national Depression which followed immediately after. Caught in the machinery
activated to sort out the bank failure and bled by the decline in livestock
prices, many of the ranches around Elko were foreclosed. But the years after
beef and wool economies fell into chaos, gambling was made legal by the state
legislature. Elko, like towns everywhere in Nevada, had a new industry. And
unlike most, it had an entrepreneur to make the most of it. Newton Crumley
had operated saloons and hotels in Tonopah, Goldfield, and Jarbidge before
he settled in Elko in 1925 and bought the Commercial Hotel. He and his son,
Newton Jr., operated the hotel with an eye toward the future.
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You can tour Elko by horse-drawn carriage
for a taste of the 19th century lifestyle.
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By 1937 they had added a
two-hundred-seat cocktail lounge to the Commercial, and by 1941 they hired
Ted Lewis, the "High-Hatted Tragedian of Jazz," his orchestra, and his 21-person
Rhythm Rhapsody Review for an eight-day engagement. After Lewis came Sophie
Tucker, then Skinnay Ennis and his band. For drowsy little Elko, more than
250 miles from the nearest radio station, the situation was stunning. Even
more impressive was the effect on traffic along U.S. 40: little of it passed
through Elko without a detour into the Commercial.
In 1946 the Crumleys began
"remodeling" a 10 foot wide root beer stand into the sixty-eight room Ranch
Inn Motel-Casino (at that materials-short time new construction was prohibited
but remodeling was permitted). At that time the Crumleys had the largest
non-ranching payroll in Elko County after the railroads, and in 1948 they
sold an accumulation of ranching properties north of town to Bing Crosby.
With ranching restored to
prosperity, with gambling and big-name entertainment adding cosmopolitan
touches to the municipal flavor, and with newcoming ranchers like Crosby,
Joel McRae, and Jimmy Stewart providing glamor and sophistication, Elko entered
a golden age at the end of the 1940s.
The Hollywood rancheros
have died or sold their Elko spreads now, and the Crumleys are long gone
from the scene. There is lively entertainment at the Commercial, at the
Stockmen's, and at the Red Lion but nothing so revolutionary as in the 1940s.
Yet the town retains its unique air of awkward splendor. It is the marvelous
diversity of its population that is responsible. In Elko there are cowboys
and Indians, sheepherders, miners and railroad men, gamblers and whores,
schoolmarms and ribbon clerks.
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This Basque woodchopper is a competitor at
Elko's famous National Basque Festival.
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As the population figures
suggest, Elko is a bustling little city, offering a wide variety of services
and amenities to visitors. Don't expect to find a room at Basque Festival
time or during the Cowboy Poetry Gathering unless you've booked well in advance,
but at most other times of the year you'll find motel rooms readily available.
Restaurants range from the homespun to the elegant—from The Coffee Mug
near the center of the city, say, to Misty's at the Red Lion. There are old
favorites, the Basque dining places-Toki Ona, the Star, Biltoki and the Nevada
Dinner House—and some surprises, too, like Showboat Southern Kitchen,
featuring cajun cooking, catfish and hushpuppies. Every kind of automotive
service is available in Elko, from shade tree mechanics to new car dealers.
I had no trouble getting a flat tire fixed on a Sunday morning during one
recent visit.
Begin an exploration of
Elko at its center: park in the former Western Pacific RR switching yard
and visit three shrines of Nevada History: The Commercial Hotel, the first
Nevada casino to use big-name entertainment to draw customers (and now best
known for the immense stuffed polar bear in the glass case by the coffee
shop); the Stockmen's, traditional gathering place for generations of local
Basques, and the Pioneer Hotel, a 19th century landmark recently refurbished
in grand style to house the Western Folklife Center.
The Center originated the Cowboy Poetry Gathering and other projects aimed
at preserving and presenting Western American skills and lifeways. An exhibition
gallery is now open, presently showing ranch-made items, ranging from highly
machined leather stamps to meticulously braided horsehair ropes. A small
shop offers an elegant collection of wonderful hand-made goods for sale,
as well as books and other merchandise.
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Did I mention that Elko is a cowtown?
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One great downtown landmark
is gone now: the switching yard that spawned the city in the first place.
It hasn't been missed. A few pessimists declared that moving the Western
Pacific switching yard three miles east would eliminate the train whistles
at all hours of the night and Elko's birth rate would decline (local joke).
The community is pleased with the change and you'll appreciate all the free
parking.
And except for the missing
switching yard and new faces on some of the buildings, you'll see as you
perambulate around the center of the city that this is still the Elko of
a century ago. Then, as now, Elko relied on ranching and mining to nourish
the local economy, and the city seems to have changed very little in a hundred
years.
To reinforce that notion
of changelessness, the traditional Basque hotels still flourish along the
south side of Silver Street (south of the Stockmen's and much wider without
the railroad tracks). The Nevada and The Star cater to a regular lodging
clientele of Basque sheep herders, but open their dining rooms to the general
public at supper time. They offer hearty food and plenty of it, served
family-style. The atmosphere is at once homey and exotic, a pleasingly
provocative combination.
But then, just as it seems
time has jelled and stopped altogether, as perhaps you wander out of the
Clifton Club after a companionable picon punch, modern times assert themselves:
you can get an espresso at Cowboy Joe's, and nouvelle cuisine at the Stray
Dog Cafe.
Elko is still "town" for
the buckaroos—the locally preferred term for cowboys—who work the
cattle ranches out beyond the horizons, and the stores that cater to them
are major attractions; several of the finest are downtown.
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Saddle-maker Lee Thermos is one of the craftsmen
you can see at work upstairs at Capriola's
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The J.M. Capriola Co. is
on Commercial Street It opened here in 1929 and maintains the tradition
established by G.S. Garcia. As a visiting journalist wrote in admiration
in the New York Times some years ago, Capriola's "sells everything for the
cowboy and his horse, from a box of horseshoe nails to a $3500 saddle." A
hand-made saddle crafted to a classic design might cost a little more nowadays,
but they are still made right upstairs, along with the other leather goods
and the tack that account for three-fourths of Capriola's world-wide business.
President Reagan straddled a Capriola saddle at his California ranch, and
Hollywood celebrities like Sylvester Stallone and Harrison Ford do the same
today. The volume of mail orders from Europe continues to grow, but most
of the customers here, and on the main floor of the store where the blue
jeans, snap-fastened shirts, boots and broad-brimmed hats are displayed,
are still the honest-to-God working cowboys they have always been.
A friend tells of needing
some holes punched in a new belt and taking it to Cap's. She was directed
to the saddle workshop upstairs, where one of the craftsmen made short work
of the job. She attempted to pay when he handed the belt back to her, but
he waved the thought away. "It's all right," he said. "We're having a special
sale on holes today - they're free." Anacabe's equally venerable and welcoming
Elko General Merchandise Store, where you can outfit
yourself for a day's fishing or a winter in a line shack, is on Idaho Street
downtown.
Idaho Street was once U.S.
40 and it's still Elko's main commercial thoroughfare: a solid stream of
traffic from the old city center on the west to the new district at the freeway
offramp to the east. A bright stripe of restaurants and motels, anchored
at the freeway by supermarkets and shopping centers.
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From the center of town,
take Idaho street east to the Elko City Park. More than 50 years ago, at
what used to be the eastern edge of town before the age of asphalt and
electricity, the city of Elko bought the China Ranch. Here, where Chinese
truck farmers had raised vegetables and other table delicacies for the local
markets, has been created the broad lawns, towering shade trees and wide-ranging
recreational facilities of the Elko City Park. It is one of the finest in
America, and would be an ornament to cities many times Elko's size.
This is where the annual
Basque Festival is held each July and it is furnished with every conceivable
accoutrement: baseball diamonds, barbecue pits, picnic tables, tennis courts,
swimming pools—three of them (one indoor, one outdoor and one for wading
smallfry)—basketball courts and an outdoor handball court. On a warm
day in Elko the park is all you need.
But there's more. The
Northeastern Nevada Museum is located on the south side of the park. Expanded
now to several times its former size, the museum is a professionally managed
and maintained archive and exhibit of regional history. Most of the items
displayed were donated to the museum by local residents. One exception is
the old saloon bar from Halleck. For this beloved relic the museum is required
to pay rent in the form of one bottle of Beefeater's Gin per year, served
over the bar. Rent day began as a private ceremony, but has developed into
an annual invitation-only affair of considerable eclat in the local community.
The museum is also noted for the variety and quality ofits art exhibits,
including its annual traveling show of Nevada photography which is easily
the most-visited art exhibit in the state. Theme exhibits, such as the one
accompanying the annual cowboy poetry gathering, are also excellent. The
Elko Chamber of Commerce is right next door, providing
useful information about the community, its resources, and sightseeing
information.
Elko's
Convention Center is the most recent addition to
the park complex, and the most impressive so far. at community theater and
meetings facility opened with a concert by the Utah Symphony Orchestra and
has drawn SRO crowds to more recent performances be such celebrities as Wolfman
Jack and Willie Nelson.
You can take Nevada Route
225 north to Wild Horse Reservoir, Mountain City, and Owyhee.
Nevada Route 227 leads southwest
to Spring Creek, South Fork State Park, Lamoille, and the magnificent Ruby
Mountains.
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