Letters from Cornucopia (S. M. H.)

“The Blonger boys at The Palace say they never saw such times.”
April 24, 1876

The spark

That brief quotation from the Daily Silver State, found on a genealogy website in the early days of the internet, was the first clue I found of the whereabouts of Lou and Sam Blonger. Lou and Sam were brothers of my great-great-grandfather, and all I knew is that they had “gone west.” The words left me wondering. What times? And where?

Eventually I located the brothers in the Cornucopia mining district of northern Nevada during the winter of 1875-76. A couple of years before, Cornucopia had been the latest and greatest western boomtown. The Blongers had already spent a couple of years in the mines and saloons of Dry Canyon, Utah, before settling down for a while in Salt Lake City. The lure of the mother lode soon proved irresistible, and the brothers returned to the hills, this time to a godforsaken outpost in the brushlands of northern Nevada.

The letters

A few months earlier, a stage coach had pulled out of Winnemucca, Nevada, headed for the Cornucopia mining camp. It carried a driver, a pilot, and four passengers. One of the passengers, who was taking a new position in the town, had a literary bent. Upon his arrival, he wrote a brief account of the three-day, 100-mile journey and mailed it to the Daily Silver State newspaper for publication, under the byline “S. M. H.” Over the course of the next two and a half years, S. M. H. wrote 53 more “Letters from Cornucopia,” all of them published in the Silver State. Together they paint a picture of a once-promising mining camp in the midst of an agonizingly slow decline into oblivion.

From start to finish, the writer maintained three main themes in his letters. First was his relentless boosting of Cornucopia and its need to develop a business relationship with the town of Winnemucca rather than Elko. Both towns provided access to markets via the intercontinental railroad, and the roads from Cornucopia to either town were equally bad. Winnemucca had the advantage of being 100 miles closer to San Francisco than Elko, and as far as S. M. H. was concerned that made Winnemucca the obvious choice for Cornucopia’s overland connection to the outside world. Unfortunately the route to Elko was much shorter and already had frequent, if often undependable, stage and freight service. In an attempt to turn the tide in favor of Winnemucca, S. M. H. regularly pleaded with the town fathers of Winnemucca to grade the road, build a bridge over the Owyhee River, and establish regular stage and freight service, lest the undeserving businessmen of Elko permanently capture Cornucopia’s trade.

The second theme of the letters was S. M. H.’s advocacy for the construction of a “custom mill.” Although many mines were being worked at Cornucopia, the huge Leopard mine dominated the scene, and the Leopard mill, the only mill in town, crushed Leopard ore exclusively. The workings of the other mines, such as Sam Blonger’s small Texas claim, had to be sent out of town for processing. The consensus was that a custom mill—that is, one that offered service to individual customers—would greatly stimulate the growth of Cornucopia’s other mines.

Third, and most amusing, was S. M. H.’s unstinting defense of Cornucopia and the route to Winnemucca in the face of withering mockery from the editors of the two Elko newspapers. The fight simmered for several months, but when S. M. H. touted an eight-day haul from Winnemucca to Cornucopia as something special, the editor of the Elko Independent finally unloaded. “The entire interest of the officious blatherskite,” he wrote, “in the district perfumed by his presence, consists of a collapsed carpet-bag and a dirty shirt,” among other colorful insults. Stung by the harsh words, S. M. H. responded, “When the said editor says that I am a bummer he tells an unmitigated lie—he is a scoundrel of the first water.” S. M. H. was no match for the Elkoite’s vocabulary, but history will surely record that Winnemucca never had a more loyal defender.

In his letters, S. M. H. told stories of everyday life in Cornucopia: the business of the mines, the arrivals and departures of the stages and freight haulers, the weddings and funerals, but most of all, the waiting. You see, S. M. H. may have been sold a bill of goods. While he was en route to his new outpost, the Silver State published a “Letter From Cornucopia” from a different correspondent. It warned in no uncertain terms that prospects in the town were not as rosy as many had advertised. S. M. H. may never have seen this item, but by the time he wrote the second of his “Letters from Cornucopia” he had already noticed that “the influx to this place has ceased a little.” He brushed it off. “It is well for all that it should be so,” he reasoned. “Rome was not built in a day, nor do men get rich in that short length of time. . . . I am fully of the belief that this will in time make one of the [finest] mining camps in the state.” That set the tone of his correspondence for the remainder of his stay in Cornucopia.

A few weeks later, on July 24, 1875, tragedy struck. A spark lit a pile of dry sagebrush, and within an hour, the Leopard mill had burned to ground. Replacement parts were ordered from San Francisco immediately; the Leopard mine was too valuable to abandon. But in the meantime, business in Cornucopia nearly ground to a standstill. It took the three long summer months to get the mill back in operation, and after reopening its workers went without paychecks for a few weeks. Even after the workers started receiving wages again, the economy remained sluggish, with little cash on hand. These were “such times” the Blonger boys had never seen—and a portent of the boomtown’s inevitable demise.

Never fear! S. M. H. was imbued with an optimism so unstinting it couldn’t possibly have been faked. Despite having to apologize, again and again, for having little to report, that money was scarce and times were incredibly dull, his correspondence refused to state the obvious—that the mines were playing out, investor interest was low, and Cornucopia was in a death spiral. In S. M. H.’s public representations, virtually every mine was doing “splendidly” or rumored to be inches away from striking pay dirt.

The mines drove the economy, of course, but it was the local business owners who were S. M. H.’s main readers, and in his letters he was more than happy to give free advertising to many of the townspeople by working them into the narrative. During an especially slow period in the winter of 1876, S. M. H. took time out from his usual reportage to paint a picture of Cornucopia’s Main Street, one that must substitute for an actual photograph, since none seems to have survived. In letter 21 and letter 22, he wrote about the lodging houses, the stores, the various restaurants and saloons, and all the personalities that inhabited them. He visited the Blonger Brothers in the Palace Saloon, located above the office of David Bassett, Esq., Justice of the Peace. Down the street a bit, S. M. H. gave a nod to his own office, and next door came to “the room, known as the Homestead, must not say much about it.” No need, S. M. H., we get the idea.

By October 1876, S. M. H. had run out of ways to make Cornucopia sound like a hot commodity. Many of the residents, including the Blongers, had already pulled up stakes and moved south to the more promising mining camp at Tuscarora. S. M. H. stayed on, continuing to provide updates until January 1878, after which his pen fell silent.

Note to the Reader

In addition to the 54 letters written by S. M. H., I have included a few similar letters from Cornucopia written by others, as well as a couple of editorial retorts to claims made by S. M. H. These items are labeled A through K to distinguish them from the work of S. M. H. All the material is ordered by date of publication.

I have corrected obvious typesetting errors but not variant spellings. For ease of reading I have also added numerous paragraph returns and moved the internal headings, which often occur in mid-sentence, into their respective paragraphs. They are displayed in small caps.

Names that I determined to be badly misspelled are corrected in brackets at least once in the transcriptions. A complete index of names and subjects is in the appendix.

Some of the letters and articles contain language, characterizations, and opinions that, while not unusual for the times, are offensive to modern sensibilities.

Thanks

Thanks to Toni Mendive of the Northeastern Nevada Historical Society and Museum for her help in researching this piece.

Photos

Photographs are reproduced with permission of the Northeastern Nevada Historical Society and Museum.

—Scott Johnson