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HistoricalNevada Society Quarterly Volume 60 2017 Numbers 1-4 Sheryln L. Hayes-Zorn Hillary Velázquez Managing Editor - & Frank Ozaki Associate Editor Production & Design Articles John B. Reid Toni Briegel Editor-in-Chief (2013-2017) Manuscript Editor - Diane L. Ahmad Assistant Editor Joyce M. Cox Book Review Editor Notes and Documents Proofreader Contents 4 Constructing Back Country Wilderness The Sierra Club and the Clair Tappaan Lodge at Donner Summit KIMBERLY J. ROBERTS 18 Mark Twain, Ruel Gridley, and The U.S. Sanitary Commission Raising Funds to Aid Civil War Soldiers ROBERT E. STEWART 37 C. D. Baker and the Modernization of Postwar Las Vegas EUGENE MOEHRING 59 Sisters All Tonopah’s Women Go to War, 1914-1918 PHILLIP I. EARL Front Cover: Paiute man on a mule, ca. 1913-18. Photograph by Harry Hess. (Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas Collection) 83 “They Live by Daily Wage” Labor and the Work of the Paiutes of Moapa and Las Vegas, 1911-1924 POLLY C. MICHEL 100 An Irish Immigrant in the Wild West The Letters of Denis Hurley of Carson City, Nevada, 1873-1938 BRYAN LAMKIN 137 The Boundaries of Being a Nevadan National Reputation and Exceptionalism MICHAEL GREEN 148 Resistance to the “Hoofed Locusts” Key Pittman, Basque Immigrants, and the Sheep Industry of Nevada, 1910-1920 IKER SAITUA 173 Notes and Documents Nevada and the Thirteenth Amendment ROBERT E. STEWART Book Reviews 191 Lake Tahoe’s Rustic Architecture. By Peter B. Mires (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2016) Reviewed by Mella Rothwell Harmon, M.S. 194 Cities, Sagebrush, and Solitude: Urbanization and Cultural Conflict in the Great Basin. Edited by Dennis R. Judd and Stephanie L. Witt (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015) Reno, Las Vegas, and the Strip: A Tale of Three Cities. By Eugene P. Moehring (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2014) Reviewed by Jon Christensen 197 Success Depends on the Animals. By Diana L. Ahmad (Reno & Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2016) Reviewed by Curtis Foxley 199 Cumulative Index – Volume 60 HistoricalNevada Society Quarterly NEW QUARTERLY OPPORTUNITIES The Quarterly is actively seeking Associate Editors The former Editor-in-Chief position has been reorganized into three positions. We are currently seeking: • Associate Editor–Articles • Assistant Editor–Notes and Documents If you interested in either of these unpaid positions, please email Sheryln Hayes-Zorn, Managing Editor at [email protected]. The Quarterly is actively seeking Peer Reviewers If you are interested in being a Peer Reviewer for the NHSQ, please email Sheryln Hayes-Zorn, Managing Editor at [email protected]. In your letter, identify the fields in which you are qualified to review and include a listing of your significant publications. The Quarterly is actively seeking Book Reviewers Every issue of the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly will begin to feature more book reviews. Please submit your review, 2 to 3 pages to Dr. Diana Ahmad, Book Review Editor at [email protected]. NHSQ would consider publishing longer review essays. If you are interested in writing book reviews for the NHSQ, please email Dr. Diana Ahmad. In your letter, identify the fields in which you are qualified to review and include a listing of your significant publications. Book reviewers should have a record of refereed publication in the area in which they review. Publishers may mail books for review to Book Review Editor, Nevada Historical Society, 1650 North Virginia Street, Reno, NV 89503. The Quarterly is seeking new content for the publication: Articles, Notes and Documents and Book Reviews. Please note: We must inform authors that it can take up to two years from the time of final acceptance for an article to come out in print. We do our best to publish articles as soon as we can in the order in which they are accepted. Constructing Back Country Wilderness The Sierra Club and the Clair Tappaan Lodge at Donner Summit KIMBERLY J. ROBERTS DONNER SUMMIT, 1929 Nathan Clark remembered his first “winter snow wilderness”1 adventure vividly. In 1929, he and his older brother Lewis, both members and future presidents of the Sierra Club, got on board the overnight train from Oakland and arrived at Donner Summit in the middle of a blizzard the next morning. They loaded their gear onto a toboggan and set out in search of the telephone company cabin they had made arrangements to stay at. They had never been on skis before. Nathan recalled: “We didn’t know where we were; we didn’t know where anything was; it was terribly cold; and the wind was blowing, and the snow was fly- ing. We bravely took the toboggan off the train and lowered it down onto the tracks, and the train went away. Then we pulled it along the ties inside the snow shed for quite a long way. We struggled thru deep snow and reached a well-made little lodge and knocked on the door. A rather stern and grumpy man opened it and said we couldn’t stay there—it was private. He let us in for a while, and we thawed out and Kimberly J. Roberts is the Photo Curator in the Special Collections Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received her M.A. degree in history of photography, science, and western landscapes from the University of Nevada, Reno, and B.A. in english and history from Colorado State University. She grew up in the intermountain west, mainly in Colorado, and has worked at museums, libraries, and archives her entire career, including the Denver branch of the National Archives, and the Minnesota Historical Society. Constructing Back Country Wilderness 5 behaved very respectfully… After a while we left this lodge, put on our skis, and started out eastward in search of the telephone cabin. We returned to the toboggan, which I think we’d left near the snow sheds, and went along the tracks. We found a cabin—roofed but too open—it was no good. It had a stove and wood, but one side was missing, and we left. We found another building, which was not the telephone cabin, but it was at least complete. We were too cold and lost to go farther, so we dug down thru the snow, went in, removed the tin can from the top of the chimney, struggled with the toboggan, fixed our meals, spent a couple of nights there, and did so-called skiing during the day. This was Washington’s Birthday weekend, 1929—Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There were no developments at Norden at all. Just the railroad station.”2 Clearly, despite Nathan’s insistence that the area was undeveloped wilder- ness, they were surrounded by infrastructure. His account mentions multiple buildings, including train stations, snow sheds, and three cabins not including the one they were actually looking for. They were not far from Highway 40, by then a well-traveled road even in winter. This is not to downplay the danger they faced; they were clearly isolated and at the mercy of the elements. Realizing just how exposed and vulnerable they were as they took those first tentative steps into the storm must have triggered an awareness of the vastness of their surroundings and their lack of control over the environment. This sensation is the core of the word “wilderness” itself. Derived from the Teutonic/ Norse root word “will,” wilderness literally means willful and uncontrollable. No- tions of wilderness have always referred more to this idea than to a specific material object or place.3 The unfamiliar and dangerous terrain, the hazardous conditions, and the difficulties finding shelter certainly comprise a wilderness experience. Safe, mediated access to our public lands is something we take for granted today, not realizing it isn’t natural and that a lack of specialized infrastructure and amenities create actual barriers to experiencing the back- country. Even a simple trail makes all the difference in the world to traversing the landscape, offering a sense of freedom within a carefully bounded security and turning abstract “space” into a more intimate and understandable “place,” to use the words of Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place: the Perspective of Experience. Open space, he explains, “has no trodden paths and signposts. It has no fixed pattern of established human meaning; it is like a blank sheet on which mean- ing may be imposed.”4 To create accessible wilderness areas is to impose a set of values on land, creating a specific context and meaning through which the land is experienced. Backcountry recreational areas are carefully designed to create an experience of wildness and the Sierra Club was one of many groups actively engaged in constructing such places. Ultimately, the perceived com- mercialization of this landscape was one of the factors that led the Sierra Club down the path towards political activism. 6 KIMBERLY J. ROBERTS The Clair Tappaan Lodge, built by the club up at Donner Summit in the 1930s and still owned and operated by them, was one of their major projects. The construction and operation of this lodge parallels larger developments within the club over the course of the twentieth century as demand for access to recreational backcountry shifted to concern for wilderness preservation. This shift occurred between the 1920s and the 1960s, roughly the time between John Muir’s leadership and the emergence of the club as a major voice in the envi- ronmental movement. During roughly the first half of the twentieth century, the Sierra Club functioned more as a social club using landscape as a hub for recreational activity than a political club using notions of landscape to campaign for environmental causes. Conservation at this time was a comparatively har- monious national movement and public lands were not yet a contested political landscape.

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