Jarbidge Nevada lies within the narrow steep sided canyon that’s the channel for the middle Fork of the Bruneau River, 9 miles south of the Idaho border in the northeast corner of Nevada at 6,500 feet above the level of the sea. Sharply rising walls of rock soar up on either hand to jumbled spurs and crags more than 2,000 feet above the tiny gold rich settlement below. Summer nights are cold — there are places where the ice never melts — and the winters are eight months long.

Today the population totals a couple of dozen but in 1916 jarbidge was one of the busiest and most productive mining camps in Nevada with hundreds of people busily engaged in getting rich, or at least staying alive.

Postmaster Scott Fleming loosened his high starched collar and stared apprehensively into the lacey curtain of snow falling on Jarbidge’s single street. December had been stormy and snow had been falling steadily since the early afternoon of the fifth. The stagecoach bringing the mail down from Rogerson Idaho was already three hours overdue and Fleming was worried. With three feet of snow in the higher passes, he knew it took all the skill and stamina the driver possessed to hold his horses to the narrow Crippen grade.

Earlier he’d watched a string of laden wagons rattle into Jarbidge, the red-faced stiff-limbed drivers sitting high up on the boxes, hurrying their exhausted teams up the narrow canyon street. They had met an outbound train of empty wagons at one of the narrowest points of the grade and been forced to spend the previous night and half of today struggling past one another on the freezing flank of the mountain. Fleming was beginning to think the stagecoach might’ve met the same wagons before they crested the Summit.

At a little after 8 o’clock a miner named Frank Leonard was checking his mail at General Delivery and registered surprise when Fleming told him the mail had not arrived. The outbound drivers had called in from the telephone at Rattlesnake Station at the summit of the Crippen Grade, Leonard told him. They said they had passed the stagecoach on its way down to Jarbidge at mid-afternoon. It should have been in town well before now.

Something was seriously wrong. Fleming pictured driver Fred Searcy plunging over the edge of the snow-slick road. Immediately he hired Leonard to ride up the Crippen Grade and bring the sack of registered mail back with him if he could retrieve it from the wreckage.

When Leonard returned some two hours later, the small post office was filled with concerned men whose buzzing speculation stopped abruptly as he entered. He described a bitterly cold ride through the blinding snow all the way to Rattlesnake Station and no sign of the stagecoach. One of the men suggested a search party and was met with a willing chorus of approval.

“Wait a minute now,” Fleming interrupted. “We know Fred got to the summit and we know he’s not on the road now. Before we go running half-cocked into that blizzard let’s see what else we can find out.” He plucked the telephone receiver from the wall, rotated the crank and asked the operator to ring Rose Dexter, who lived in the last cottage in Lower Town, the straggling collection of shacks and lean-tos across the river.

“Why, yes,” Mrs. Dexter said, the stage had passed her house on the way into town. It had been about 6:30 she remembered, because she heard someone shooting at coyotes and had gone outside to warn them away from the house just as the stage had come around the bend from Rogerson.

She knew Fred Searcy of course. She had called up to him — “but he was bundled up with a heavy lap robe or mail sack across his legs and hadn’t answered,” she told the postmaster. “Probably frozen clear through and in a hurry to get to the barn.”

As Fleming turned toward the curious faces, the door burst open to admit a swirl of snow, along with a frosted giant of a man who stopped in surprise at seeing so many men crowded into the small building. His astonishment increased when he learned that the mail stage had not arrived.
“The hell! I saw the stage three hours ago, not a hundred yards from where I’m standing now!”

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Editor’s Choice —

Las Vegas May Soon Get an Art Museum

People bustle about outside the Las Vegas Container Park on a Sunday afternoon, flanked by flashy murals that stretch up to four stories tall. A giant praying mantis sculpture looms above the scene, blowing fire every few minutes toward the visitors below.
On the Strip, flashing billboards and street performers stand in front of immaculate fountains and imaginative casinos. Just a few miles outside of town there’s the Seven Magic Mountains art installation, which attracted about 120,000 people last year.
Further into the desert north of town, looking down on the ghost town of Rhyolite, are haunting statues of desert ghosts by Albert Szukalski. And farther still outside of Goldfield are graffiti-covered cars with their noses buried in the dirt — the International Car Forest of the Last Church.
Southern Nevada, a bastion of artistic attractions, remains one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. without an accredited art museum.
But that could all change soon.

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How Virginia City Became An Old West
Tourist Draw

by Alicia Barber

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