| This is a study of criminal activity on Nevada's Comstock Lode, during the twenty-year period between 1859 (when the lode was first discovered) and 1878 (when the wealth of the mines began to diminish). Essentially it is a reaction to the book Gunfighters, Highwaymen and Vigilantes (1984), by historian Roger McGrath, in which he explores the real world of the Wild West as compared to the West portrayed in popular cinema. He studied two frontier mining towns, Aurora, Nevada, and Bodie, California. In doing so he draws some expected, as well as some surprising conclusions. For instance he found that the women of these towns suffered little from violence; that no gunfights ever took place between lawmen and outlaws; that minorities—Indians, Mexicans, blacks, or Chinese—were never targeted for mistreatment due to their ethnicity; that no bank in either town was ever robbed; that horse thieves and cattle rustlers were never hanged; and that juvenile delinquency was not a problem. Based on all these findings McGrath concluded that frontier violence did not father modern violence, and that “the experience of the trans-Sierra frontier demonstrates that some long-cherished notions about violence, lawlessness, and justice in the Old West—especially those created by motion pictures and, still worse, television—are nothing more than myth.”; My study of the Comstock, (also located on the trans-Sierra frontier and that includes the mining towns of Gold Hill, Silver City and Virginia City), presents a different story. Although, like McGrath, I found no instances of bank robbery or cattle rustling, I did uncover a great deal of homicide, shootings, serious assaults, highway robberies, juvenile crime, violence against women, and violence against minorities.; My research was done in the summers of 2000 and 2001, wherein I visited several Nevada libraries and government offices. I did an extensive criminal study of the first twenty years of the Comstock, 1859 through 1878, by using government files such as the Storey County Criminal files, and by reviewing the five major newspapers that served the Comstock region in the latter half of the 19th century—The Gold Hill Evening News, Gold Hill Daily News, Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, Virginia City Daily Union, Virginia City Evening Bulletin, and the Virginia City Evening Chronicle. |
