The history of Reno and its neighbors, told through the people who lived it. One short story a day — 130 stories spanning 1863 to 2026, drawn from the archives of the Historic Reno Preservation Society.
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An introduction to Nevada Stories: the history of Reno and its neighbors, told through fiction, one short story every weekday.
In May of 1868, Myra Lake could tell by her husband's hands that the land was already sold.
The auctioneer had a voice built for open country.
The telegram arrived on a Tuesday.
Otto Kellerman arrived in Reno on the third of September, 1869, with forty dollars American, two changes of clothes, a good knife from Solingen, and no German left to speak to.
Bridget Fitzgerald arrived in Reno in the summer of 1874 with forty-two dollars, a trunk of clothes, and a letter of introduction that turned out to be addressed to a man who had left for Sacramento the previous winter.
James Doyle came down from Virginia City in September of 1875 with three hundred and forty dollars, a bad knee, and a disposition that had not improved in the six years he had spent underground.
Guadalupe Morales had learned the river's moods the way you learn anything you live beside long enough — through attention and a certain amount of fear.
Margaret Wells arrived at the depot on a Tuesday in October and could not find anyone who knew exactly where the university was.
The law arrived in Reno on a Thursday, by telegraph, the same way everything arrived.
Daniel Reilly had not planned to become a lawyer in a town that barely needed one.
Rosa Morales heard the river before she saw it.
Thomas Gray set type the way other men played piano -- by feel, without looking, his fingers finding the right letter in the case before his eyes had finished reading the word.
Willa walked to the river the morning after the law was signed and stood where her mother had stood thirty-four years before, watching something be taken.
The depot smelled of coal smoke and pine resin and the particular sweetness of oranges carried a long way in cold air.
Agnes Park walked up the hill north of town on a Monday morning in September with a carpetbag in one hand and a letter in the other, and when she reached the top she stopped and looked at what she had come for.
Helen Marsh arrived in Reno on the four o'clock train from the east, carrying two trunks, a hatbox, and a marriage she intended to leave on the courthouse steps.
George Turk checked the dining room twice before the doors opened, the way he checked everything twice, because in a hotel the difference between good and adequate was the things nobody noticed.
The tearoom occupied the ground floor of a building two doors south of the Riverside Hotel, and at ten o'clock on a Thursday morning in March it smelled of lemon oil and the particular mustiness of rooms used mostly by women.
Frances Cole arrived in Reno on a Wednesday in October of 1921 and went directly to her attorney's office, because she was not a woman who wasted time, and because the sooner she started the clock on her residency, the sooner the clock would stop.
Dolores Park sold a pair of boots to a woman from Connecticut on a Tuesday morning in September, and by the time the woman left the store, she was walking differently.
Frank Kellerman stood behind the bar on a Friday evening in December of 1918 and poured a whiskey for a cattleman from Lovelock and thought about the fact that in three days he would not be able to do this anymore.
Clara Reinholt signed the lease on a Tuesday in March of 1920, standing in the empty storefront on Virginia Street with the landlord and a pen and the particular feeling of a person who has just committed to something that cannot be taken back without cost.
The ranch sat in a fold of the Truckee Meadows, seven miles south of Reno, at the end of a dirt road that turned off the main highway and ran through sagebrush for a quarter mile before arriving at a gate made of peeled pine poles.
The alley ran parallel to Commercial Row, between Sierra and Virginia Streets, and in the years before Prohibition it had been called Douglas Alley, which was the name on the city maps, but during the dry years the people who used it most had taken to calling it Bottle Alley, which was not on any map but was accurate.
