In 1898, Tasker L. Oddie, a twenty-seven-year-old New Jersey attorney and business executive, moved to Austin, Nevada, to serve as secretary of a company with mining and other interests in central Nevada. Over the next four years, he wrote frequent letters to his mother recounting the rigors of life on the Nevada frontier and the people he met there - miners, ranchers, Native Americans, and the townspeople of tiny, remote Austin and other isolated backcountry settlements. Nevada at the end of the nineteenth century was in economic decline, its known deposits of precious minerals nearly exhausted, its population drifting away to other possibilities. Soon Oddie was also striking out on his own in search of valuable mining prospects, eventually finding his fortune in the spectacular silver deposits of Tonopah, which were discovered in 1900.
Oddie's letters are full of vivid details, the lively accounts of a young man eager to experience life and make his fortune, observant and humorous, intelligent and endlessly curious. The letters remain the best records we have of central Nevada when it was still very much an unsettled frontier, peopled by rugged pioneers and ever-hopeful fortune-seekers. Through Oddie's letters, we see the depressing stagnating of mining towns in decline and the hectic excitement of the boom times following the Tonopah strike. This is real grass-roots history, sparkling with information about mining and community building in the frontier West. Eventually, Oddie became wealthy, expanding his interests from mining to cattle raising and going on to enter politics, eventually serving as governor of Nevada, then as U.S. senator. These letters of his youth document not only the spirit that eventually made him a leader of his state, but the state that he was one day to lead. Now available in paperback for the first time, Letters from the Nevada Frontier is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of Nevada at the end of the nineteenth century.
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