Overview

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 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 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 an unsettled frontier, peopled by rugged pioneers and ever-hopeful fortune-seekers. 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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9780874175820

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The skillfully edited Letters from the Nevada Frontier offers a penetrating account of the uneven and often painful processes that were part and parcel of Western conquest.... [T]he collection succeeds in rendering insight into the human dimensions of the rough-and-ready West.

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