Lot 1

The auction was held in the open air on a Thursday morning in May, on land that had been desert scrub until approximately three weeks prior.

Frederick Morse had taken the train from Sacramento specifically for this. He was thirty-eight years old and had made a reasonable amount of money buying property near railroad stations before the stations were finished, and he understood that the window between groundbreaking and completion was the only window that mattered. After completion the prices reflected what people already knew. Before completion they reflected what people were willing to believe.

He had done his research. The Central Pacific was building east. The Truckee Meadows was the natural stopping point -- water, grass, a defensible ford. The town would be here. He was here first. This was, as he understood it, the entire game.

What he had not accounted for was the German.

The man's name was Kellerman. He was perhaps forty, broad-shouldered, with the kind of deliberate stillness that Frederick associated with men who had spent time doing physical work and had then stopped. He had arrived on the same work train as Frederick, which meant he had left Sacramento the night before, which meant he had made the same calculation Frederick had made and made it at approximately the same time.

They stood next to each other at the auction without speaking. The auctioneer was moving fast -- the railroad wanted the lots sold and the town established, and there were perhaps seventy men in the crowd and more arriving on foot from the work camps to the east. Frederick had identified the corner lots as the most valuable: Commercial Row on the north side, Virginia Street as the natural spine going south. He had decided which three he wanted before he arrived.

Kellerman bid on the first Virginia Street lot and Frederick let him have it. The second Virginia Street lot Frederick wanted, and he bid on it, and Kellerman bid against him, and they went four rounds before Frederick stopped. He stopped not because the price was wrong but because of the way Kellerman was bidding -- without hesitation, without any visible calculation, as though the number didn't particularly matter to him. Frederick had learned to recognize the difference between a man bidding on an investment and a man bidding on something he had already decided to have.

He bought three lots on Commercial Row instead, which was the correct decision financially. The lots he wanted were adjacent to the brewery site and the new depot, and within two years they would be worth four times what he paid. He sold them in 1871 and went back to Sacramento and made the same calculation about Ogden, Utah, which did not work out as well.

Kellerman stayed.

He had the lot on Virginia Street and he had, apparently, enough money to build on it, and he had whatever quality Frederick had identified in the auction -- the sense of a man not speculating but settling. By September of 1868 there was a saloon on the lot. By 1870 it had a second floor. The name above the door was simply KELLERMAN, which Frederick thought was either very confident or very German, and he was not sure there was a difference.

He heard about it years later from a man who had passed through Reno on his way to the mines and stopped at Kellerman's for a beer and found it still there, still running, still under the same name. Frederick had been in four cities since then. He had made money in two of them.

He thought about the auction occasionally. Not with regret, exactly. More with the specific feeling of having been in the presence of something that knew what it was, at a moment when he was still deciding.

---