The Crossing

The survey crew had been working the river bend for three days before Myra Lake understood what they were doing.

She had watched them from the willows on the north bank, which was where she went in the mornings when the air was still cool and the light came off the water at that particular angle she had never seen anywhere else. The crew worked methodically, moving their instruments in a straight line west to east, driving stakes into the ground at measured intervals. They did not look up.

Her husband Thomas had been watching them too, from the ranch house. He had come in from the fields two days early, which he never did in May, and she had seen him standing at the fence line with his hat in his hands, which he only did when he was working something out.

On the third morning she asked him.

He said: the railroad is coming through here. Not past here. Through here.

She looked at the stakes in the ground. There were eleven of them now, running from just east of the cottonwood grove to the base of the small rise where they had built their first fence in 1861. The stakes were painted red at the top.

She said: what does that mean for the land?

He said: they're offering forty dollars an acre for the right of way. I already told them yes.

She had known, from the way he held his hat.

The Central Pacific had been pushing east across Nevada since the previous summer, laying track at a pace that struck everyone who saw it as either a miracle of organization or a controlled disaster, depending on how close you were standing. The crews were mostly Chinese -- she had seen them at the Truckee Meadows camps, a thousand men moving in a system she did not fully understand but recognized as competent. They built in sections and the sections accumulated. It was the accumulation that was hard to argue with.

The town was not her idea. She had come to the Truckee Meadows in 1858 with Thomas and his brother and a wagon that had not made it to California, and the meadows had been enough. Water, grass, the mountains to the west going pink in the evening. They had built the ranch on a ford that the emigrant wagons used, and for ten years that had been sufficient. Travelers paid to cross. Some stayed for a few days before moving on. Most of them were going somewhere else.

In May of 1868 a man named Myron Lake -- which was Thomas's given name, though he never used it -- signed the paperwork with the Central Pacific Railroad that established the right of way and the townsite. The railroad company named the town Reno, after a Union general who had been dead for six years and had never been to Nevada. Myra had no opinion about the name. What she had an opinion about was the speed of what followed.

By June there were forty buildings. By July there were more than a hundred. Men arrived on the work trains and stayed when the work moved east. Merchants arrived from Sacramento and Virginia City. A man named Hertlein started a brewery on the road they were calling Commercial Row. The land that Thomas had sold for the right of way was being sold again, in lots, at prices that had nothing to do with what he had been paid.

She watched it from the same place she had watched the survey crew -- the north bank of the Truckee, in the willows, in the morning. The light still came off the water the same way. The rest of it was different.

Later she would tell her daughter that she had not been opposed to the town. What she had been was attentive. There is a difference, she said, between watching something happen to you and watching something happen. She had tried, in those first months, to watch it the second way.

Whether she succeeded was a matter her daughter thought about for the rest of her life.

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