Nevada Appeal to celebrate 160th birthday with Meet Your Merchant
The Nevada Appeal is hosting “Meet Your Merchant: Connecting Community with Business” on Saturday, May 17.
The event will offer community members a chance to discover new businesses they may not know in Carson City.
The event will be free to the community. It will run from 2-5 p.m. on Saturday, May 17 at the Carson City Multi-Purpose Athletic Center Facility, 1860 Russell Way.
Booth space for business is available at nevadaappeal.com/meetyourmerchant.
The event corresponds with the Appeal’s 160th year in publishing. During the event there will be a recognition for the Appeal’s achievement. The Appeal’s first edition was published on the morning of May 16, 1865.
For information, or to sponsor, check out the web page or contact Annemarie Dickert at adickert@nevadanewsgroup.com.
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CHAPTER 2
On May 16, 1990, the Nevada Appeal turned 125 years old. To celebrate the occasion the paper published a book on the Appeal’s 125 years in history. For the next eight weeks the Appeal will reprint parts of the book leading into the Appeal’s 160th birthday. The book was produced by then-editor Don Ham with help from John S. Miller, Daun Bohall, Guy Rocha, Jon Christensen and Noreen Humphreys.
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Carson City was a community different from most of its Nevada sisters. Boom camps usually sprung up wherever the ore happens to be discovered and arriving build whatever they can. This means towns often blossom in unusual and sometimes hostile locations with street layouts that frequently defy any effort to catalog or describe them.
But Carson City started out as an idea. Abraham Curry, Frank H. Proctor, Benjamin F. Green and John J. Musser purchased the Eagle Ranch to use as a townsite. It was meadowland along the Sierra Nevada foothills, well irrigated by snow runoff from various canyons.
In September of 1858, Curry hired a Dayton surveyor to map out the townsite and, because Curry had little spare cash, offered the man a prime city lot in lieu of his $200 fee. The pragmatic surveyor said he would rather Curry owed him the cash.
Abe wanted only the best for his dream city which he decided would someday be the seat of state government. He platted wide boulevards and a huge plaza in the center of the map that would eventually serve as the Capitol grounds.
Good soil, good climate, attractive surroundings, coupled with the good fortune of being on the Emigrant Trail, helped Carson City take root. The first stirrings of the Comstock boom were being felt. Virginia City favorably affected everyone’s fortunes in a wide radius — including the folks in Carson City.
Abe, in his enthusiasm to make his brainchild succeed, at first gave away or traded off more building sites than he sold. And much to everyone’s surprise — including Abe’s — the town took off like a rocket. Homes, businesses, hotels and saloons blossomed out. Wells Fargo set up offices to guarantee the regular flow of mail and express freight. Less than a year later, a telegraph wire arrived connecting Carson City with the West Coast. That was a sure sign that those people who were expert in such things, were betting the town was going to grow and prosper.
At the time Harry arrived in Carson City, it wasn’t much to look at compared to some of the growing metropolitan California towns he had been in. But it was attractive, and it showed very definite promise.
Carson had grown from zero to 200 people in less than a year. And it had soared from 200 to 2,000 in the past six years. Harry hoped the patterns were logarithmic. He expected to someday captain a newspaper of 100,000 circulation.
Carson City had favorable visual impact. Travelers seeing the town from on high along the Kings Canyon grade were often moved to take pen in hand to describe first impressions. The neat, white buildings, nestled on the green alluvial fans coming from the canyons, looked almost Tyrolean in the bucolic splendor. The city had a functioning water system so lawns, trees, flowers and vegetable gardens flourished in spots where it might have otherwise remained sagebrush.
In that May of 1865, Carson City was still 10 years away from the legislative act that would grant incorporation. The state itself was less than a year old.
The Territorial Legislature of 1861 met at the Warm Springs Hotel, but all subsequent territorial and state legislatures met on the second floor of the Ormsby County Courthouse (Abe Curry’s former Great Basin Hotel on the southwest corner of Musser and Carson streets) until 1871 and the completion of the state Capitol.
The city’s dirt streets were dust choked and, in the summer, and were hopeless quagmires with fathomless mudholes every spring. Rainstorms created small rivers and lakes downtown that could strand pedestrians on the street corners.
Bells tinkled on the freight wagons night and day — seven days a week. Homeless dogs were underfoot in streets and alleys and hogs ran at large, rooting in the grand plaza that was still five years away from seeing the beginning of the Capitol building. Young punks had the right of way after dark — smoking, drinking, talking loud and building hand-warming fires in the plaza. The youthful hooligans were not dangerous but very obnoxious and would become one of the early targets for Harry’s editorial pen.
Carson City tantalized Harry despite its shortcomings and despite the fact he was homesick and desperately missing his Nellie Verrill, now a 21-year-old ripe plum facing the stigma of being considered an old maid by her peers. Here was Harry’s chance to establish and operate a business, get moved into a house, dabble in politics, settle down and raise a family and do all the domestic things denied him during his 35 years of free-wheeling bachelorhood.
There was no newspaper in the area upholding the Union cause. Successionist-Democrat journalists were holding sway in the previous newspaper attempts in Carson City. The town needed a staunch pro-Union newspaper. That was reason enough for Harry. He was not the first or the last journalist to respond to a community’s desire for a hometown newspaper without examining the town’s economic base to see whether or not it could support one.
On the job Iess than a month, Harry, in a letter to his sweetheart dated June 11, 1865, hints at the tough road ahead of him: There are very few incidents transpiring here to material for subject, but the people must have a newspaper, and they flatter me with expression of satisfaction with my efforts. The place has been a regular graveyard for newspapers and if I succeed in making a permanent institute of the Appeal, I shall indulge my vanity, and you know what an awful egotist I am.
With nearly six months tenure in Carson City, Harry is beginning to detect public impact from his editorial efforts, and he brags to Nellie in a Nov. 11, 1865, letter: I am thankful to be able to be furnished with the means of serving, to the best of my ability, the same cause with my pen. The Appeal is the first “square up” Union paper ever published in Carson and its conduct has pleased the Unionists and vexed the Copperheads and I am hugely delighted with both results.
Our election takes place on the day after tomorrow, Tuesday the 7th of November, and if we have a Union victory, I swear to telegraph the result right straight to you if the wires are working.
Carson City’s chief industries were farming, catering to the cross-country travelers, a chronically broke state legislature and the state’s government bureaucracy — such as it was.
About a half-dozen hopeful newspapers had blossomed and then withered away during the few years following Carson City’s creation. Carson City had several newspaper firsts. The “Territorial Enterprise,” which grew famous in Virginia City spent a year in Carson City in 1860 after it pulled out of Genoa. It abandoned Carson too when the boom developed on the Comstock.
Carson City gave birth to Nevada’s first daily newspaper, the “Silver Age” in November 1860, only days after the Enterprise’s sudden departure. The Age didn’t last long either. Carson was without a newspaper for nine months until the “Carson Daily Independent” opened its doors July 27, 1863. After an attempt to economize by changing from a daily to a weekly and then back again in an attempt to spur reader acceptance, the Independent closed up for good Oct. 11, 1864.
About that same time came the “Daily Evening Post.” It changed owners in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy but it folded Jan. 24, 1865, when it closed “for a few days’ rest.”
May 16, 1865, the Appeal made its debut and Mighels showed up on the scene a few days later. Harry was quickly accepted by the community. He was acclaimed poet laureate for the Fourth of July festivities. It was an important occasion since it was the first peacetime observation of the holiday since the end of the Civil War. Gov. Henry Blasdel, recognizing Harry’s military background, tapped him out for service and commissioned him an assistant adjutant general with the rank of major in the staff of Brigadier General Slingerland, commanding the First Brigade, Nevada Militia.
Harry may have been a professional and social hit in Carson City, but the Appeal was a less-than-booming financial success. This fact showed through even in Harry’s optimistic editorializing. On June 13, 1865, with the Appeal Iess than a month old he stated:
We are editorially willing to gratify desire for posthumous fame by printing marriages and obituaries, but we call upon businessmen to advertise instead of relying on “puffs” in the local column from the editor and want to start bringing in the job printing.
It doesn’t make the printer very particularly happy to have his clothing account or his livery stable bill, or his butcher’s dun or his bill of fare presented to him bearing the imprint of a San Francisco or Virginia job office. We can strike off as good specimens of bill heads, posters, proclamation cards and notes of rewards offered.
We are not dying or sick. We are healthy as poor folks who work hard and cannot afford to indulge in dissipations. But this stripling hobble-dehoy Appeal is anxious to grow and get some fat on his muscles; he wants strength and room in accordance with it.
We are anxious to make the Appeal a permanent institution here for our own sake and the name of the thing. We are solicitous to publish all the telegraphic and other news that we can get and to make this as near a first class daily as our pen and type and means will admit.
The Appeal and Harry’s editorial policies continued taking shape as the months went by. In October of 1865, the Appeal had moved to a little stone building on the southwest corner of Second and Carson streets, facing the plaza. Harry, who had been conducting his reporting and editing affairs from a desktop in Controller Nightingill’s office, now had a sleeping room and work area.
He reported his new status to Nellie in a letter dated Oct. 22, 1865: I believe I told you that the Appeal proprietors had purchased an entire new outfit of pens, presses, etc., and moved into a more commodious and better located building than the one in which I first found them. Well, in the rear of the building I had fitted up a little snuggery for sleeping apartment and sanctum. I am writing in it now; and it is as cozy a little room as one would wish to have in this barren land. I shall be very comfortable this winter — and you know that comfort has many attractions for me. I suppose that you will conclude that being an old bachelor, my room lacks a commendable degree of tidiness. But when I tell you that “Jackson “ an intelligent contraband, makes matutinal visits to my room for the purpose of building my fire and blacking my boots, and that while am at breakfast, that faithful “cullud pussion” makes my bed and sweeps out and sets things to rights generally you will learn that I combine comfort with a reasonable sort of neatness while avoiding the necessary drudgery to attain it.
I am over head and ears in politics. Nearly two weeks since we put our Union nominee in the field for Congress and yesterday the Copperheads assembled here and nominated one of their number of the same position. I came near having a fight yesterday morning. A fellow who goes by the name of Major Gillis and whom I have known for several years, here and in California, came to warn me that I must be careful how I used his name in connection with matters political. He is a blatant “secesh” and I have taken occasion to give him some pretty hard rubs through the columns of the Appeal — such as saying that he was a stay-at-home rebel without the courage to take his gun and fight for “the Confederacy,” etc., etc. After hearing the gentleman through I fiercely informed him that I had fought his kind of rascals with powder and shot for some two or three years and that I proposed to talk and write about them pretty much as I pleased. He didn’t seem to like the tone of my remarks and again cautioned me to be careful what I published about him. I then asked him in a very savage sort of way what he proposed to do about it if I did make a personal attack upon him in my paper. This brought him up with a round turn and he left me without answering my question and with a very large sized flea in his ear. I am afraid that I became inexcusably profane while impressing it upon his mind that I should take the liberty of treating him as chose. But I must be pardoned for not selecting the nicer expressions while addressing myself to an avowed rebel.
I state this circumstance by way of demonstrating a condition of things which exist here. The “Democrats” of this part of the world are nearly all out and out rebels; and had they the power, not a Union man could show his head in the streets with safety. But cowards and bullies as they are, they dare not attack us now.
In 1866, Harry brought his young sweetheart out to the West Coast and married her. He wrote semiannual “progress reports” to his readers in which he would touch upon the Appeal’s progress (or lack of it) and chat a bit about future plans. On May 16, 1868, on the Appeal’s third anniversary, Harry observed: The newspaper reading people of Carson deserve a better paper than this one. But we assure our readers that telegraphic dispatches and bread and butter cannot be both purchased by any newspaper concern that is, as we have, not exceeding 100 paying subscribers; and so far as first class editorial talent is concerned, we beg leave to convey the delicate hint contained in the statement that we noticed in one of Horace Greeley’s editorials the other day, a sentence which he evidently borrowed without a “thank you” from one of our pet leaders.
Modesty forbids us to say more. Hope we shall be here for years hence, four times as big, 20 times as rich and surrounded by a widespread, opulent population.
As the years went by, Mighels bought out the other partners until he was sole owner. Twice a year he would write a little essay in the Appeal reporting the paper’s growth and progress to the readers. On its fifth anniversary Mighels confessed he was disappointed in Carson’s growth and the lack of business but insisted they were getting by.
At that time the Appeal’s circulation was about 200 which isn’t bad considering Carson’s population was around 1,600. But Mighels had once hoped out loud that Carson would grow to half a million and circulation would peak at 100,000.
In September of 1870 the Appeal abruptly and mysteriously disappeared. It developed that Mighels had sold the Appeal to C.L. Perkins, a local businessman. On Dec. 9, 1870, the “Daily State Register” rose from the rubble of the Appeal.
Adding to the bizarre nature of the situation is the fact that Perkins was the direct opposite of Mighels, politically and philosophically. Mighels was a Republican and staunch Unionist. Perkins was a Democrat who preached states’ rights and pardons for southern politicians. It’s hard to believe Mighels would even talk to him — let alone deal with him. Further, Perkins bested Mighels, a few days earlier, in a statewide election for the position of state printer.
The “Register” appeared with a deeper news-page format and grand promises of more news, more features and more reporters. It also sported in its columns, most of the late Appeal’s standing advertisements, obviously lifted right out of the galleys.
Perkins, in his first column, pointed out that his political views were so divergent from those of Mighels, he had to change the name of the paper only because “the different political tone in these columns” would only confuse people if delivered under the old banner.
Mighels’ surrender could have been due to a long list of pressures. First, nothing was expected. The local population, circulation figures, ad revenues, and even job posting all stubbornly refused to grow. He was heavily into politics and had little time for the paper. In recent months he had been hiring editors to handle the news pages.
Since territorial days, Nevada has subsidized its pioneer newspapers through legal ads and job printing. A newspaper proved legitimacy by owning a press in the county seat and publishing regularly for a year. Publishers able to stick with the regimen were rewarded with contracts for ballots, public announcement ads and miscellaneous job printing.
The state printer’s job was seen as being such a “perk” to support a hometown paper in the state capital. Mighels as much as said so in private correspondence. Possibly he figured since Perkins won this political plum, Perkins also deserved the burden of getting out a daily newspaper on the side.
It was also likely Mighels went into the election presuming the voters would be validating one political pole over the other, either union or state rights. Like most editors, he probably presumed his political stance was the popular one in his community. Losing the race and seeing Perkins’ pro-secessionist blathering’s tacitly endorsed by the voters must have been a brutal shock for Mighels, even though the loss was by only a few dozen votes.
Mighels was perfectly willing to grieve state’s rights with his speeches, his pen and even his fists as necessary. Maybe he tried with his wallet too. He and Perkins may have even had a winner-take-all election bet. It’s a theory that helps explain these peculiar circumstances and it’s in keeping with Mighels’ precipitous personality.
Mighels continued to be active in politics and in his community even though he was not involved in local journalism. On Feb. 13, 1872, the Register was purchased from Perkins by John Booth, a veteran newsman of Unionville, Virginia City and Gold Hill. Booth continued to operate the paper with its politics and content unchanged.
After two years, Mighels could apparently no longer stand the anti-Union atrocities being committed in the editorial of the Register. On Sept. 9, 1872, he resurrected the Appeal name and, in a visible attempt to scrub away the taint of the previous episode, changed the name to the “New Daily Appeal.” He upgraded the printing plant with a new press and equipment which means he either built up a grubstake in the intervening two years or found himself a silent partner. The new steam-powered, rotary printing press was the first piece of through freight to arrive in Carson City aboard the fledgling Virginia & Truckee Railway.
In the first edition of the “New” Appeal, Mighels asked Carson City for a second chance: Our capacities are known and while we propose for our own advancement and reputation if for nothing else — to do the best we can, if we fall short of what we are able to accomplish then indeed we deserve neither encouragement, support nor success. And on these terms, we fling our banner to the breeze.
The New Appeal hit streets and went head-to-head against the Register. Three months later, the Register disappeared as abruptly, strangely and quietly as did the old Appeal two years earlier. And as soon as the Register was gone, Mighels dropped the word “New” from the paper’s name.
Unanswered questions abound. How did Harry, who was obviously so broke he could no longer control his own destiny, find the means to re-enter the arena two years later with enough money to buy a new press and start a healthy, aggressive newspaper from scratch?
Did he go out and earn a nest egg with which to buy the new start? Did he borrow it from others? Fact is, the Appeal never was a success during the time the Mighels family ran it, and they often had to work other jobs to make ends meet.