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 5
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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The editorials of Henry Rust Mighels as they appeared in the Appeal, were a window into the man’s heart and mental machinery.
When Harry came to Carson City, the great Civil War had been over only a few weeks. He was still feeling the effects of wounds received in combat. A year earlier, he had been fighting the rebels in pitched combat. With war now over and the Union saved from those who would have seen it split asunder, Harry could not be expected to spare unrepentant Copperheads and secessionist sympathizers from the literary power and shot of his editorials.
The first year of publication, the editorial column almost daily carried items explaining and espousing Union party dogma and politics.
On Sundays, however, the editorial columns were reserved for sermons spiritual essays and religious poetry. Much of it he wrote himself.
The public good was always Harry’s chief concern when he was editorializing. His liberal attitudes toward individual rights often belied his colonial upbringing. He was at all times “pro-people” and had displayed some editorial attitudes which were simply breathtaking for the times. In 1877 he wrote an editorial condemning the practice of capital punishment. What makes this event more interesting is the fact that 12 years earlier he had editorially suggested that execution would be appropriate punishment for the Confederacy’s Gen. Robert E. Lee and President Jefferson Davis. Apparently, his war experiences were still fresh in his mind in those earlier years, and they may have clouded his true feelings on capital punishment.
The 1865 editorial begins by lambasting Horace Greeley:
Greeley who counsels mercy for rebel leaders is as full of crochets as a psalm book. When the South swag into secession he said let them go. He was afraid they might hurt somebody if provoked. He is a sickly member of the American Peace Society. Greeley is a good-hearted old granny, but he has no business with breeches on. He ought to swap duds with Jeff Davis. (When Davis was captured by federal troops, he was wearing women’s clothes as a disguise.)
We don’t want such counsellors as Greeley to tell us what to do with Jeff Davis and the rest of the family of whom Booth was the most manly. We can tolerate Horace in the newspaper world and let him drivel merrily the columns of the Tribune, but we want men of backbone as stiff and straight as a piston rod to deal with our national felons.
The rebel leaders ought to have justice done them. But we don’t want them tried by a judge and jury of such whey faces as Horace Greeley and Gerritt Smith.
For those “goodies” to deal with such absolute scoundrels as are the leading secessionists is as absurd as for an honest farm boy to bet against a thimble-rigger.
The easiest manner of execution is all the mercy the rebels will get if they are served as they ought to be.
But 12 years later, Harry’s revulsion for capital punishment was made quite clear. Possibly his own impending death intensified his awareness of just how tenuous and precious life is.
The later editorial spells it out:
… But the question recurs, as it always will recur as long as the death penalty remains a possible incident of our Criminal Code, is the putting to death, by process of law, of a human being an act whose results are sufficiently beneficial to the body politic to justify the retention of the statute which directs its infliction? One should be careful in discussing this question, not to confound his convictions with his sentiments; and to restrain a precipitate conclusion lest it be the result of importunate emotion rather than that of a judicious and calm reasoning.
It is quite certain that the deliberate hanging of a man until he is dead is a most serious and if it be not a decidedly injurious shock to the sensibilities of the community. Familiarity with scenes and acts of violence and death, harden the mind and blunt the nicer senses; and it seems to be admitted to be true that in countries where the death penalty is in vogue, murder and bloodshed are the most rife. The execution of a man is, indeed, in the nature of a confession that the law is at its wit’s end. Hanging is a knock-down argument. It is the law’s jumping off place; and it is a most jagged, ghastly and ugly ending.
We will not stop to attempt the difficult task of self-introspection to discover and make known why we entertain the decided opinion that the death penalty is an indefensible, needless brutal relic of the days of the rack, the wheel, the stake, the faggot and the ax, but we do express the wish that the present day Legislature may and will do away with it as a remedy which is worse than the disorders it is intended to eradicate and is in itself a rather shameless self-confession of the law to deal, with candor and wisdom, with one of the gravest problems known to criminal jurisprudence. The theory of capital punishment is that it exerts a reeded and restraining example. Not any advocate of the gibbet and the rope will venture the admission that the law thus contemplates a revenge. It is a most weak and pitiful conclusion when the law is forced to admit that it must take the very life itself is instituted to protect and sustain.
Hanging, theorise as we may, means nothing short of the extirpation of a dangerous man; and this is to place man on a level with the beasts against whom remedial laws are enacted, whose process is facilitated by the dynamic force of gunpowder and whose enforcement is stimulated and encouraged by the bribe and allurement of a scalp bounty. We cannot withstand the impression amounting well-nigh to a belief that the shock and horror and utter ghastliness of the execution… will do vastly more harm to the morals and orderliness than it can possibly benefit.
We hope the day is not far off when capital punishment shall be consigned to the horrid errors of the past; and imprisonment in solitary confinement, unpardonable by any ordinary process, shall supersede the gallows. And we beg to make the suggestion that the Committee of the Assembly to whom has been referred the matter of pardons, will take this question under consideration with a view to some conclusions upon the best and most effective manner of dealing with crime and criminals.
Harry Mighels was an obvious opponent of slavery. In fighting for the Union case, the correctness of abolition was as at least as important to him as the preservation of the Union itself. With the two-pronged question slavery and secession obviously settled once and for all by the Civil War, it visibly irritated Mighels to see repatriated southern bureaucrats in Washington trying to circumvent these determined-by-combat decisions.
In the following editorial, Harry declares the belief that blacks possess full rights — including the right to vote and have their votes weighted equally with those of whites. While he was at it, he stressed that such enfranchisement should go to women as well.
The desperate Cops. (Copperheads) have shouted themselves hoarse in praise of the “firm and Jackson-like course of the president,” and the Wasson Cradelbaugh “National Administration Party” after denouncing the radicals for stickling for Negro suffrage, endorsed Sen. Stewart because of his supposed antagonism to that pet measure of the Stevens and Sumner school of politicians. The apparently well-founded surmise that the president sanctions Stewart’s Negro suffrage resolutions sets the Copperheads to thinking that they have sung hosannahs to “the drunken tailor” too soon, and Stewart’s newfound admirers must either amend their platform, or in the strong jawed vernacular of their flopping friend, “chaw” their words.
We believe in making loyalty and intelligence the tests which should, when complied with, enfranchise all classes of citizens, white and black, male and female. We believe and have long believed that there is nothing better than strong prejudice that can be set up in opposition to the proposition. But “Democrats” and the “white man’s government” factionists, who are the authors of the feeble attempt to put up an administration party here, cannot take grounds with us and not lose their identity as partisans. Neither can they consistently follow President Johnson and Sen. Stewart even though those worthies should launch themselves upon the advancing tide of Negro suffrage merely for policy’s sake.
We believe that Andrew Jackson is a “Democrat” — or perhaps, we can better say demagogue, and we believe that Stewart is ready and willing to follow him or any other man in power, wherever he goes, provided, that by doing so, he, Stewart, can possess himself of place and influence…
The Unionists have lost all faith in the president and the more laboriously he flounders between the meaningless neutralisms of progressive Democracy and Republicanism, the worse confounded will be that party or that faction which attempts to hold him up as the grand champion and exponent of any fixed platform or policy.
Andrew Johnson will stultify and betray any party that hangs its faith upon his words and acts…
Mighels further identified his belief in the ability of women to know the issues and use the ballot intelligently in a letter to fiancé Nellie Verill. He was new in Carson City at the time, and he was witnessing first post-Civil War election in which Unionists and the secessionist-sympathizer Copperheads were running an apparently close race.
I’m almost ashamed to say it but there is the danger the vote will be close between the Unions and Copperheads. I’ll not do your good sense and sound patriotism the injustice to say that I suppose you being a woman will feel no interest in politics of this state for I know you fully appreciate the necessity for the success of the Union Party and that you will take a lively interest in the campaign which is to test the standing of this young state upon the Union’s most important questions.
As a staunch Unionist, Harry saw the union as omnipotent. As far as he was concerned, rebels were rebels whether they were secessionists beaten in battle; states rightists sounding off in reconstruction-era politics in Washington; or the West’s “aboriginal population” (Indians) who were, in the 1860s, involved in armed revolt in several areas.
Harry attacked states’ rights proponents editorially by saying:
States rights is a hobby horse for slavery proponents. To be an advocate of state rights dogma is to sustain the right secession and to hold that creed is to be a traitor.
In the Aug. 11, 1865, edition of the Appeal he commented upon the Indian problem and manifest destiny:
The wars of savages, black, red or white, are merely the logical results attendant much of civilization.
The Union had driven out the aboriginal savages of slavery and the Indian too must surrender life in the wild or render up his life and cease to be an Indian in habit and propensity.
They are in a last ditch stand with nowhere left to go ... There is no more west to be pushed to. There is complete possession of the Plains. The telegraph and overland mail are now being suppressed…
The weed must give place to the vine and the cereal. The bear and the wolf must give place to the sheep and ox; slavery must give way to freedom and the highest civilization of the white man must have free, untrammeled and undisputed control, Indian or no Indian and no human power can long prevent those results.
This will be the greatest age of all time when the Republican government has the full power to assert and hold… a complete and indivisible empire wholly redeemed from any description of barbarism.
Virginia City and Gold Hill were the centers of metropolitan life, industry and commerce during Harry Mighels’ lifetime. Carson City was a sleepy little town whose only claim to fame at the time was the fact it was the state’s capital city.
Mighels was attentive to affairs of government and industry in the two Comstock cities. The existence of the Virginia & Truckee Railway made it as easy to get between Carson City and the Comstock Lode by rail then as it is to do by car today. Mighels was in Virginia City frequently as a reporter and as keynote speaker in demand at banquets, on patriotic holidays and at political functions.
Since most of Nevada’s money barons and power brokers resided on the Comstock and made financial and political moves affecting the capital city from there, Mighels was obliged to stay in close touch with them. His relationships with the silver barons were not always cordial.
The “Bonanza Kings,” as Harry called them, had managed by hard work, good luck and incredible timing, to get control of the Comstock Lode, and after getting the silver out of the ground, were not particularly anxious to give any of it back.
Disallowing jackrabbits and sagebrush, legislators in Nevada’s infant and starving state government had very little to look to for potential revenue other than the net proceeds of mines from beneath Mount Davidson. The Bonanza Kings wanting to hang onto the optimum number of dollars were not anxious to pay for the state government and bureaucratic services made necessary by the population growth created by their booming enterprise.
Mighels fingered them by name, Col. James G. Fair, William Sharon and John Mackay — rich and powerful men who were prepared to use their strengths to protect their pocketbooks.
The move by the state Legislature to tax the proceeds of mines was a logical one, but it was bucked by the Bonanza Kings who refused to pay tax assessments and who promised to see legislators elected and Supreme Court justices empaneled who would remove the taxes against them.
An equally important influence on the Comstock was the “Territorial Enterprise,” a daily newspaper that quite logically, sided with the silver barons in their battle against taxation.
So, Harry Mighels was a minority opinion with some eminent opposition when he editorialized in favor of taxing mining proceeds.
By 1876, the Nevada Legislature had won its point in the state Supreme Court. The Bonanza Kings had paid up under protest and had vocalized their threat to manipulate the Legislature and the Supreme Court to gain relief. They apparently had the Territorial Enterprise on their side.
An Appeal editorial June 10 of that year summarizes the situation:
Questions of importance to the state or nation ought to be discussed dispassionately. The Appeal treats all matters of public import fairly. It has no enemies to punish nor friends to reward. It was the pioneer journal in denouncing the Bonanza Kings for a refusal to pay their proper share of the taxation necessary for the maintenance of the government under which they have lived, labored, prospered and become millionaires. We have stated in our columns that the Bonanza Kings had threatened to elect the next Legislature for the sole purpose of repealing the tax on the bullion product. Nor this alone. We have intimated that they had declared that they would elect the next Supreme Court judge. We have stated this on common San Francisco street rumor. It is well known that many political movements for the control of this state are first broached in San Francisco.
The Enterprise of yesterday contained what was supposed to be a scorching leader directed against the course pursued by the Appeal. The Enterprise does not object in the least to the “roastings” which the Appeal gives to the Bonanza Kings for their refusal to pay taxes. That, it intimates, is all right. It happens, however, that the Enterprise is gifted with after wit. It had nothing to say about the refusal of the Bonanza Kings to pay taxes until after they had paid them. Now it tells us to go after them. We will not pursue them further. They have paid up and that satisfies us for the present. Their future objects are what concern the public. The questions arising out of all those complications are: First — do the Bonanza Kings contemplate electing the next Legislature for the sole purpose of freeing themselves from their just share of the burdens of maintaining government? Second — do they say they will put a certain man upon our Supreme Bench? We answer both questions in the affirmative.
The Enterprise doubts the assertions of the Appeal and utters some very unkind sentiments. It states that all our remarks have been made to injure Judge Richard Rising. We admit that his affiliations are such that we shall oppose his nomination for Supreme Judge. If the editor of the Enterprise were better acquainted with Storey County politics than he is, he would not work himself into a furious passion and then imagine that the Appeal has uttered passionate sentiments. Perhaps if the Enterprise editor informs himself of the power which has kept Richard Rising on the District Court Bench of Storey for years, he will not be so angry…
We maintain the truth of our statement. If that paper wants us to mention the names of our informants, we will do so. We have not been in San Francisco lately, but plenty of reputable (people) have been. We will appall the editor of the Enterprise with the names of reputable gentlemen sustaining our assertions, if he wishes to do so, some of whom are his personal friends, and who regret that he has gone off on a tangent.
While Harry was adamant about the right of state government to wrest tax money from the mining barons, he was also well aware of the importance of mining to the state. He was anxious to see the mining industry preserved and that the chief product — silver — remained in popular demand.
Also in 1876, the state’s prime industry faced an international crisis. Silver had been demonetized in several European countries — meaning it was no longer considered money but a commodity to be bartered, bought and sold. The danger was in the fact that the United States had a price and could face a flood of foreign silver should the world market price drop below the U.S. price.
Harry, in an April 19 editorial, called for a tariff on foreign silver imports and the adoption of a standard silver dollar coin to be used to pay government debts.
... Let the greenback be redeemed in these silver dollars; let the national banks be authorized to exchange their currency for them; let the salaries and compensation of all government indebtedness except officers, employees and contractors be with them; let them in short be paid in liquidation of all government indebtedness except that interest on the public debt which we have specially agreed to pay in gold.
We would even go farther and receive them for customs duties, and when gold was needed to pay the interest on the public debt, let the government go into the market and buy the necessary gold, even as it buys the beef for the Army and coal for the Navy. This nation is now the great silver producer of the world. It is reasonable to suppose that during the next ten years we shall exhume 1,000 millions of dollars’ worth of silver. The use of silver in the arts and manufactures will probably not keep pace with our increased production of it, If then we permit the powers of Europe to demonetize and degrade it without an effort on our part to maintain its value, or in other words, if we allow France, Germany and England to “bear” silver, without ourselves endeavoring to “bull” it — the loss will be ours…
Harry got his wish on both counts. The Bonanza Kings paid their begrudging share of the state’s tax bill until the mines themselves gave out and the state’s welfare languished along with the populace’s inevitable hard times.
The United States adopted silver and silver certification for printed dollars which lasted nearly 100 years. Carson City even got a federal mint to turn native silver into coin of the realm.
On Jan. 5, 1875, Harry wrote an ambivalent editorial on the evils of gambling. He criticized the practice but hinted at legislation and taxation as a means to control it.
This far-western region cannot carry a self-imposed burden of this sort and is constantly lifting it up only to have it settle down again and gall in some other place. The task, a slow one to be sure, and rather indefinite is for society to purge itself of its own disease. in the meantime, all that the most earnest legislators can do is to play the part of homeopathic doctor making it costly to and helping nature by assuming to administer medicine in the form of license…
There is a peculiar base which is equivalent to robbery. Three card monte dealers in the railroad towns and on the V&T between Reno and Virginia City ply their trade. The practices of these rascals should be made a penitentiary offense.
On Jan. 24 of that same year, he saw legislators pondering the passage of a “Sunday law.” Harry observed:
Laws which seek to force a religious observance on Sunday are intolerable and find their base and origin in a spirit of fanaticism ... We sympathize with the spirit and intent but any statute which militates against one class of citizens is an outrage.
The cities of New York and Ohio have Germans who like to spend a large part of Sunday in beer gardens. The preferences and prejudices of Calvinists and other over-strict denominations of Christians should not be permitted to prevail over this Teutonic custom.
Sabbath was made for man — not man made for the sabbath. We commend the Legislature to a careful and prayerful study of His teachings and example.
During his stay at the Appeal, Harry spearheaded the drive for community pride and improvement. He was also the strongest voice in calling for city incorporation as a means to affect improvements.
Some of our streets are in scandalous condition. They will continue to do so just as long as persist in making them the receptacles of all sorts of old rubbish such as tin cans, old boots and shoes, scraps of old barrels and boxes and filth from kitchens and workshops.
There is a puddle alongside the Ormsby House which is a great source of comfort to certain vagabond hogs which wallow in it at great peril of a pile of old pickle jars. The green and stinking waters of that pool are enough to breed a pestilence. That hole should be filled up forthwith.
A bridge across a little run on Carson Street is in such bad repair that vehicles have to be turned out of the road in order to pass. A couple of planks is all that is needed. Let us have a grand clean up in time for Fourth of July. Get out your brooms and shovels and hoes and wheelbarrows and report for fatigue duty.
His clamorings for a cleaner and tidier community extended over a three-year period and eventually resulted in the act of incorporation from the Legislature which set the stage for tax districts, street repairs and other community services.
Harry was a supporter of law and order and temperance. With that in mind, one is startled to find the following editorial on the use of opium, printed May 20, 1877:
Occasional opium tipplers declare it tempting to let it become habit. Nothing like as strong as tobacco or stimuli of alcoholic drinks. Here and there one of the sisters becomes so addicted to smoking opium it is difficult to abandon the practice, but many do as decided or as dreadful as they are customarily reported to be.
Inclined to think the hallabaloo raised over the opium traffic in the light of our unrestricted liquor license law and still more unrest over the sale of all sorts and degrees of vine and spirits is the old story of the gnat trying to swallow a camel.
We are too ready to look past the beam that is in our own eye to discover the mote in our brother’s eye — especially if our brother happens to be a Chinaman.
Here, Harry was obviously irritated with his fellow citizens’ use of opium among the Chinese population while ignoring the social and physical ravages of tobacco and alcohol in the white community.
Harry was well known, well liked and highly thought of in Washington, D.C. His counsel was sought and heeded by politicians on the federal level. They often found guidance and solace in his stern and unyielding pro-Union editorials.
He was a person with impact in Washington even before he became a Nevada resident. Remember, he went to President Lincoln right after the outbreak of the Civil War and asked for and got a commission in the U.S. Army. Probably not an unusual occurrence during those hectic first days, but still one worthy of note.
After he was involved with the Appeal, Harry journeyed to Washington at two different times to confer with bureaucrats. One of these trips probably had to do with securing a federal mint for Carson City. The mint was a development that Harry urged editorially long before it had been mentioned anywhere else as a possibility.
Harry’s most important contributions to the community and state were through his editorials which were well-written and outspoken. He was quoted widely in the Nevada and California press and through his editorials he was instrumental in shaping state and even national politics in the years following the Civil War.