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.
•••
CHAPTER 10
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.
•••
Both the Mighels family and the Davis family produced some interesting and talented people. One of the most successful persons to spring from the Appeal families was Phillip Verrill Mighels. He was the second child and second son for Harry and Nellie V. Mighels.
Phillip was born April 19, 1869, in Carson City. He attended school in Carson City and was admitted to the bar in Nevada at 21. But he apparently disliked the work and drifted into journalism.
Phillip took a job as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and two years later moved to New York City. Many members of the Mighels and Davis families lusted for international fame, but Phillip V. was the one who came the closest to gaining immortality.
Phillip was a prolific and successful novelist. He was not one of those writers of Wild West dime novel potboilers that little boys consumed voraciously. He was a careful writer who researched his topics meticulously and wrote books that were fiction but were well grounded in fact and authentic atmosphere.
Books like “Out of a Silver Flute,” “Furnace of Gold” (the plot of which was laid in Goldfield), and “Bruvver Jim’s Baby” were regarded as true portrayals of life in the West. Easterners read them and daydreamed about life out West. Boom camp residents in Nevada and California would read them and marvel at Phillip’s ability to capture life as they knew it.
Phillip’s novels were republished in England and during his brief career he produced about a dozen novels and wrote prolifically for Harper’s Magazine and other major periodicals.
Very few of his novels survive today. Novels are not all as enduring as nonfiction and only the more classic items can survive over the centuries. He did tackle one breathtaking (for his time) topic — an interracial love affair. His novel, “The Inevitable,” was about a white woman and a black man who struggled against society and conflicting personal aims to make an intimate relationship work.
Phillip, according to his nephew Harry Mighels of Reno, received an unusual item of recognition that not too many people know about.
Gutzon Borglun, the famous sculptor known chiefly for the Mount Rushmore faces, was commissioned to do a life-size statue of Comstock millionaire John Mackay. The idea for the statue was dreamed up by Sam Davis while in his job as state controller. The original thought was for the statue to grace the ground in front of the Capitol, but legislators balked when it came time to grant permission. The statue was mounted in the “quad” in front of the Mackay School of Mines building on the University of Nevada, Reno campus.
In any event, while the bronze statue was in the planning, Borglun, a personal friend of the Davis family, called upon Phillip to pose in John Mackay’s stead. The artist felt Phillip enough resembled the senior Mackay in his younger years to do the posing. The statue is unmistakably John Mackay, but one can still see hints of Phillip’s frame and features in the finished statue.
Phillip’s quest for authenticity is what led to his untimely death. He was killed in a hunting accident in Winnemucca. Phillip was staying at the Bliss Ranch in Humboldt County doing research and background work for his latest novel. He was hunting sage grouse one afternoon and, depending on which newspaper version you read, he was shot in the groin by his own shotgun while either raking a downed bird out of a bush or clubbing an injured bird with the gun butt. It doesn’t matter which is correct; both acts are violations of basic hunter safety.
The gunshot wound was grievous, and Phillip died the next day. His untimely passing electrified the entire nation. His hometown of Carson City, very proud of him and his achievements, was universally stunned. His funeral cortege arrived by train from Winnemucca. Dignitaries from all over Nevada, as well as a good part of the Carson City community, attended the funeral.
Phillip’s passing was universally lamented in the Nevada press as a loss to the arts. The Reno Evening Gazette commented:
Many sorrowing friends and admirers of the late Phillip Verrill Mighels were at the depot this morning when the body of the Nevada author and poet was taken to Carson City for internment.
Tragic as was the death of this gifted writer, it was not the manner of his end which affected the people gathered at the train, but the loss which was thus suffered by a state which takes pride in its sons. Mr. Mighels was of Nevada, Nevadan. His poems breathed the scent of the sagebrush, the incense of the wonderful wastes of plain.
They were colored with the azure tints of Nevada’s cloudless skies and the varying sunset hues which make kaleidoscopic the gaunt eminences that guard Nevada’s valves.
He wrote of strong men and good women. He was virile as are the people of this state and he pictured true westerners in his western tales.
The posthumous fame that will come to Phillip Verrill Mighels will, if he bends his spiritual ear earthward, recompense him for the arduous labor attending his climbing of the ladder that leads upward from the field of mediocrity.
Sam Davis’ kid brother, Robert Hobart Davis, like Sam, launched his life’s career from the Appeal. Robert had national success that threatened to eclipse what little notoriety Sam had been able to garner for himself.
Robert was born March 23, 1869, and was 25 years younger than brother Sam. Robert came to Carson City in 1884, where he was quickly put to work at the Appeal by Sam who had married himself into the newspaper some three years earlier.
Robert worked in circulation and as a compositor. By the time he was 19 years old he had completed four years on the Appeal payroll and left for San Francisco to work for the Chronicle, the Call, Examiner and Bulletin.
He moved to New York where he went from the World to the Journal. First major recognition, according to a Nevada Historical Society writer, was when he exposed the Beef Trust which was selling rotten meats to the U.S. government to be fed to soldiers fighting the Spanish American War.
He graduated from newspapers to fiction. And as an editor, he is credited with discovering such artists as O. Henry, Fannie Hurst, Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Booth Tarkington and printing their first works. Many of them he helped by providing them with story plots he created and outlined.
In 1925, he got the dream assignment of being a globe-trotting reporter who wrote the column “Bob Davis Reveals” which received national attention until his death in 1942.
His humble beginning at the Appeal was recognized by an association of Nevada journalists who mounted a plaque on the corner of the Appeal’s old location at the brewery building. The plaque was moved to an exterior wall near the front entrance of the Appeal’s new building on Bath Street.
Bob Davis’ inconsequential beginnings in Nevada impressed other Nevadans but Davis himself usually ignored Nevada in his writings. He may have ignored his Nevada heritage in life but his estate, which handed large grants to journalism studies, won him attention from mid-century Nevada writers.
The new man of the Mighels family was Henry Rust “Hal” Migheis, the eldest son of the Appeal’s famous founding editor. Hal was everything his dad wanted him to be.
H.R. Senior’s oft-expressed wish was for “five strong sons” to operate an Appeal of a quarter-million circulation. Hal was the only member of the first-generation offspring to stick with the Appeal.
Born Oct. 9, 1867, he was 12 years old when his father died. Operating the Appeal was a hand-to-mouth existence for the Mighels family from the beginning and Hal was helping as soon as he could walk. His mother, Nellie, would set “sticks” of type at home and Hal would carry them to the Appeal.
When his father died, Hal quit school in order to work and provide an outside income.
Despite the fact that he had only a ninth-grade education, he was an expert writer, competent in spelling and punctuation. A good reporter, he used to claim he could get a worthwhile news story from anyone he talked to and visited the Capitol daily.
In 1898, Hal leased the Appeal from Sam Davis and his mother when his stepfather ventured into politics. Hal served in the Nevada Legislature as an assemblyman for two years (1913-14) and was appointed clerk of the Nevada Supreme Court in 1915, serving until the next election in 1916. He also operated the Ely Times for Vail Pittman and later the Fallon Standard for Mrs. Clyde Bingham.
As an assemblyman in 1913, he helped fight off an attempt to move the state capital to Reno. Hal and his fellow opponents to the measure got a bill through the Legislature to build an extension on the Senate and Assembly wings of the Capitol — with the object being to make it financially impractical to abandon the Carson City facility to build a new one in Reno.
Hal died on Memorial Day 1932. His wife, Ida B. Mighels, who had “never set foot inside the Appeal building” was suddenly thrust into the role of publisher.
Hal’s son Harry admitted that his father didn’t have much of a head for figures. Two years before his death, Hal signed a contract to buy out a local competitor for several thousand dollars with no real idea of where the money would come from.
According to Harry, his father’s careless money-handling habits had augured the Appeal into deep financial difficulty. “But within two years, mother had built up the Appeal business and paid off all the old debts,” he observed.
Ida managed the Appeal until 1940 when she leased the operation to Amos Buckner.
In 1945, Harry and his sister, Mrs. Ray McDonald of Sacramento, sold the Appeal to W.L. Davis Jr., no relation to the family, thus ending the Mighels’ nearly 80 years of involvement with the paper.