Mathewson-IGT Knowledge CenterUniversity of Nevada, Reno

Special Collections & University Archives

ON THE COVER

Devil’s Gate and Devil’s Gate toll road are shown in this 1872 photograph. Devil’s Gate, a famous toll station that profited from the busy wagon traffic to and from Virginia City, is remembered on Nevada historical marker 223: “This rugged reef of metamorphic rock was once one of the famous landmarks of the Nevada Territory … Devil’s Gate marks the boundary line between Storey and Lyon Counties. Through this narrow gorge paraded thousands of the most adventurous souls of the mining West as they made their way to the gold and silver mines of the Comstock Lode.”

“Special Collections is one of the richest teaching and learning opportunities in the university system. There is no richer library resource in Nevada than the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center, and Special Collections is its jewel.”

— James Hulse, Nevadan, historian, author, professor emeritus

In the late 1940s, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, who lived in Reno for some time, donated to the University of Nevada a replica of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze doors that are in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, Italy. The replica doors had been installed in the New York City Fifth Avenue mansion of his mother, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III, when it was built in 1879. Previously in Getchell Library, they now welcome all visitors to Special Collections and University Archives on the third floor in the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center.

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One of the greatest artists who ever lived dubbed the bronze doors that grace the entrance of the University of Nevada, Reno, Special Collections the “Gates of Paradise.”

What Michelangelo said about the doors at Florence’s Baptistery of San Giovanni holds true for their replica at the University. Those who pass through the Renaissance portal on the third floor of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center enter a community of knowledge open to anyone who walks in. Here, scholars and authors find a heaven; students from many disciplines discover primary sources and become hands-on researchers; family members connect with departed relatives; and visitors view long-vanished landscapes populated by the people who built northern Nevada and the West.

“One easily gets a surface knowledge of any remote country through the writings of travelers. The inner life of such a country is not very often presented to a reader. The outside of a strange house is interesting, but the people, the life and the furniture inside are far more so. Nevada is peculiarly a surface-known country.”

— Mark Twain, 1876

“I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming. My people were scattered at that time over nearly all the territory now known as Nevada. My grandfather was chief of the entire Piute nation, and was camped near Humboldt Lake, with a small portion of his tribe, when a party travelling eastward from California was seen comin … When told that they had hair on their faces, and were white, he jumped up and clasped his hands together and cried aloud – ‘My white brothers – my long-looked for white brothers have come at last!’ ”

— Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 1883Sarah Winnemucca portrait, circa 1864-1891.

Photograph of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, was taken by

Bradley & Rulofson around 1865.

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The Clarence and Martha Jones Special Collections and University Archives is a universe of voices, documents and images that are often uplifting, always surprising and sometimes haunting. The pieces of a mosaic of unwritten history await writers who create narratives and historians who delve deeper into the past. They find Medieval texts and miners’ diaries, pioneer journals and politicians’ correspondence, business records and books-as-art, photos from the dawn of photography, and a digital resource within reach of the world.

Beyond the gilded doors, vanished souls speak to us; death has lost its dominion.

The value of Special Collections and University Archives is greater than the sum of its thousands of rare books and other materials. The collection contains the ingredients that make writing books possible. For example, Arielle Gorin, a doctoral candidate in history at Yale, visited Special Collections in 2011 hoping to find focus for her dissertation. She found the records of fraternal organizations, miners’ personal correspondence and court documents that put faces on the history of Nevada’s mining towns and camps. Her visit to campus sparked her

Comstock miners, circa 1880s.

Gus Bundy photograph taken around 1947 of a sheepherder in the Sierra Nevada.

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interest in the role of fraternal organizations, such as the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Freemasons and Knights Templars, in the legal and institutional development of the mining West. With its constant acquisitions and changing exhibits, Special Collections is a living, breathing laboratory for the humanities, staffed by experts who preserve, organize and catalog the materials, and serve as guides for visitors in a trek through time.

History’s Detectives“The two men were convicted on false evidence; it was a frame-up. We proved it thanks to materials in Special Collections. The letter wasn’t just a bit of relevant correspondence. It was a smoking gun.”

— Guy Louis Rocha, former Nevada State Archivist

Those who seek primary source materials in Special Collections know that history is neither carved in stone nor cast in bronze. It is malleable and changes once new evidence is uncovered. That was the case for two men convicted of killing a restaurant owner in Goldfield in 1907. The defendants, both labor leaders, claimed the shooting was in self-defense and they were framed by mine owners and politicians. For nearly 80 years their convictions stood until Carrie Townley Porter, a Special Collections librarian, pointed two authors towards a 1913 letter in the George A. Bartlett papers. The letter proved that Reno political boss George Wingfield was behind a conspiracy to pin a murder on the

Gambling in Goldfield, Nev., in the early 1900s.

Sacks of ore in front of the John S. Cooke

Bank in Goldfield, Nev., circa 1905.

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labor leaders and that Governor Tasker Oddie was aware of the false testimony of witnesses. The proof became part of the book, The Ignoble Conspiracy, by Sally Springmeyer Zanjani and Guy Rocha. The Nevada Pardons Board in 1987 posthumously pardoned the two men, who had served prison sentences, and the New York Times picked up the story. In this case, an old document had much more than academic value. The letter vindicated innocent men and brought closure to one of the men’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Accidentally or by design, history can be recorded falsely or twisted in the retelling. Primary sources, if preserved and accessible, can be used to discover the truth, even after decades have passed.

“It broke upon our eyes like the ocean. For a long time we sat enjoying the view … [it is] set like a gem in the mountains … I called it Pyramid Lake.’’

— John C. Fremont, Jan. 13, 1844

First illustration of Pyramid Lake from the expedition of Captain John C. Frémont in 1843-1844.

Rock formations at Pyramid Lake in 1867, photograph taken by Timothy O’Sullivan.

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A Region and its People The journey begins with the land and its original inhabitants. The

voices of Washoe, Shoshone and Paiute elders are preserved in audio recordings, tape scripts and field notes created by anthropologists Sven Liljeblad, Margaret Wheat and others. The elders describe basket making, fishing in lakes and rivers, pine nut harvests, the medicinal uses of plants and other knowledge that, without the dedicated chroniclers, would have been lost to the ages.

The records of geologists and mining firms attest to the primeval upheavals and mineral wealth beneath the Silver State. The historical map collection traces Nevada’s evolution from a blank spot on the globe to a known quantity measured in miles and, sometimes, in

Photograph of Wovoka, circa 1907, who was also known as Jack Wilson. Born in Smith Valley, Nev., around 1856, he was a Northern Paiute religious leader who founded the Ghost Dance movement which was incorporated into numerous Native America belief systems.

Anthropologist Margaret Wheat talking with women of the Paiute tribe in the 1960s.

Unidentified woman of the Washoe tribe weaving a basket, circa 1900-1925.

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“Give me a good day. Take away any sicknesses I may have and drop them on the other side of the mountains.”

— Northern Paiute prayer upon awakening and washing in a river or lake

misery. Maps and charts document the carving of roads and rails as they pierced mountain ranges and spanned the sagebrush ocean. Time and alkali dust have erased most traces of the Silver State’s pioneers, but their journeys are documented, from the trails of the mountain men to the ruts of wagon-train emigrants to brochures touting the Lincoln Highway. Special Collections preserves and makes available the experiences of both the privileged and the poor and bears witness to their conflicts with the region’s original inhabitants.

Photograph by Lorenzo D. Creel of a Paiute man and boy sitting on a porch, circa 1906-1922.

Jimmy and Wuzzie George gathering tules for a boat in Churchill County, Nev., in the 1950s-1960s. Photographed by Margaret M. Wheat and used in her book Survival Arts of the Primitive Paiutes.

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“I think this is bound to be a rich country but it will take some time to explore it, and then it is bound to be controlled by capitalists after a few years … The roads are lined with oxen and mule teams loaded with freight.”

— William Beegan, Virginia City prospector, 1860

“We have had what I call a moderately cold winter nearly no snow and but little rain so far – which causes the Ranchmen (Farmers) in the vallies to be gloomy – but for 2 days since we had a good shower and rain and it is to be hoped that the

heavens will soon give us more for unless it is continued this part of the country will come to desolation.”

— Geo. L. Lucas, Elko, 1879

James R. Herz Collection, circa 1870.

George Wharton James Collection, circa 1910s.

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Booms and Busts“And what are the qualities which are looked for in a mining superintendent in the present day? In concise language, foppish dress, a flashy air, a fast team, several fancy women, costly establishment, an acquaintance with all the fast men and women in this fast community … Polished boots, spotless gloves and an immaculate toilet need never be soiled by entering the mine; such trouble is altogether unnecessary.”

—“Floy Favorite,” a pen name for a Mining and Scientific Press correspondent, Virginia City, 1864

For decades, northern Nevada was an obstacle for California-bound travelers to overcome, then came the discovery of gold and silver and the “Rush to Washoe” began in 1859. Special Collections preserves the diaries, letters and literature of Virginia City’s residents, both celebrated and obscure. A hand-written short story by Comstock journalist Dan De Quille tells the tale of a cowboy prank involving a hot spring and scalded buckaroos. The collected papers of diarist Alfred Doten provided the raw materials that shaped Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s publication of three-volumes of Doten’s edited journals. Books with Mark Twain’s hand-written notes in the margins are within reach. Maps detail the claims, trace the mazes of square-set timber shafts and document the digging of the Sutro Tunnel, an attempt to drain the flooded Comstock diggings. Handsomely bound ledgers record the day-to-day operations of the mining firms.

Gus Bundy photograph of the Virginia City cemetery, circa 1947.

An 1864 stereograph, part of the Lawrence & Houseworth series entitled: Nevada, Number 237.

Photograph of Nevada journalist Alfred Doten taken in 1866.

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Within these archives, famous, infamous and ordinary Comstock residents tell their stories. A pocket-sized notebook of tool-sharpener Nelson Brobant details his rounds among Gold Hill prospectors in 1859 and 1860. Some of his customers have faded into the mists. Others, like Lemuel “Sandy” Bowers, became famous. Bowers amassed a fortune, built a mansion in Washoe Valley and then lost everything. In the thousands of boxes and well-organized files, the unexpected is common. One folder contains a certificate for “superhuman courage,” honoring a Comstock resident who donned a homemade gas mask and saved seven miners trapped in the bowels of the Virginia City

tunnels. The rescue made national news in 1894 and was quickly forgotten, but the document preserved by Special

Collections bears witness to his heroism.As Virginia City thrived, rails tied the mining camps to the

transcontinental line. The details of the emigrants who flocked to Nevada’s mining camps, hamlets, towns and cities await anyone who wishes to drill deeper into the history of northern Nevada.

Nelson Brobant’s account book in which he logged his work on mining equipment in the Comstock in 1859 and 1860.

Virginia and Truckee Railroad Engine #22 crossing the Truckee River in 1908.

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“The worst that can be said of Nevada is that she lacks population, and it must be apparent that if that is a fault it is chargeable not to those who are here but to those who fail to come … Nevada, however, has been under a cloud. Hitherto, no one has dreamed that there was anything of value in Nevada aside from the ledges of gold and silver.”

— State Bureau of Immigration, Nevada and Her Resources, 1894

Prompted by flooding in the mines, the roughly six-mile-long Sutro Tunnel connected the Comstock Lode in Virginia City to an area near Dayton. Envisioned by Adoph Sutro in 1860 and completed in 1878, the tunnel was successful in draining and ventilating the mines but was finished too late to make much profit. However, it pioneered the excavation of large drainage and access tunnels in the United States. Photograph circa 1860s-1890s. 11

Birth of the Silver StateAfter its founding in 1868 on the new Central Pacific railroad line,

Reno emerged as the transportation hub for the richest silver strike on the planet. It was the state’s financial and industrial center, later linked to the rest of the nation by the Lincoln and Victory Highways. Beginning in 1910, Reno became the divorce capital of the nation, the most well-known berg in Nevada at a time when Las Vegas was just a wide spot on a dusty road.

By 1931, gaming became the “Biggest Little City’s” economic engine and authorities often ignored prostitution and bootlegging. In Reno and throughout Nevada, Americans could do things that were frowned upon in other states. What was “sin” elsewhere fueled Nevada’s growth. As the Truckee Meadows grew, buildings were razed, built and razed again. But the blueprints for many of the ghost structures and the original plans for those that survive are nestled in Special Collections.

Blackjack and craps dealers and players at Lake Tahoe’s Cal-Neva Lodge, circa 1938.

Reno’s busy downtown, circa 1940.

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“Can I get a divorce by mail? … Do you know of another state where I can get one easier? … I will send you $15 if you will send me a divorce. … She had a child but it wasn’t mine. … My life – one continuous hell. … Yours for a divorce.”

— excerpts from letters to a Reno lawyer, 1919 to 1947, Robert Laxalt papers

“What I’ve wrote in this book is without the help of the dictionary or any course in story writing. I didn’t want to dilute what I had to say with a lot of imported words that I couldn’t of handled. Good English is all right, but when I say something I believe in hitting straight to the point without fishing for decorated language.”

— Will James, author, artist, wrangler and drifter

Postcard, circa 1940.

Photograph of wild horses running on the Black Rock Desert by Gus Bundy, circa 1955.

Will James, about 1923.

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Architectural Drawings and ManuscriptsThe blueprints and documents of Frederic J. DeLongchamps are the

most significant grouping of historical architectural records in Nevada. DeLongchamps was Nevada’s premier architect who in his 50 years in Reno designed more than 500 buildings, including the Reno Main Post Office, the Riverside Hotel, buildings on the University campus and the landmark Washoe County Courthouse.

Other materials in the collections help researchers understand the evolution of the region, including the records of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, aerial photos of the Truckee Meadows over time, the records of divorce dude ranches, and a wealth of newspaper clippings pasted into scrapbooks, business records and personal correspondence.

In the manuscript collection, researchers follow the creative processes of the authors and scholars who preceded them. The papers of Dan De Quille, cowboy writer and author Will James, Sessions Wheeler, Robert Laxalt and others contain drafts and edited typescripts of both published and unpublished works. Researchers can trace the creative process as revealed by the authors’ own hands, chuckle over their doodles and catch a glimpse of their Muses. The writers wrote to their fellow scribblers, discussing the problems of their craft and their art. They dickered with their publishers, weathered rejections and slogged through writers’ blocks.

“All of us together were born of old-country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old-country way, and peel apples and pears after dinner. We were among the last whose names would tell our blood and the kind of faces we had, to know another language in our homes, and to suffer youthful shame because of that language and refuse to speak it, and a later shame for what we had done … and in a little while even our sons would forget, and the old-country people would only be a dimming memory, and the names would mean nothing, and the melting pot would be done.”

— Robert Laxalt, writing about McGill, Nevada, 1977

Reno Main Post Office designed by Frederic J. DeLongchamps, circa 1935.

Studio portrait of Robert Laxalt in the 1970s.

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The personal papers of U.S. Senators Alan Bible, Richard Bryan, Harry Reid, Congresswoman Barbara Vucanovich and State Senator Bill Raggio, among others, provide insight into political squabbles and national issues. The correspondence includes letters to and from presidents, constituents and government agencies. Bible, for example, was in the midst of disputes involving the 1960 Olympics held at Squaw Valley. Correspondence in his files shows the government’s Cold War concerns about the Soviet teams and athletes at an event designed to showcase peaceful competition.

U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt and Governor Richard Bryan on the University campus, May 17, 1986.

U.S. Senator Alan Bible in the 1960s.

Barbara Vucanovich was the first woman from Nevada to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Olympic flame and sculptures

at the 1960 Olympic Winter

Games in Squaw Valley, Calif.

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Mapping a Dreamscape“Our situation had now become a serious one. We had reached and run over the position where, according to the best maps in my possession, we should have found Mary’s lake [Humboldt Sink] or river. We were evidently on the verge of the desert which had been reported to us; and the appearance of the country was so forbidding, that I was afraid to enter it.”

— John C. Frémont, journal, Jan. 3, 1844

For historians and cartography buffs, the collection offers early maps of North America and the frontier West. Nevada maps beginning in the 1840s follow the evolution of the state’s development. It is a geography of human ambition. T.H. Jefferson’s map of his 1846 trek of the California Trail, published three years later, shows the river crossings used by the doomed Donner Party. On later charts, towns appear, only to become

Photograph by Gus Bundy of Jumbo Grade between Washoe Valley and Virginia City, circa 1950.

Photograph of an unidentified cowboy by George H. Johnson in the early 20th century.

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ghost towns a few years later. Ranches hug the river bottoms. Roads and railroads knife across the landscape. Mining firms carve up mountains. Map by map, decade by decade, Nevada’s geography morphs as the state reinvents itself again and again.

The Sanborn fire insurance maps of Reno provide detailed, accurate information about buildings and other structures. Compare them year-by-year as stables, blacksmith shops, brothel “cribs” and wooden buildings give way to brick banks, hotels and department stores. What was once a corral becomes a school, then a row of shops, a hardware store and then a high-rise casino. People forget; only the maps remember.

Cross-reference the Sanborn maps with historic photographs and historical city directories and the changing face of Reno emerges. Details drop into place, providing a wider perspective on the state’s history.

The Sanborn fire insurance maps contain an enormous amount of information about each building. In this map, the colors represent types of building materials used, such as pink for brick and yellow for wood.

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Images of Light and ShadowFrom Daguerreotypes to tintypes and from snapshots to digital

images, the more than 200,000 photographs in Special Collections – tens of thousands now scanned and available online – document the stories of potentates and presidents, miners, teachers, politicians and private citizens who visited the state or made it their home.

The collection ranges from the early images of the hardscrabble lives of Native Americans and miners to press coverage of landmark events including Reno’s “Fight of the Century” between James J. Jeffries and Jack Johnson. That bout between the “Great White Hope” and the African-American heavyweight champion took place in Reno on July 4, 1910, but more than a century later it is minutes away in the University’s collection. The archives contain news clippings, promotional materials, photos and a movie of the bout.

“As we came along wagons and packs were strewn in great numbers standing ½ way up to the hubs in hot sand. Mules and horses pass here with lank forms & glassy eyes topping greasewood & eagerly smelling every bucket for water.

— Peter Decker, crossing the 40-mile Desert, 1849

1920s photograph of a statue at the University of Nevada, Reno of John Mackay, Comstock Lode mining baron.

Photograph from the Robert Laxalt Collection taken in Smith Valley, Nev., in the 1960s.

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Other photographs chronicle the daily lives of Nevadans, their workplaces and their residences. The family albums are of special interest, for here are the fleeting everyday moments frozen in time: family gatherings, ranch work, children playing in the snow or lovers boating on a lake, boys fielding baseballs and families at Sunday picnics. The images evoke the joy of their celebrations and the heartbreak of their funerals. These are events not found in history books, but they communicate how our forebears worked and played, loved and lost, rejoiced and mourned.

Lucille, Fred and Myron Dressler on a ranch in Douglas County, Nev., circa 1903.

Three children in Churchill County, Nev., circa 1910, from the George Wharton James Collection.

Family portrait of the Hulse family in front of their home

in Pioche, Nev., circa 1938. Back row: Berene C. Hulse, Delora Hulse and James G.

Hulse. Front row: Delora Rose and James W. Hulse.

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“Suddenly, there burst forth a wild acclaim. Back of us and down the aisle from the east came one of the central figures in the real drama. It was Johnson, as we could see from his round, shaven head, and then following swiftly arose a five-fold greater roar as from the opposite quarter came Jeffries. The first blood cry of the thousands echoed as the men climbed into the ring.”

— Rex Beach Booklet, July 4, 1910

James J. Jeffries and Jack Johnson in the 9th round of the Johnson-Jeffries fight in what was called Reno’s “Fight of the Century” on July 4, 1910.

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The Nuremberg Chronicle, a history of the world beginning in Biblical times, was printed in Latin in Germany in 1493. One of the earliest and most lavishly illustrated books produced after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and revolutionized publishing, the copy in Special Collections is one of the 400 surviving copies of the 1400-1500 printed.

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The ‘Wow’ FactorSpecial Collections also houses the unexpected. The repository that

preserves a 5,000-year-old Sumerian tablet (a receipt for a boat written in cuneiform script) and a Shakespeare First Folio, also archives the 1905 editions of Annalen der Physik, the scientific journal containing Albert Einstein’s relativity and quantum theory papers from his “miracle year” that changed our perception of space and time. The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 – a lavishly illustrated history of the world beginning in biblical times – shares space with a handwritten letter from Sarah Winnemucca in which the Paiute educator asks “all good Christians” to help elder Native Americans. Mementoes of Nevada in the psychedelic 1960s are neighbors to the records of the state’s early fraternal organizations and churches.

The Civil War letters of Benjamin J. Crumley, a Georgia-born chaplain serving in a Union cavalry regiment, describe “a heap of hard fighting.” The yellowed, creased epistles, unpublished and not yet transcribed, bear witness to men and horses peppered by grapeshot and wounded soldiers dying in field hospitals. The letters also reveal Crumley’s devotion to his wife and children. The sentences are infused with hope. He tells his family he knows they, too, are suffering, but

A 5,000-year-old clay Sumerian tablet in cuneiform script that is a receipt for a boat.

AT RIGHT: A Civil War letter of Benjamin J. Crumley.

A history of Rome’s emperors and popes from Julius Caesar to Pius III, published in Florence, Italy, in 1478. Printed in Italian during the earliest stages of movable type, the illuminated initial capital letter and other markings were embellished by hand.

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should “keep in good heart.” He writes that “the time is not too distant when we can stay together all the time without parting.”

Other collections of letters shed light on Reno’s divorce ranches from the point of view of the hordes of disillusioned men and women who flocked to Nevada to take advantage of the state’s six-week residency requirement. At some of the dude ranches, a calamity became an adventure. “What was to have been a dull, dreadful six weeks turned out to be a fabulous vacation and an introduction to a whole new way of life and thinking,” wrote a guest of the Donner Trail Ranch in 1962. The letters of gratitude to ranch owners Harry and Joan Drackert paint a picture of an industry long vanished, but always associated with the Biggest Little City.

1967 photograph by Gus Bundy of a wild horse north of Pyramid Lake.

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Gus Bundy’s dramatic photos of wild horses being captured in the 1950s, the sort of roundups immortalized in the 1961 movie, The Misfits, played a role in the establishment of the federal Wild Horse and Burro Act, the law that protects mustangs from capture and slaughter.

Some items are museum pieces, but this is not a museum. It’s a hands-on (albeit sometimes white-gloved) environment where users brush against the DNA of explorers, mining barons, tribal leaders and the ordinary Nevadans who carved out an empire in the high desert.

The breadth of collections often contains items that can’t be shelved in a regular library because of their value, fragility or format. While Special Collections’ primary focus is on the history of Nevada and the Great Basin, it also houses collections on specialized subjects including the Robert Burns Book Collection, the George R. Stewart Collection and the annual Burning Man festival, keeping all related material in one place.

The Women and the West collection contains first-hand accounts of women’s experiences in Nevada and the trans-Mississippi West. It includes Josephine Scott’s handmade three-volume journal compiled while prospecting with her husband, George, near Goldfield in 1914. The typewritten text is illustrated with clippings from maps and magazines, photos, letters, receipts for provisions, product labels and the other minutia of life on the desert frontier. It is one woman’s quirky time capsule of an age when gold fever again brought the dreamers to Nevada.

Eva Adams, named Director of the U.S. Mint by President John F. Kennedy, served from1961 to 1969.

Suffragists Ann Martin and Mabel Vernon with an unidentified man in the Nevada desert during the women’s suffrage campaign in 1914. A native Nevadan, Martin established the University of Nevada’s Department of History in 1897.

Two women stand next to a small airplane bearing the Nevada Flying Club insignia with a pilot and another woman seated on the wing, taken around 1934. A sign for a dude ranch is in the background.

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The Art of Books The Book Arts Collection

showcases books documenting the history and development of limited edition printing and materials that exemplify the contemporary art and craft of fine bookmaking. It includes traditional letterpress books, both historical and contemporary, and more avant-garde, non-traditional examples of books as art, art as books.

Author/artist Julie Chen’s creations range from a collection of books in a candy box format, with creatively constructed books as miniature literary

confections; to a book with accordion pages that fan across a table; to a tablet with sliding tabs that allow the reader to create different combinations of text and images and thus alter the content of the piece, on purpose or by chance. Inspirational because of her creativity, Chen explores a variety of themes such as climate change from an artist’s perspective or the subtle yet powerful influence memory has on daily life.

Other artists’ interactive books include Charles Hobson’s Dancing With Amelia, a fold-out book with half its pages cut as aircraft silhouettes. Dancing With Amelia combines facts about Amelia Earhart’s life with romantic fiction based on the relationship that grew between the aviatrix and her husband, George Palmer Putnam.

Books about bookmaking, including volumes about design, printing technique and processes, typography, bookbinding, illustration, papermaking, paper decoration, letterforms, and calligraphy, are also included in the Book Arts Collection.

World Without End was designed, printed and bound by book artist Julie Chen who creates books that turn literature into sculptures. Special Collections has book No. 9 of 25 copies produced in 1999.

Dancing With Amelia is Charles Hobson’s limited edition book of just 38 copies that combines fact and fiction about Amelia Earhart’s six-year marriage to George Palmer Putnam. Images of the couples dancing support the notion their relationship was like a dance.

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Lake Tahoe Resources “At last the Lake burst upon us – a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of sea, and walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still … I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”

— Mark Twain, 1872

Lake Tahoe enthusiasts will find thousands of documents, records and photographs tracing the story of the lake from prehistory to the present. For example, the Bliss family manuscript collection and historical photos bear witness to the clear-cutting of the Lake Tahoe Basin during early Comstock times, the slow re-growth of the pine forest and the modern development and preservation of this national treasure. The Tahoe steamboats, growth of the lakeside communities and tourism, advent of skiing, and establishment of summer resorts are chronicled in many rich collections.

The locomotive Glenbrook No. 1 and the steamer Tahoe are shown in this photograph taken by Stanley Palmer, circa 1905, at a Lake Tahoe wharf.

Photograph taken by Gus Bundy at Lake Tahoe in 1952.

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One manuscript collection centers on Camp Chonokis, a girls’ summer camp active between 1928 and the 1960s. Among the camp records and photographs of outings are campers’ annual logbooks beginning in the 1920s. On those pages, the girls inscribed their stories and poems, sketches and watercolor paintings, journal entries, scripts for original plays, and song lyrics. They enjoyed their vacations against the backdrop of the Great Depression, World War II and the post-war period. Cross-referenced with the collection’s documents and photos, the logs paint a picture of the girls’ coming-of-age summers. Snapshots depict camp owner Mabel “Bliz” Winter, camp employees and the many campers ages eight to 18 whose writings make up the annual logs. Often the girls go by nicknames, such as Slats, Perkie, Bunny and Weebe. Those idyllic summers are long gone, but the campers live on in this poignant archive.

Often, the actions of the people who inhabit the collections affected small communities. In other cases, Nevadans accomplishments resonated around the globe.

AT RIGHT: Map for Lake Tahoe tourists, circa 1900, after the Lake Tahoe Railway and Transportation Company

began operations between Truckee and Lake Tahoe.

Girls from Lake Tahoe’s Camp Chonokis, circa 1930, a summer and winter camp for girls ages 8-18, established in 1927.

Camp Chonokis was founded on the belief that girls could benefit from a loosely structured outdoor experience apart from their more regimented school programs.

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Secrets in the SnowSometimes people change history by starting with a simple question:

how much snow on a mountain range delivers how much water in spring and summer? For hundreds of years, that question couldn’t be answered anywhere in the world.

Enter James E. Church, a scholar with a doctorate in classics who

“All the world interests me. I love the beautiful and the grand. Everything in my life centers around these two themes … If a man can add two and two and divide by one he can do the things I’ve done. I am not a scientist. I try to be a little bit logical, that’s all.”

— James E. Church, 1935

1903 postcard.

Drawing of James Edward Church by Carolyn Edmundson in 1955. Church was a professor of classics at the University

of Nevada and the developer of snow surveying.

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taught at the University of Nevada at the start of the 20th century. In 1901, Church came up with a mathematical relationship between snowpack and water runoff. He then invented the first practical method of sampling deep snow. In 1905, on the summit of Mount Rose, Church and his assistants established one of the nation’s first high-altitude weather observatories. Under crude and harsh conditions the scientists tested Church’s theories and found them so sound that although technology has advanced into the computer age, many of his procedures are still in use today. His meticulously collected snowpack data provide historical perspective to present-day scientists who study climate change.

Church’s papers are preserved in Special Collections, including the vest-pocket notebooks where he jotted down the data that changed the science of hydrology.

Other collections also have a bearing on today’s environment and its future. Data about the Lake Tahoe Basin, documented by concerned organizations over the decades and preserved in Special Collections in the form of aerial photographs, shoreline survey data, scientific reports and photographs, give scientists a time capsule of the evolution of the

“Snowing. Fast wind west about 4 or 5 feet deep, no drifts. Looks as likely to continue as when it commenced. No living thing without wings can get about.”

— Patrick Breen, with the Donner Party, Nov. 30, 1846

Snow survey sampling, early 20th century.

Buckhorn restaurant at Kings Beach, Calif., in the 1950s from the online collection called Images of Lake Tahoe.

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lake and its drainage area. That information is essential in the study and preservation of Lake Tahoe’s clarity, and for developing strategies for controlling invasive species that now threaten the lake’s health.

“Nature is willing to talk to you if you just sit down with paper and pencil and listen to her.”

— James E. Church

Archiving a UniversityThe University Archives documents the history of the University

of Nevada, Reno from its beginnings in Elko in 1874. It is the official depository for documents, including Board of Regents’ minutes, presidents’ papers, campus publications and records of student organizations. All editions of The Nevada Sagebrush, the campus newspaper, and Artemisia, the University yearbook, are preserved, as is the Book of the Oath, a large, blue-leather-bound volume begun in 1920. The book contains the signatures of University graduating classes up until 1964, an assertion that the graduates had taken the solemn civil pledge inscribed in the journal.

The archives also contain thousands of photographs of University life from the 1870s to the present. One photo, taken in 1920, captures a group of coeds, dressed in knee-length jumpers over white blouses, spinning and dancing across fallen leaves in front of the statue of

“[I swear] lifelong loyalty to the shaping ideals of American civilization … liberty … equality … and justice”

— from Book of the Oath, 1920-1964

Lambda Chi Alpha homecoming parade float in front of Hatch Hall at the University of Nevada, Reno in 1951.

Mike Leslie, homecoming queen Diane Kane, Al Creel, Marilyn Jensen and Walt Ryals at the University of Nevada, Reno in the fall of 1955.

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Comstock mining baron John Mackay on the University Quad. Who were these 11 young women reveling on the Quad under a February sky the color of gun metal? What became of them? The women can be cross-referenced against other photos, class lists and University documents. Answers to questions that may seem mysterious at first glance often can be found with a bit of detective work at the University Archives and other parts of Special Collections.

A Resource for the Ages “A collection of unpublished materials is like a laboratory to a chemist, a stratum of Devonian shale to a paleontologist, or the night sky to an astronomer.”

— Bernard Mergen, University of Nevada, Reno alumnus, author and professor emeritus of American Studies, George Washington University

Over the decades, Special Collections has been acknowledged as a primary resource in hundreds of books, articles and documentaries. Although the scope of the collection seems overwhelming, it is organized to allow researchers to drill deeper and deeper into topics and cross-reference them with other sources. The process begins when Special Collections acquires materials, organizes them and enters a list of contents into the Libraries’ online catalog. Users focus on what they need by going over the topic listings, and then request them from staff in the Special Collections reading room.

Materials from the book, photograph and architectural drawing collections are brought out to the user from the restricted closed stacks area. Manuscripts are stored in acid-free boxes in the Mathewson

Women’s physical education class at the University of Nevada, Reno in front of Mackay School of Mines, 1920 photograph by Samuel B. Doten.

Mary, the wife of the Chinese doctor at Chinatown in Virginia City, and a child in 1866.

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Automated Retrieval System, commonly called MARS. The interior of MARS resembles the bays of a space station, with a framework of steel bins arranged on both sides of aisles patrolled by a robotic crane. The environment is climate-controlled and secure. Via barcodes, the database keeps minute-by-minute track of the locations of the tens of thousands of items. Once requested, the materials are delivered immediately.

On Campus, Online Special Collections shares its riches with the University

community and region through exhibits, conversations and lectures. Changing exhibits at the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center have featured the history of the horse in Nevada; the lives and work of local artists in post-war northern Nevada; the stark and beautiful imagery of Nevada’s sagebrush landscape; exhibits and displays honoring the history of the University; the art of Nevada gaming, from garish slot machines to the electric icons of the neon wilderness; and displays from the political papers collection.

1862 poster printed on silk for Topliffe’s Theatre in Virginia City, the earliest known Nevada imprint.

The Mathewson Automated Retrieval System, commonly called MARS, stores and retrieves books and manuscripts.

Librarians also share the University’s collections with the planet. Special Collections has thousands of research materials made available for free on the World Wide Web, including its rich, extensive collection of photos. Patrons may order digital copies of photographs or get help through phone or email conversations with Special Collections staff. Students, researchers and scholars from Princeton to Paris to Papua, New Guinea, have tapped into the knowledge base.

More materials are being added to the Internet, but the virtual experience will never completely replace the intimacy of scholars and students being able to hold the past in their hands.

Librarians also race against time to preserve the materials in their care. Some fragile items, such as wire recordings and magnetic tape, must be transferred to digital media. That’s also the case for some of the fragile documents, but the originals remain stored in trust for the

Part of the Just Passing Through digital photo collection, this was taken to promote Reno’s Transcontinental Highways Exposition of 1927 celebrating the completion of the Lincoln and Victory highways.

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public. Yet, even digital media is not forever. It needs to be consistently maintained and refreshed so it does not degrade into blank oblivion. As technology changes, so

do the challenges of preservation.

Sustaining and Sharing KnowledgeThe department depends on the community it serves

to make sure its treasures are always available to the public and our history is not relegated to garbage bins

and landfills. Special Collections relies on donations, both monetary and material, to build and maintain

the collections. Collecting and preserving history is, after all, a collaborative effort.

Much of what is contained within Special Collections is due to the generosity of many

individuals who have donated personal or family papers, treasured books, photographs, maps and

other unique materials, along with providing financial support. When an important collection or work becomes available on the open market, funds are often needed to make the acquisition or to act as seed money to be matched by a foundation, corporate or government grant.

It is not enough, however, to collect and preserve. The mission of Special Collections is to make its

treasures widely available through digitization and online exhibits, as well as public exhibit programs and

lectures.The collections never will be complete. More treasures

of local history are languishing in attics, garages, file cabinets, closets and storage sheds from Elko to Incline

Village. With luck and generosity, some will be added to the repository and resources will be available to curate and share them. For the existing collections and those to come, the experts at Special Collections will ensure our legacy remains available to us and to generations yet unborn.

AT RIGHT: Leaf from a 15th century French illuminated manuscript.

Photograph of actress Ruth Chatterton,

originally published in Goodwin’s

Weekly, Dec. 20, 1913. Photography

by James and Bushnell, Seattle.

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SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVESUniversity of Nevada, Reno Libraries • Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center

This publication was made possible in part by the Friends of the University Libraries endowment. The writing of Frank Mullen, graphic design by Claudia Ortega-Lukas and images from photographers, cartographers and architects over the decades have coalesced to bring the Special Collections story to life.

We hope you find it as intriguing as we do. Special Collections serves as a rich, growing repository of the evolving history of Nevada and the

University of Nevada, Reno through its collections of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs and other materials. Its resources are readily available to all for exploration and discovery.

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ON THE BACK COVER

Mrs. Key Pittman took this photograph in Tonopah on August 10, 1904. The night was extremely dark, heavy rain was

falling and the sky was intermittently illuminated by bolts of zigzag lightning. The house struck was occupied by C. F. Reynolds.

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES University of Nevada, Reno Libraries • Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center

3rd Floor, 1664 N. Virginia St., Reno, NV 89557

Telephone: (775) 682-5665 • Email: specoll@unr.edu www.knowledgecenter.unr.edu/materials/specoll/