Interview with Jim Hulse

Question: How your would describe Nevada at the turn of the 20th century?

Jim Hulse: Well if we were to turn back the clock a hundred years to late 1899 or to early 1900 the plight to Nevada was very serious. The Comstock Boom had been dormant, dead for twenty plus years. Nevada had had a twenty-year depression as we are inclined to call it now. The population of the state was only 42,000 people. It had been as high as 80 to 90,000 twenty years before, so it has dwindled to half its former size. And the prospects were not very good at that point. So if we were to go back to the beginning of the new century, the 20th century, what hope was there? But in the spring of that year when ore was discovered in Tonopah and then a couple of years later in Goldfield, and in that period of time when copper was discovered in White Pine County and when the Newlands Reclamation Project was going through Congress - it was finally enacted in 1902 - that changed the whole economic face of Nevada; not quickly but over time.

And I would say at the end of the 19th century the old Comstock oligarchy was still in power. Senator William M Stewart, one of the founders of Nevada and one of the tools of the railroad industry and of the mining industry, was still our leading U.S senator. Senator Jones, who was also in the grip of the big corporations and who almost never came to Nevada, was voting for Nevada in the senate. That old oligarchy had been in power for thirty years. It finally yielded up the ghost in 1902, 1904, and were replaced by new and fresh people.

Question: We have the image of the prospector and his mule as the agents of change in Nevada transition to the twentieth century.

Hulse: The basic assumption about mining or about the use of the land, was that you went out and found what you could, took what you could. And the idea of intervening in some way in the land in order to get the product was a new idea, which was just beginning to dawn. For example, the prospector with his burro would go out and pick out some samples of ore from a claim and send it to an assay office. The person who went out and homesteaded the land did much the same thing. The man and his wife would go out and put down a claim on some land and try to improve upon it. The coming of the kind of agriculture as represented by the Newlands project in Fallon was something that involved government intervention and assistance. So there were a number of technological changes just on the horizon to replace the old Comstock pioneer order of things.

The process was slow; it didn't happen over night at the turn of the century, but we can see transitions occurring. In the railroad sector, the old Central Pacific Railroad that had been built across Nevada at the end of the 1860's was being replaced by new innovations that the Southern Pacific brought in soon after the turn of the century. Railroads were being re-routed. In southern Nevada Senator Clark of Montana built a railroad from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to southern Nevada and founded towns like Caliente and Las Vegas. I think he bought that land in about 1902 laid out the city in 1905. So the whole series of transitions occurred in the very early years of the twentieth century.

Question: At the turn of the century, Las Vegas was merely a railroad stop and didn't seem to have a future.

Hulse: The census of 1900 shows Las Vegas had about thirty people and the town was laid out basically in 1905. By 1910 it had about a thousand people. When I first saw it as a boy in 1940, it had about eight thousand people. So much of the growth that we've seen there has occurred in the 1990s and there's a kind of a curve upward of population, very steep curve since the 1950s.

I don't know of anyone who imagined the possibility of a metropolis in that valley. Or I don't know of anyone who imagined that there would be 300-thousand people in the Truckee Meadows by the end of the century. I remember being a newspaper reporter here in the 50s when there were thirty to forty thousand people. And the idea that we might eventually have two hundred thousand people seemed to be a fantasy. There's been a change of scale. Much of Nevada through this century, much of the outlying area remains much the same. Tonopah has had more ups and downs, Ely as well. But for two-thirds of Nevada, the change in population has been very slight and modest.