A NEVADA TOWN WHERE THE WEST IS STILL WILD

For the Traveler’s Tale series, we ask fiction and non-fiction writers to share one of their most indelible travel memories. 

THE IDENTITY of Nevada becomes clearest in its empty corners. Most of the state has a population density of less than one person per square mile, which means it is a long way between towns, houses, ranches and everything but clumps of sagebrush. Once you’re away from Reno or Las Vegas, Nevada is big, dry and quiet. 

In 2019, I crossed the state by horseback, with a packhorse in tow to carry supplies, while traversing the Pony Express Trail. The Pony Express was a frontier mail service that ran for slightly more than 18 months, starting in April 1860, between the Missouri River and San Francisco. Ultimately, it proved impossible to carry enough mail at an average speed of 11 mph for 10 continuous days across so vast an area to make the service work financially, and it failed.

It took me slightly more than a month to ride from one side of Nevada to the other. Most of my journey was a give-or-take-a-century passage through a landscape that felt old. A lot of Nevada felt old, and certain places and people there brought into clear focus the refreshingly slow pace of change.

In 1860, Middlegate Station, about 110 miles east of Reno, was a Pony Express station. Today, it is a low, tin-roofed building with a wraparound porch framed in weathered logs. When I rode up to it in September some four years ago, two Harley-Davidson motorcycles and a dusty ranch truck were parked out front. Officially, it is a bar, restaurant and $30-per-night motel sitting on the south side of U.S. Highway 50, which Life magazine dubbed the “Loneliest Road in America” in 1986. Its last recorded population was 17 people in 2016.

When I visited, closer to 30 people lived in a hamlet of RVs, lean-tos and loosely fabricated buildings that appeared to lack permanence, as though a westerly zephyr might just carry away all that is Middlegate. But for the past 160 years or so, it has been a roadhouse and a stopover, a small center of humanity amid the treeless desert of western Nevada. The same family has been running the current operation for five generations. 

I saw many vestiges of the Old West on the trail, but Middlegate felt like a true frontier community. Most of the people could have been drifters, short-term workers helping out in the restaurant or cleaning motel rooms for a place to sleep.

But the people made the biggest impression on me. The staff and locals knew that I was camped behind the motel, that I’d had a beer with Dan, a guy who helped me find a water trough for my horses, and that I wasn’t much different from the bike-packers or RV-ers who pass through, except that I was traveling with two horses and no support vehicle.

As I sat alone in the restaurant looking at the menu, the cook approached my table. He was a young guy with a dark beard, wearing an apron and a ball cap turned backward on his head. He told me he had heard I was passing through on horseback and what I probably needed for dinner was a flatiron steak with sauteed mushrooms and onions and a side of homestyle fries that was like a loaded baked potato chopped up and fried in a skillet. It wasn’t on the menu, but that was what he thought I should have. I told him that sounded great, and he asked if I wanted a salad. Either way, I said. “Better get you a salad, too,” he said, ambling off.

Later, I rolled out my bedroll beside my horses while nighthawks circled overhead and the occasional semi rolled down the highway. As I was sorting my gear before dawn the following morning, a woman who didn’t look like one of the drifters walked over to me. She wore a thin yellow sweater over a white cotton shirt, and she held an unlit cigarette in her hand. She looked like the owner or manager of the place. She asked if my night at Middlegate had been satisfactory, and I told her the place was an oasis of hospitality. She lit the cigarette and smoked while I finished packing. “Your horses look good,” she said. “I was raised on a ranch,” she said. “I know what a horse should look like.”

I rode out of Middlegate Station thinking the Old West is not an anachronism. It’s an ideology born from a land of little rain. It’s the cultural manifestation of topography, climate and location. You can find it in every state between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean, but in Nevada, it runs closer to the surface. At least that was my experience. That with hardly a shade-tree but plenty of wind to blow your troubles away, the desert brings out the Old West’s timeless qualities, even in the people who live there.

Will Grant is the author of “The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000 Mile Horseback Journey in the Old West” (Little, Brown & Co., 2023).

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