0:04 [SPEAKER_00]: After our episode on the Conqueror's Curse, I invited Richard Moreno back to the studio to talk more about the history of the city of Reno. 0:13 [SPEAKER_00]: In that earlier episode, we discussed the ill-fated Howard Hughes film, The Conqueror, that resulted in the eventual deaths of more than 30% of its cast in crew. 0:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Before visiting Reno this spring, my only exposure to this city had been the TV show Reno nine more months, so I was basically expecting a giant trailer park. 0:36 [SPEAKER_00]: By the time we left, it was one of my favorite cities from the trip. 0:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Incidentally, I later learned that none of that show was filmed in Reno, so everything is somewhere in California or Oregon. 0:50 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the reasons I invited Richard back was to help introduce us to the Rio Reno, which was known for decades as the divorce capital of America. 1:02 [SPEAKER_00]: The divorce was so central to Reno's identity that getting divorced here was known as getting renovated. 1:10 [SPEAKER_00]: I asked Richard why this was the case. 1:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Basically, it when it became a state, Nevada had made divorce legal, then made it illegal, like a lot of Western states, it fluctuated. 1:25 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1931, there were two things that occurred that were really key to the future of the state in Nevada. 1:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, it was the year that two bills came up. 1:35 [SPEAKER_01]: By then, divorce was legal, but I believe you had to live six months in order to get a divorce. 1:45 [SPEAKER_01]: and it became known as the cure basically the six week cure and it was no fault divorces which also made it a lot easier because prior to that time not only did you have to become a resident of the state for at least six months but you also had to have a reason cruelty or alienation or whatever and you'd have to prove that this was no fault. 2:06 [SPEAKER_01]: So that was a big deal when the legislature approved the bill that basically lowered it to six 2:14 [SPEAKER_01]: for any of the states and said that you didn't really have to have a reason. 2:18 [SPEAKER_01]: It was no fault. 2:19 [SPEAKER_01]: The other thing that occurred was they made gambling legal. 2:22 [SPEAKER_01]: That year, it had been legal for a while, then illegal, then legal. 2:26 [SPEAKER_01]: And they finally said, you know what, we need for economic development reasons, we need to just say it's legal. 2:32 [SPEAKER_01]: And so those two things, the legalization of gambling and the ability to get a quick divorce were key to the next phase of Nevada's development. 2:43 [SPEAKER_01]: And so then after 1931, you started to see the development of dude ranches, especially in the Reno, and in those days again, Vegas was still tiny. 2:51 [SPEAKER_01]: in 1931. 2:52 [SPEAKER_01]: So this was it was a factor, but it wasn't as big. 2:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Reno became known as the divorce capital of the world. 2:59 [SPEAKER_01]: It had hotels, it had the infrastructure to support people, and they started building apartment complexes. 3:06 [SPEAKER_01]: specifically for divorces to stay in, and most of the time they were women that would come to get a Reno divorce, to get the cure as they called it, and they would stay there for six weeks. 3:18 [SPEAKER_01]: And then as part of that, these dood branches also started to develop where you could go stay at a ranch that was on the outskirts of the town of Reno for six weeks, get a cottage there, 3:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Cowboys, who would take care of all your needs. 3:40 [SPEAKER_00]: I think it was at this point in the interview that Kim stepped out of the room. 3:45 [SPEAKER_00]: We haven't seen her since. 3:47 [SPEAKER_00]: She's my assistant. 3:52 [SPEAKER_01]: In some cases, these women would get a divorce and immediately marry the cowboy, they met at the dude ranch. 3:58 [SPEAKER_01]: So there were down in Washo Valley, there were a couple, the south part of Reno, there were a few in areas where it's now, it's all developed with houses, et cetera, and Walmart's, but there were a couple of others that developed, and then around Pyramid Lake, there were some pretty well-known ones that were developed these dude ranches. 4:18 [SPEAKER_00]: If you were with us for our history of Las Vegas, with Mark Hall Patton, you recall the importance of marketing for the growth of Nevada. 4:27 [SPEAKER_00]: It may be that no state and American history has marketed itself more successfully than this one. 4:35 [SPEAKER_00]: And few things sell, like celebrity, Reno, like Vegas, did whatever it could to attract the rich and famous, and when they arrived, did whatever it could to make them as comfortable as possible. 4:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Cornelius Vanderbilt owned one. 4:50 [SPEAKER_01]: He had come out to Reno to get a divorce and then decided to stay. 4:54 [SPEAKER_01]: He liked it so much. 4:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Cornelius Vanderbilt, I think, at the fourth. 4:58 [SPEAKER_01]: And then he ended up developing his own ranch out near Pyramid Lake. 5:02 [SPEAKER_01]: that catered to these folks. 5:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And usually they were wealthier women who would come out the wire services, the newspaper wire services, actually in those days had reporters in Reno who had just camped out at the train station. 5:15 [SPEAKER_01]: They'd get a tip that like some celebrity was going to come to Reno to stay there for six weeks and get it a horse. 5:22 [SPEAKER_01]: And so you would have AP and UPI reporters 5:25 [SPEAKER_01]: Camping out the train station. 5:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Oh look it's glorious once and let's go grab bird and try to get a quote from somebody There were attorneys. 5:32 [SPEAKER_01]: That's all they did was they specialized in the forest 5:38 [SPEAKER_01]: Reno really became like this divorce mill where they would a whole industry cropped up to cater to that. 5:46 [SPEAKER_01]: And then Vegas started doing it. 5:48 [SPEAKER_01]: And as Vegas began to grow, particularly after World War II, with the opening of the Flamingo in 1946, and then the development of the strip. 5:57 [SPEAKER_01]: And some of the other things that were the El Rancho and some others down in that area, you really started to see Las Vegas catered to it. 6:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And then I think by the 19... Oh, 1960s, Vegas's population had replaced Reno as the biggest city in the state. 6:13 [SPEAKER_01]: And you started to see a similar switch in the number of divorces, as well as marriages, really growing in Las Vegas. 6:20 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's the other part as the marriage industry, which continues to still be huge. 6:24 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think there's a blood test required in a waiting, you can go find yourself an Elvis pastor in Las Vegas and go to a drive through practically and get married right away. 6:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you. 6:36 [SPEAKER_01]: You're good. 6:37 [SPEAKER_01]: You're good audience, gentlemen. 6:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much. 6:40 [SPEAKER_00]: I just saw a couple days ago where Elvis's people will no longer let them license the rights to let them use. 6:49 [SPEAKER_01]: So that too, you know, Priscilla came back and said, but we'll work with you. 6:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's funny. 6:55 [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't pay the right amount. 6:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think so. 6:58 [SPEAKER_00]: I think. 6:58 [SPEAKER_01]: I think. 7:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, I was, you can do Star Wars. 7:03 [SPEAKER_01]: They have all kinds of themed weddings you can do down in Las Vegas. 7:07 [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, the worst, why Reno in Las Vegas really don't cater to that as much anymore is that other states have changed all their laws. 7:16 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's much easier to get a divorce. 7:18 [SPEAKER_01]: There were some states we had a way to year to be a resident at least a year and then you still had to show cause, et cetera. 7:25 [SPEAKER_01]: And so as the worst laws loosen the around the country, that industry went away. 7:33 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the chapters in Richard's book, Nevada myths and legends, focuses on this lost city, now buried beneath Lake Mead. 7:42 [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1930s, the remains of a thousand-year-old Native American city were discovered in the area, soon to be flooded by the Hoover Dam. 7:52 [SPEAKER_00]: Construction on the dam continued, and archaeologists and historians race to save what they could before the city was covered by water. 8:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Today, the lost city has buried beneath Lake Mead. 8:07 [SPEAKER_01]: The lost city is basically an archaeological area where several thousand years ago Native American people and we're not sure 8:17 [SPEAKER_01]: which Native Americans these are because they didn't leave any kind of written record. 8:22 [SPEAKER_01]: But they settled along the banks of the Overturn River, now known as the Overturn River, down in that area there. 8:30 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there was a whole series of settlements that grew up there in that area. 8:35 [SPEAKER_01]: and they mined salt and they raised crops and things like that. 8:40 [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't a huge city, but over time it developed and they built these complexes with underground pit homes as well as above ground, but dobe structures. 8:51 [SPEAKER_01]: What makes it interesting is that in the 1920s an archaeologist named Harrington, 8:57 [SPEAKER_01]: The area locals had known about the area, but he was invited. 9:01 [SPEAKER_01]: He was, I believe, from Berkeley. 9:03 [SPEAKER_01]: UC Berkeley came out and he started excavating in the area and he called it the loss city. 9:09 [SPEAKER_01]: In that period of time in the mid-1920s, 9:13 [SPEAKER_01]: archaeological digs were something that you could splash on the cut front page of the newspapers and what where did they go? 9:20 [SPEAKER_01]: What happened to the lost city? 9:21 [SPEAKER_01]: That kind of thing. 9:23 [SPEAKER_01]: And Harrington was not above promoting and so they did and they started defining all of these artifacts from 9:30 [SPEAKER_01]: This civilization that was there this lost city and then why it's interesting to us today is that They were able to preserve that and there's now a museum that is literally on this side of the archeological They they've also built replicas of the different types of housing from the different areas because at certain time They built this kind of housing that later it was this above ground 9:53 [SPEAKER_01]: type of housing and so when you go there you can actually go in one of these Adobe structures and see how it's been rebuilt or at least reconstructed. 10:02 [SPEAKER_01]: You can look into a pit house and see what they did and when I've been there what I find interesting is to actually see what the archaeologists were doing because they built this around the actual site so you can see the foundations, the tags that they put on things and get a sense of how they operated. 10:21 [SPEAKER_01]: The interesting part of the story is, of course, they've discovered this in the mid-20s. 10:25 [SPEAKER_01]: They start to build Hoover Dam in the 1930, completed in 1931. 10:29 [SPEAKER_01]: It starts to fill up like meat with water. 10:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, a lot of this area where the last city was located is now under like meat. 10:39 [SPEAKER_01]: And so Harrington and the other archeologists were out there trying to scramble and grab everything they could to put up in the town of Overton, which is where the museum is located today. 10:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Before it was all submerged and of course I'm sure they said no, don't build this dam. 10:55 [SPEAKER_01]: There was no, it was an era where you didn't go get the environmental impact report on something. 10:59 [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's another kind of interesting part of the story is that they were scrambling to basically save everything they could before it was submerged under Lake Mead. 11:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, Lake Mead's now down and I keep reading about the things that are showing up, including dead bodies and barrels and stuff like that. 11:17 [SPEAKER_01]: So who knows what they'll find if they get to that? 11:20 [SPEAKER_01]: It's at the northern edge of Lake Mead near Overton, Nevada. 11:24 [SPEAKER_01]: is where the lost city was, or parts of it were. 11:28 [SPEAKER_01]: So there's, it's a whole area of civilization. 11:30 [SPEAKER_01]: It's not like just one area. 11:32 [SPEAKER_01]: And it really gives you a picture of that prehistoric time in Nevada when the white men had not arrived and these native people were there. 11:41 [SPEAKER_00]: As sad as the loss of the lost city is, the disappearance of a more recent city is far sadder, Reno's Chinatown, 11:52 [SPEAKER_00]: During the railroad boom of the mid-19th century, huge numbers of Chinese came to America to work on the railways. 12:01 [SPEAKER_00]: other immigrant groups, like the Irish, were also enlisted. 12:06 [SPEAKER_00]: But the most dangerous and deadly jobs often went to Chinese. 12:10 [SPEAKER_01]: When they built the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, there were two groups. 12:15 [SPEAKER_01]: There was the Union Pacific group which was coming from the East, and then there was the Central Pacific Railroad coming from Sacramento from the West. 12:25 [SPEAKER_01]: and the idea is that they would eventually meet somewhere. 12:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The Union Pacific was basically using Irish immigrants to build a railroad and the Central Pacific because there just weren't a lot of people. 12:40 [SPEAKER_01]: They needed more folks than they could. 12:42 [SPEAKER_01]: They tried hiring Irish immigrants. 12:43 [SPEAKER_01]: But San Francisco just wasn't that large, and you didn't have that population base. 12:48 [SPEAKER_01]: They ended up importing Chinese workers. 12:51 [SPEAKER_01]: The Center Pacific hired just thousands of Chinese workers, a single man, to come over and work on this railroad. 12:59 [SPEAKER_01]: And they did. 12:59 [SPEAKER_01]: It was dangerous work also, which is why a lot of others probably didn't want to do it. 13:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And the Chinese work cheap. 13:08 [SPEAKER_01]: They 13:10 [SPEAKER_01]: or European laborers, and so during that period of mid-1860s to about 1869, there were the ones doing all the hard work going through the Sierra Nevada range, building the tunnels, because there are several places where the train literally goes through the mountain. 13:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And so it was really tedious hard work to do, and they built it, and then the railroad basically said, 13:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks. 13:37 [SPEAKER_01]: And once they completed the railroad in 1869, in primary point Utah, where the two lines met, all the Chinese along the way were let go. 13:47 [SPEAKER_01]: They were basically said, hey, thanks for all your help. 13:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Here's your last paycheck. 13:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Good luck. 13:52 [SPEAKER_01]: So they drifted to different communities to try to figure out someone back to San Francisco, someone back to China, they could afford it, someone to Sacramento, but you had a number of these communities begin to have populations and communities of Chinese living there. 14:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Some brought over family, once they were established, and before there were any kind of immigration controls on Chinese coming to the US, that was another 14:19 [SPEAKER_01]: congressional act that came later, and Reno was one of those places because it was right on the train track. 14:25 [SPEAKER_00]: The immigration control Richard is referring to is the Chinese exclusion act of 1882. 14:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Chinese nationals were unable to immigrate to America for a full decade. 14:37 [SPEAKER_00]: But by the time that law passed, thousands of Chinese laborers had already entered the country and were beginning to 14:51 [SPEAKER_01]: a small Chinatown developed right in downtown Reno along the banks of the Turkey River. 14:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Right near where Virginia Street is and to the east of Virginia Street over in that area. 15:02 [SPEAKER_01]: And so initially the Chinese were there. 15:04 [SPEAKER_01]: The only work that they could get was essentially what you would think of as women's work. 15:08 [SPEAKER_01]: They did laundry. 15:10 [SPEAKER_01]: We now think of as a traditional frontier Chinese work but it was basically work that white men didn't want to do. 15:16 [SPEAKER_01]: And so, they did those kinds of jobs. 15:20 [SPEAKER_01]: And it really wasn't until the late 1890s. 15:24 [SPEAKER_01]: There was a couple of factors that came into play. 15:26 [SPEAKER_01]: One was the rise of an anti-immigrant political party called the Working Man's Party, which got a foothold in Reno. 15:33 [SPEAKER_01]: And it was basically an anti-Chinese group that wanted them out, wanted to get rid of them. 15:40 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there was that. 15:41 [SPEAKER_01]: And then on top of that, apparently, 15:44 [SPEAKER_01]: the Chinese owned company from San Francisco had gotten a contract to build a major construction project a ditch to for irrigation purposes. 15:54 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there was a lot of resentment. 15:56 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure there were a little bitter. 15:57 [SPEAKER_01]: And so what ended up happening is, and I believe it was 1898 or 1899, essentially, 16:04 [SPEAKER_01]: It's never been proven, but allegedly, members of the working man's party burned down the Chinatown in Reno, and that was the beginning of the end of that Chinese community in Reno. 16:16 [SPEAKER_01]: There were many left, some tried to rebuild farther along the river, and then there was another kind of anti-Chinese thing that occurred where the Department of Health decided that the new Chinatown that had developed was unsafe and unsanitary. 16:32 [SPEAKER_01]: and so they essentially brought in bulldozers and they bulldozed the second Chinatown and got rid of it. 16:39 [SPEAKER_01]: And so as a result, you still had a handful of Chinese-owned businesses really until the 1940s. 16:47 [SPEAKER_01]: I know there was a guy named Bill Fong who had a restaurant and built one of the hotels, the older hotels and downtown Reno. 16:54 [SPEAKER_01]: but he was an outlier and then eventually he also ran out of money. 16:59 [SPEAKER_01]: The Alcortez, that was the hotel that Bill Fong built, an interesting side note on the Alcortez is that in the 1940s when black entertainers would entertain in the casinos like 17:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Harris or Harold's club or any of the places that were there are the mates in the 1950s. 17:17 [SPEAKER_01]: The only place that they could stay, the black entertainers was the Alcortez. 17:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Bill Fong's Alcortez was the flip-place suit allow black gas, so that was something that the Alcortez was known for. 17:31 [SPEAKER_01]: It's also now owned, I think, by people who are associated with burning man. 17:35 [SPEAKER_01]: But it's a great hotel from the exterior. 17:38 [SPEAKER_01]: It's a beautiful 1940s art deco building. 17:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Definitely worth checking out. 17:44 [SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, that's the last remnants of any kind of Chinatown, and he wasn't really part of Chinatown, but of any Chinese own businesses in Reno. 17:54 [SPEAKER_01]: So like a lot of places, they were pushed out. 17:56 [SPEAKER_01]: I know in the town I grew up in in Napa, there was a Chinatown down near the river there and the same thing occurred. 18:03 [SPEAKER_01]: They burned it up, burned them out. 18:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And most of them ended up moving back to San Francisco. 18:08 [SPEAKER_01]: So sadly, that was not uncommon because of the racism at the times. 18:14 [SPEAKER_00]: After hearing that story, I'll never look at another Chinatown the same. 18:19 [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm grateful as we all should be, 18:23 [SPEAKER_00]: that so many of these towns have survived. 18:26 [SPEAKER_00]: If you haven't spent time in one of these areas, make it a point to visit the next time your close. 18:32 [SPEAKER_00]: The food is amazing and authentic and that's really all you need to know. 18:37 [SPEAKER_00]: You can figure the rest out on your own. 18:40 [SPEAKER_00]: As we finished our conversation, I invited Richard to share about his upcoming project, a book focused on the writing style of Mark Twain. 18:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, I just finished a new book, and it's tentatively, I don't know if this will be the final. 18:55 [SPEAKER_01]: The manuscript's been accepted, the title I think is going to be when fake news really was fake. 19:01 [SPEAKER_01]: And it's essentially a book about 19th century, early 20th century journalists in Nevada, who made up stories in the newspaper. 19:09 [SPEAKER_01]: And it was a pretty common thing. 19:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Mark Twain is probably the best known where he would write, they call them hoaxes, but essentially it's fake news. 19:17 [SPEAKER_01]: So you would write a story and it would be a parody of something or 19:21 [SPEAKER_01]: But you weren't trying to get back at a political enemy or for whatever reason. 19:26 [SPEAKER_01]: And it turns out Twain was as I started to do my research was only the tip of the iceberg. 19:31 [SPEAKER_01]: I found at least a dozen or more other writers from that same era. 19:35 [SPEAKER_01]: We're talking roughly 1862 to about 1912 that they indulged in this. 19:42 [SPEAKER_01]: And it was a time when most of these were small papers in mining towns. 19:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Usually the editor owned it. 19:48 [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't owned by a big conglomerator. 19:50 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there was a lot more freedom in that sense. 19:53 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think newspapers in those towns at that time were more complete entertainment. 19:59 [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't just to get Genus. 20:01 [SPEAKER_01]: They ran the recipes sometimes. 20:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Poetry, short stories. 20:05 [SPEAKER_01]: There was a lot of different things that would you'd find in the pages of a 19th century, 20:12 [SPEAKER_01]: And as part of that, I started finding all these hoaxes. 20:15 [SPEAKER_01]: So, Twain, as I mentioned, is probably the one who's the best known. 20:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The first one he did was a story called the Petrified Man, where he describes them finding somewhere up near near Winnamaka that area in Humboldt County, supposedly finding a preserved Native American data that was buried in a sitting position. 20:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Somehow, because of calcified water, had spilled on the bones he was in, hardened like stone. 20:42 [SPEAKER_01]: But the best part is as you read, he describes the hands of this Native American, and it's this. 20:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Richard is holding one thumb to his nose to demonstrate. 20:54 [SPEAKER_00]: the other hand extends out from that first hand, with the fingers of both hands out stretched. 21:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Which is a famous sign for doing a rag barrier, and so he's clearly making fun of the whole thing. 21:07 [SPEAKER_01]: And he wrote the story to actually mark a judge who had ruled something about this pentrified man. 21:13 [SPEAKER_01]: So as you read it, it's clearly a force, but people took it seriously. 21:16 [SPEAKER_01]: And he did a number of these and there was another guy named Dan to Quill who did science Oaksens that were that as you read them, they're like that makes sense except it doesn't. 21:26 [SPEAKER_01]: There were some who wrote puns throughout their papers. 21:29 [SPEAKER_01]: There was a guy wrote about a tree that supposedly was another science pun called the luminous shrub. 21:36 [SPEAKER_01]: about how supposedly at night the shrub would glow in the dark of near Tuscillore and Nevada. 21:42 [SPEAKER_01]: And so I researched all these various characters and I did stories about who they were because a lot of them were forgotten. 21:51 [SPEAKER_01]: There's a literary, they're known by literary name, the sage were school by academics, but that comes into play about why are they called that. 22:00 [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that they wrote these fake news stories is one of the things that identifies them as a member of 22:06 [SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, the book, it's, I'm not an academic writer, so it doesn't have footnotes in that God, but it is being published by the University in Nevada Press, which is an academic press, and I think it'll be out next year is the plan spring of 23, is when it's tentatively, but that's the project I'm working on now.
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