Devil’s Gate

Two walls of dark, craggy rock nearly meet across the canyon here, leaving a gap just wide enough for a road—the gateway every traveler bound for the Comstock had to pass. Miners blasted the outer face to widen it for wagons, and an official toll station collected from the freight wagons grinding up to Virginia City. The name fit the reputation: highwaymen worked the narrows in the early 1860s, levying their own toll on watches and wallets. The rock gate still frames State Route 341 at the entrance to Silver City.

What the plaque says

It gives… “a forcible impression of the unhallowed character of the place” J. Ross Brown – 1860 This rugged reef of metamorphic rock was once one of the famous landmarks of the Nevada Territory. In June of 1850, John Orr and Nicholas Kelly unearthed a gold nugget nearby, the first ever found in Gold Canyon. For the next ten years, the canyon was the scene of placer mining and one of the first stamp mills in the Territory was erected just to the south of Devil’s Gate during the summer of 1860. During the brief Paiute War of May, 1860, the people of Silver City built a stone battlement atop the eastern summit and constructed a wooden cannon for protection. Devil’s Gate marks the boundary line between Story 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.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 2.5 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Virginia City — 3.0 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Carson City — 9.7 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since
• Stewart Indian School — 12 mi
  The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices

More markers nearby

• Silver City School House — 0.2 mi
• McCones’ Foundries — 2.3 mi
• Chollar Mine — 2.5 mi
• Savage Mansion (1861) — 2.7 mi