The most famous thing about U.S. 50 across Nevada is an insult. In July 1986, Life magazine ran a photograph of the empty two-lane highway and quoted a AAA man's verdict: "It's totally empty. There are no points of interest. We don't recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there unless they're confident of their survival skills." The name stuck, in the worst way and then in the best: the Loneliest Road in America. What almost no one who repeats the phrase knows is that it is close to the opposite of true. The loneliest road in America is a string of some of the most stubbornly cultured small towns in the West — places that were supposed to blow away with the ore and instead kept the opera house lit, the churches standing, and the steam locomotive under fire. Out here, culture didn't thin with the population. It concentrated.
The insult they kept
Nevada did not argue with Life. It printed the insult on the map. That same year the state's tourism office launched a program called "I Survived Highway 50" and began handing out a passport-sized Official Highway 50 Survival Guide, to be stamped town by town — the loneliest road runs some two hundred and eighty-seven miles from Fernley to Ely, and you collect a stamp in each of the towns strung along it. Fill the passport, mail it in, and the state mails back a certificate signed by the governor, a lapel pin, and a bumper sticker announcing that you survived a road with, officially, nothing on it. It worked: more than twelve thousand kits went out in the first two years, and in 1988 the legislature made "The Loneliest Road in America" the wording on the highway signs themselves. It is one of the great acts of civic jujitsu in the West — a region that took a put-down aimed at its emptiness and turned it into the name people drive hundreds of miles to earn. The towns knew the thing the magazine missed: they were never empty.
An opera house for a few hundred people
Eureka is the one that still feels like a town. It came up on silver-lead in the 1860s, ran sixteen smelters at its peak, poured enough black smoke over the valley to earn the name "the Pittsburgh of the West," and was for a while the second-largest city in Nevada. The ore is a century gone and the population is down to a few hundred, but the astonishing thing is what they kept. The Eureka Opera House, built in 1880, still stands on Main Street with its horseshoe balcony and a hand-painted 1920s curtain advertising long-dead local businesses. It spent the middle of the twentieth century as a movie house, and in 1993 the town — one you could empty into a single football stadium with seats to spare — decided its Victorian opera house was worth restoring rather than losing. It hosts concerts and conventions again now. Eureka bills itself, without irony, as the Friendliest Town on the Loneliest Road, and keeps a grand nineteenth-century theater running for an audience it largely has to import. That is not what a dying town does. It is what a town that refuses to die does.
Three churches and a sack of flour
Seventy miles west, Austin climbs straight up Pony Canyon, and its arithmetic is starker still. In 1862 a stray silver strike in the Toiyabe Range set off the Reese River rush, and by the next summer better than ten thousand people were packed onto this grade. Today about a hundred and seventy live here. And yet Austin still holds three churches from the boom — a Catholic one and a Methodist one, both from 1866, and an Episcopal one from 1878 — three separate congregations' worth of nineteenth-century faith kept up by a town that could nearly fit inside one of them. It kept its stranger monuments too: Stokes Castle, a three-story granite tower a mining baron raised in 1897, lived in for barely a month, and left standing ever since.
Austin's real inheritance, though, is a story. In 1864 a local merchant named Reuel Gridley lost an election bet and had to carry a fifty-pound sack of flour down the street behind a band. Rather than pocket it, he auctioned the sack for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the outfit that tended wounded Union soldiers — and the buyer handed it back to be sold again, and again, and again. Gridley took the same sack of flour on the road across Nevada and California and beyond, and that one bag raised something like two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars for the war's wounded. Mark Twain, who knew this country, set the tale down in Roughing It. Austin also raised Emma Wixom, a girl who grew up on this remote grade, took the stage name Emma Nevada, and went on to sing for the opera houses and crowned heads of Europe. Empty desert in every direction, and the place still turned out a diva and a national charity built on a sack of flour.
The train that didn't leave
At the far end, after two hundred miles of sagebrush, Ely arrives like a small city — near four thousand people, the biggest town on the road. Copper built it: the Nevada Northern Railway went in around 1906 to haul ore from the pits at Ruth and the smelter at McGill, and when the copper finally wound down, Ely did the improbable thing and kept the railroad. The Nevada Northern's fifty-six-acre yard and depot are so complete, so unaltered, that they survive as a National Historic Landmark frozen around the year 1907, and on most weekends the town still fires a 1910 steam locomotive and runs it out into the desert — the Ghost Train of Old Ely, a working railroad kept alive as an act of memory. Ely tends the rest of its inheritance the same way: a Renaissance Village of restored immigrant cabins that once housed the Cornish, Italian, Basque, and Chinese who did the work, and a downtown of hand-painted murals telling the town's story back to itself. Even the Ward Charcoal Ovens south of town — six great stone beehives that once cooked charcoal for the smelters — are kept and interpreted rather than left to fall.
The reward at the end of the road
Drive far enough east and the loneliest road delivers its last joke on Life magazine: Great Basin National Park, a full national park — a glacier-cut peak, limestone caverns, the oldest trees on earth — sitting almost on the Utah line at the end of the road with, supposedly, nothing on it. That is the truth the survival-guide passport was always winking at. The emptiness is real; the loneliness is not. Strung along three hundred miles of the most sparsely peopled country in the Lower 48 are an opera house, three churches, a steam railroad, a national park, and the memory of an opera star and a traveling sack of flour — culture not scattered thin but distilled down, held hard by a few thousand people who decided that the least of the reasons to keep a place was how many others agreed. The magazine called it lonely. The towns called it home, and then sold the loneliness as a souvenir.