Nevada's oldest joke about itself is that it's the place you go to become someone else. In the northwest corner of the state the joke is older than the state, truer than anywhere else, and in one place not a joke at all. Along the eastern wall of the Sierra, within a few miles of one another, a failed silver miner turned himself into America's writer; tens of thousands of strangers arrived married and left free; a dying mining town learned to make a living playing a version of its own past; and — four miles from the capitol — the federal government spent ninety years trying to unmake Native children into something else entirely. This is the remaking ground. What it comes down to, every time, is a name: who gets to choose one, and who has one chosen for them.
The name he chose
In the fall of 1862 a broke, restless Missourian named Samuel Clemens took a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job as a reporter at the Territorial Enterprise, the loudest newspaper in Virginia City. He had come west the year before with his brother Orion — a patronage post as secretary of the new Nevada Territory — then tried and failed to strike it rich in the mines, and backed into writing because nothing else had paid. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel letter with a name lifted from his old riverboat days, a leadsman's call for water just deep enough to run safe: Mark Twain. The failed miner did not so much become a writer that day as invent one to be.
What the invented man invented, at first, were lies. The Enterprise prized a good hoax and Clemens obliged — a petrified prehistoric man found grinning in the hills, an invented family massacre at a place called Dutch Nick's, "matters of thrilling interest for breakfast," as he put it, turned out of an office he later called a factory of slaughter and mutilation. The West gave a man room to make himself up, and Twain used every inch of it. He'd flee town in 1864 a step ahead of a duel he had provoked, but by then the trick was permanent: the byline had outgrown the man, and Sam Clemens spent the rest of his life being Mark Twain.
A town that plays itself
Virginia City knew the second-identity trade from the inside. At its 1875 peak it was the most important place between Denver and San Francisco — some twenty-five thousand people, a hundred-odd saloons, mansions and churches and a real opera house, all of it balanced on the silver honeycomb hollowed out underneath. Then the ore thinned, the money left, and by the Depression the Queen of the Comstock had shrunk to a few hundred people rattling around a mountainside of empty Victorian buildings. It should have blown away, and nearly did.
What saved it was performance. After the war a New York columnist named Lucius Beebe moved up the grade, restored a mansion, and revived the old Territorial Enterprise "in the style of Mark Twain" — reinvention laid on top of reinvention. Then in 1959 came Bonanza: the Cartwrights' Ponderosa was set just over the hill, the town's name in half the episodes, and visitors began arriving in search of a ranch that never existed. "If it wasn't for Bonanza," one resident said flatly, "we'd be a ghost town." Today Virginia City is the largest historic district in the country and a town that survives, cheerfully, by dressing up as itself — board sidewalks, staged gunfights, a whole performed Old West sold to travelers who wind up The Comstock Loop for the show. Its grandest building says the quiet part out loud: Piper's Opera House, rebuilt in 1885 after the great fire, a hall that hosted Edwin Booth and Lily Langtry and — the town will tell you — Mark Twain's first turn on a stage, and that almost never staged an opera in its life, calling itself one regardless.
The six-week cure
Down in the valley, Reno turned reinvention into an industry. The town kept a short residency requirement left over from its transient mining days, and in 1906, when the wife of the president of U.S. Steel came quietly west to shed him, Reno learned what that was worth. Elsewhere divorce was slow, shaming, or all but impossible; Nevada made it quick. On March 19, 1931, in a single stroke meant to carry the state through the Depression, the legislature down in Carson City cut the residency requirement to six weeks and legalized wide-open gambling on the very same day. Reno had its business model.
For three decades they came by the tens of thousands, most of them women, for whom a Reno decree was often the only door out of a marriage the law otherwise held shut. They waited out the six weeks in boardinghouses and on dude ranches, filed at the Washoe County courthouse that locals nicknamed the House of Divide, and — the story goes — walked out onto the Virginia Street bridge to throw the wedding ring into the Truckee. Whether many ever truly did it matters less than that everyone pictured it; the image was the point, and the image was freedom. The town knew exactly what it was selling. When Reno ran a contest to name the arch it had thrown across Virginia Street, one losing entry read, "Reno — if you're in a rush, we'll get you a divorce in three months." The slogan that won became the city's name for itself: the biggest little city in the world — a place small enough to vanish into, remake yourself, and leave.
The remaking done by force
Four miles south of the Carson City capitol, the same verb becomes a weapon. This country belonged, long before any of it, to the peoples the newcomers renamed: the Wašiw of Lake Tahoe and its sacred Cave Rock; the Numu of Pyramid Lake, down the Truckee; the Newe of the ranges to the east. For their children, reinvention was not a door held open but an erasure enforced. The Stewart Indian School opened in December 1890 with thirty-seven Wašiw, Numu, and Newe children and three teachers, and it ran for ninety years on a single premise: that a Native child could be unmade and rebuilt as a white one. The children were uniformed and drilled like soldiers, forbidden their languages and their own clothes, given new names. The cruelest fact is in the walls — the sixty-odd stone buildings still standing on the campus were raised by the students themselves, Native boys apprenticed as masons and set to build the place that held them.
It did not take, and the proof is who keeps the place now. The school closed in 1980; in 2020 it reopened as a museum and cultural center run by Native people, its rooms telling the ninety years plainly and naming the peoples as they name themselves, teaching the very languages the school was built to end. The descendants of those first children took the buildings back. It is the oldest reinvention story in this corner of Nevada, running in reverse — not a name shed for a better one, but a name reclaimed after someone else tried to carry it off.
The distance between them
That is the real subject of this country, under the tall tales and the neon and the powder smoke of the staged shootouts: who gets to author a self. Sam Clemens picked "Mark Twain" and rode it into the language. A hundred thousand strangers walked into the Truckee Meadows one person and out another. Virginia City chose, twice over, to go on living as a costume of its former life. And at Stewart, children handed no choice at all — whose names and words were taken as federal policy — have spent forty years choosing them back. The whole moral weight of the remaking ground sits in the distance between those two things: a name you take, and a name taken from you. It's worth feeling on the road between them. It is only a few miles.