What was the first Anglo settlement in Nevada? If you ask them in Dayton and Genoa, you would get two different answers. But something certainly happened in Dayton 175 years ago, in 1849. Its effects would be felt in what became Nevada … and in some ways still are felt.
On January 24, 1848, James Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento. When the word made its way back east, the California Gold Rush began. In those days before instant communication throughout the world, it took some time. After all, the NFL team isn’t called the San Francisco forty-eighters.
No, they were forty-niners, and one of them was named Abner Blackburn. He was 22 when he headed for the Gold Rush. He originally came from Pennsylvania and had been around the west for a few years already. His family back east had converted to Mormonism. He was helping to guide a pack train for the LDS Church from Salt Lake City to California. They followed the Overland Trail, which in Nevada would take you pretty close to what is now Highway 50, mainly through what we now know as White Pine, Eureka, Lander, Churchill, and Lyon Counties, before you would get to Carson City.
In late spring or early summer 1849, Blackburn and his group stopped where the Carson River met a ravine that would later be called
Gold Canyon. It got that name honestly because that’s where Blackburn found some gold. He asked the members of the pack train if anybody had found gold in the area. They said no, because nobody had looked. Blackburn looked. He later said, “I took a bread pan and butcher knife and went out to the ravines to prospect and found gold in small quantities in three places. Went to a larger ravine where the water run down over the bedrock a little on the side of the gulch. Dug down in the slate and found a fair prospect and kept panning for an hour or more. Went back to camp and all hands grabbed pans, knives and kettles and started out. We scratched, scraped and paned until nearly sundown, earning $10.00.”
Now, ten dollars meant more in those days than it does now, but it still didn’t compare with the stories coming from the California gold fields. So Blackburn and company pushed on. But of course the word spread, and others came to the area to look for gold. This gave rise to the town of Dayton.
As it turned out, Blackburn had found part of what came to be known as the Comstock Lode. It wouldn’t really be discovered for another decade. But historians increasingly credit Blackburn as the first to find gold in present-day Nevada, and to helping to found what may be Nevada’s oldest settlement.
Note that I said may be. Genoa, originally Mormon Station, also makes that claim. That’s where others from the LDS Church built a pit stop for travelers. And others have claimed that another member of that church, William Prouse, found gold before Blackburn did. But in 1999, Dayton and the surrounding area celebrated the 150th anniversary of Blackburn’s gold panning, and we’ll let the historians keep debating.