THE TITHING HOUSE IS ONE OF THE EARLIEST STRUCTURES
At Hazen, the overland trains leave the passengers who are to go fortune hunting in Southern Nevada among the mines. Rawhide, Fairview, Wonder, Tonopah, Goldfield, Bullfrog, Manhattan, Rhyolite, Beatty and a score more of millionaire making camps already well known to prospectors, capitalists, and stock brokers throughout the country, are reached by the Nevada-California branch railway from Hazen, which connects at Mina with the Tonopah and Goldfield Railroad. In these regions the scenes of the Comstock Lode days of half a century ago are being repeated. Towns are created overnight—millionaires are made between meals. Stock exchanges ride high upon the enormous output of the mining certificates. Goldfield, but recently a desert, is a city of ten thousand people with good hotels, banks, daily papers, water, electric and gas plants, railroad, telegraph and telephone service, and indeed all the utilities of a modern city. Tonopah is of like history with somewhat smaller population. Here are all the cosmopolitan and adventurous spirits that are lured by gold, making these camps on the human side picturesque beyond measure. Marvelous are the stories, the true ones perhaps most so of all. One man went to Tonopah on $150 he had borrowed; in three years he was worth $2,000,000. Another owned a bed, a tent, and a ten days’ food supply; Goldfield—and today he owns a million dollars. A few men leased a mine; in five months they added to their property two million dollars. Little wonder it is a land of optimism; each treasure seeker has such examples before him to inspire him with hope; and the Nevada camps are the most hopeful and probably the most wonderful mining camps in the world.
TO SALTAIR, ON THE BORDERS OF GREAT SALT LAKE, CLOSE TO THE CITY, GO THOUSANDS DAILY TO BATHE IN ITS STRANGE WATERS, TOO SALT FOR LIFE, TOO HEAVY FOR THE LIGHTER WINDS TO CURL, TOO BUOYANT TO SWIM IN SWIFTLY
Hazen is also the junction point for another railroad, a fourteen-mile branch line to Fallon, the commercial center of the Truckee-Carson reclamation project.
PROMONTORY POINT AT THE EASTERN END OF GREAT SALT LAKE. HERE WAS THE JUNCTION OF THE TWO LINES WHERE THE LAST SPIKE WAS DRIVEN, BINDING THE NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT WITH A TRAIL OF STEEL
ACROSS THE SILENT DESOLATE SEA, THE TRAIN RUNS ON THE GREAT SALT LAKE CUT-OFF, THE BUILDING OF WHICH IS ONE OF THE TRIUMPHS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY