All Mine: Trek to Eldorado Canyon is a trip back in time

Jeffrey Libby

Thursday, Feb. 15, 2001 | 9:31 a.m.

The gold-rich hills above the Techatticup Mine in Eldorado Canyon still offer safe harbor for people looking to escape everyday life.

They have since 1861, when the mine opened and deserters from the Civil War arrived by horseback or wagon train looking for less-complicated work. If the newspaper stories are correct, they still found a fair amount of gun violence. The feuds weren't about blood and politics, but the money coming out of the hills still caused the trouble.

Southern Nevada's earliest operating, longest-running gold mine has seen a slowdown in the murder rate since then, especially in the years following 1942 when World War II ended placer gold and silver mining operations altogether.

The mine no longer attracts the deserter-types, gunfighters or double-dealing dinner hosts. More often visitors are day-trippers, not claim jumpers. Or else they are professional pretenders, Hollywood actors on location to shoot a scene from the Old West.

But either way, it's a desolate spot with very little shopping. When a street sweeper comes through it's cause for talk, and by car there's only one way in and one way out: Route 165, an 11-mile, two-lane stretch of highway leads due east from U.S. 95 through cholla cactus and the red-brown crumble of the Opal Mountains. To get to the Techatticup Mine you pass the only town around - Nelson, Nevada, population 61.

Boulder City, 25 miles to the north, is visible from the western end of Route 165 as a scattering of pale boxes on the back of the River Mountains. Other than that, there's no visible sign of human life out here save the occasional flash of a plane headed west for McCarran Airport.

"People either get it or they don't," said Terral Bolton, who arrived at the mine from Virginia three months ago as a friend-of-a-friend. "They come in and they sit down and stay awhile. Or they look around and head out. It's timeless here."

Visitors pull up to a two-story, poker-faced storefront and several outbuildings that have been restored to the look of the mining camp around 1915, when it been in operation by whites for 54 years and employed about 140 men. They end up in the hands of Bolton or of one of the Werly's, who eight months ago re-opened the storied mine for tours.

But true to the legacy of the place, where in the late 1800s even a murder was not cause enough to send the sheriff down from the county seat of Pioche, there is nothing straightforward about operations at Techatticup.

For starters, it's easy to miss the sign, which is long and low to the ground, propped up casually by a few stones. It reads simply: "Mine Tours." People stop without even noticing it, and about 800 have paid $10 since last summer to tour the mine.

Bolton, an ex-ski bum, came out with her dog, Buddy, and has since found a place for herself at the mine catching "strays" for Tony and Bobbie Werly, who own and run the place with Tony's brother, Kent. Strays are visitors who wander into the store while no one is around, which happens frequently.

"It's a work in progress," Tony Werly said.

No one actually works behind the counter, which doubles as a private kitchen, and there's no bell to ring for service. But since Bolton and Kent Werly, and Tony's son and wife live in the back of the store, someone is bound to be around soon.

"All this stuff, this place by itself, is nothing," Tony Werly, 48, said of the cast-iron animal traps, ore buckets and old soda cans he has collected. "But if you take the mining and the river and the history, if you take the panoramic views, then it's worth a million."

Hollywood and mine

Part of that added value comes from frequent visits by Hollywood and the music industry.

On a recent Wednesday a trio of Japanese rock stars pulled up on Harley-Davidsons they drove from Los Angeles. Kaz Tsutsui, the Beverly Hills, Calif., manager for the Tokyo music group, had given no advance notice of the photo shoot, but it went off without a problem. The band posed in front of the old gas pump and sat on the porch in Adirondack chairs built by Tony. The group wandered into the front room, looking at the old photographs.

Just a few months back it was Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell in town to shoot "3,000 Miles to Graceland," due to open Feb. 23. Jeff Moore, a gospel singer, has also recorded videos with the restored mining camp as a backdrop. Several other movies, commercials and musical performers have also recorded and shot footage at the mine.

When Hollywood shows up periodically for a quick, photogenic Wild West backdrop, it can count on the Werlys, who work to restore Nevada's distant past.

In the muck

"It took seven years, mucking the mine out," said Werly, who works as a union carpenter and runs canoe tours on the Colorado River. "That was my dream. I thought it would take my whole life."

Werly also rebuilt the store on the exact concrete footprint of the building, built around 1913. He and his brother have traveled as far as Washington to find wood to accurately match that used in the miners' shacks. They have rebuilt four and have plans to build a few more. In the 1930s, according to photographs, there were about 30 buildings.

"There's not a whole lot of these around," Werly said. "Historically, they've all fallen down or blown away."

Or they've been "Disney-fied," as Werly said.

But Techatticup was unusual. Unlike most mines that saw a cycle of boom and bust within 10 years, the Techatticup ran continually from 1861 to 1942, producing gold and silver that, measured by today's rates, would be worth roughly $80 million.

And when it closed in 1942 for the war effort, the company filled in a main entrance into the mine with tailings from the leaching process. When the Werlys uncovered the entrance by chance seven years ago, they dug out an entrance with many of the tools that leaned against the walls throughout the 3 miles of tunneling.

"It was like the workers had just left everything there with plans to return the next day," Werly said.

Werly and his wife, Bobbie, bought the mine and 51 surrounding acres in 1994. They had passed by the three wooden cyanide leaching tanks for 15 years on their way to the Colorado River for canoe tours. They knew the history of the place.

Tony Werly remembers chasing after stories of Queho, the last renegade American Indian to live in the hills surrounding Eldorado Canyon. Werly fleshed out as much as possible the historically documented story behind the legend, and once he'd found "99 percent" of what had been written about Queho, he moved on to other figures in the history of the canyon.

The list is endless. Werly runs through the names with relish, grinning from under a worn leather-brimmed hat atop his towering 6-foot-8 inch frame.

Following Moss

John Moss is the first white man reported to have befriended the Paiutes. Tribal leaders led Moss to most of the richest claims. Werly names several famous American Indians, including Irataba and Ahvote.

Then there is Ike Alcock driving his steam tractor up from the river, John Nash and George Hearst, the California senator and father of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. He ends with Pop Simon, who sold the Techatticup and several surrounding mines in the early 1990s.

But for Werly, the days of research have made way for more time spent rebuilding old miners' shacks and taking care of other needs. When spring comes, the canoe business will pick up, leaving him even less time to devote to late nights delving into history.

It will be left to Brent Holden, his cousin, to document and to tell the stories of Techatticup. Holden, 41, left Las Vegas to live in a shack at the mine just six months ago. Before that he'd worked 22 years as a carpenter, but personal difficulties led him out to the mine for a spell. And in many ways he is picking up where Werly has left off, staying up late and surfing the Internet for Techatticup information.

While giving tours in the front room of the store and sporting a few days' worth of stubble and a straw hat, Holden crams as many sentences as possible into each breath. And while walking visitors over to the mine he picks up gravel almost without thinking, searching the ore for hints of gold.

Holden says he learned from an old miner how to put crushed ore and mercury in a hollowed-out potato, wrap it in foil and throw it in fire. Once the fire has cooked the potato through -- baked it -- the gold and silver separate from the ore into a semiprecious "button." The mercury can be extracted from the potato to be reused.

Just as his cousin Werly has, Holden is chasing down legends of the canyon, one by one. For now it's Nash, who came to the canyon from San Francisco in 1865, just four years after the Techatticup opened in 1861. But even after searching thousands of pages of court documents and the microfiche of newspapers and periodicals for new leads, Holden is limited to a few paragraphs on one of the more violently flamboyant figures in the canyon. Holden has yet to find even a photograph of Nash.

"But I know there is," Holden said. "He was so rich, well-dressed, good-looking. Someone had to have snapped a picture of him somewhere. I've got to believe that, otherwise I don't have any hope."

In his roughly 10 years in the canyon, most of it running the Techatticup Mine, Nash is estimated to have extracted as much as $4 million in gold bullion. He is also said to have directed the killings of several people, including the claim ward for George Hearst at the nearby Queen City Mine.

When the so-called "Bridal Chamber" was discovered in 1874 -- solid quartz with gold stringers running through it -- Nash's two partners were dead within a week. Nash reportedly poisoned one partner over dinner with strychnine.

"It's just the way he was," Holden said. "His lawlessness; just what he got away with. He was the law. And then he just disappears. There's so little known about him."

In the trenches

The mining conditions are better documented. Holden knows, for instance, miners worked up through at least 1919 for 10 hours a day in pitch dark with the expectation of blasting just 3 feet of tunnel. They were allotted one candle each day. And the mules pulling the ore carts went blind within months of working on the job.

"It never stops blowing my mind how much these guys did, the lengths they went to with black powder, hammer, chisel and ladders," Holden said.

These days the cavernous rooms the miners blasted while chasing the quartz vein for their employers are well-lit for the first time, thanks to the Werlys.

And as long as their accomplishments don't erode the desolation of nearby Nelson, where people are still hiding out comfortably from the mainstream, there will be little to complain about.

Several Nelson residents, some of whom, in fact, had parents who worked in the camp, say they are pleased with what the Werlys have done.

"It's phenomenal," said Donna Andress, who published an exhaustive history of Eldorado Canyon and Nelson in 1997. "Everything you see down there is authentic, and if it isn't they'll tell you because they're honest as the day is long."

Jeffrey Libby

is a reporter for the Sun. He can be reached at jlibby@ lasvegassun.com or 259-4063.

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