Columnist Susan Snyder: Small town struggles for simple life

Monday, July 28, 2003 | 8:22 a.m.

The motto printed on the door of the Pioche Public Utilities truck could be the town slogan.

"Same old needs. Just new methods."

Since its silver-mining boom in the 1860s and its subsequent bust at the turn of the century, Pioche residents have struggled to hang onto the basics. Success or failure now depends largely on who comes to visit the town that sits on U.S. 93, 180 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

And when they visit, one of the people they are likely to meet first is Carma Adams, a retired school food-service worker who now is a guide at the Lincoln County Museum on Main Street.

"We get lots of Las Vegas people and Utah people. They come up to look at the museums, have lunch and stuff," she said. "A quiet, laid-back kind of life is what we have until some joker comes along and buys up everything."

Some joker tried. The town's grocery store, one of its two cafes and its small delicatessen closed earlier this year, after a business deal went south, locals said.

Now the closest grocery store is 11 miles away in Panaca. Adams and her peers make the trip in a senior-services van.

Pioche's biggest draw is its Labor Day weekend celebration. Highlights include a miner's contest in which competitors drill holes, shovel rock and perform other mining duties with hand tools used during the town's 1870s heyday.

Another popular stop is the Million Dollar Courthouse, listed earlier this year as one of Nevada's 10 most-endangered historic landmarks. Constructed in 1872 for $26,000, the courthouse was mortgaged, refinanced and bonded to point where the outstanding debt reached nearly $1 million, said Louis Benezet, who now guides tours in the county-run courthouse museum.

Benezet knows many of the tales surrounding who murdered who and why. And there are plenty of tales to tell. Pioche was one of the wildest towns in the 19th century West. Legends say 75 murder victims are buried in the town's Boot Hill cemetery. Benezet says it's closer to 40.

"The legends are exaggerated here," he said. "They said 10,000 people used to live here, when it was closer to 4,000. And if a couple of people were killed in a week, it'd go down as bloodshed every day."

Life-size mannequins fill a courtroom upstairs and one sits in the dark, creepy stone jail cells out back. (I won't tell you which cell, however, because I want you to jump clean out of your skin, as I did.)

Benezet moved to Pioche in 1980, when there were two grocery stores, two hardware stores and two department stores. Now, museums and "For Sale" signs seem to be the only things that come in pairs.

"I'll go to Las Vegas and write a check in a store, and they'll say, 'Pioche? Where's that?' " Benezet said.

It wasn't exactly a boomtown when Adams, her husband and their seven children moved there in 1967, either. He died in December that same year when his pickup truck hit a patch of black ice on a dark mountain road. But she stayed on in a town that has always felt like home.

"I've never wanted to go anywhere, except to visit my brothers and sisters," Adams said. "As for everyday living, I'd take Pioche any day."