Columnist Susan Snyder: Laughlin more than casino row

Monday, March 24, 2003 | 8:21 a.m.

If I had to drive to Laughlin every day, I'd poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick.

Pavement. Dirt. Sagebrush. Searchlight. Pavement. Dirt. Sagebrush ...

That's pretty much the whole shootin' match until you turn left onto State Route 163 and roll into the town named for Don Laughlin, a former Las Vegas bar owner who bought a tiny casino called South Point in 1966 and built a bustling casino row on the banks of the Colorado River.

Locals say there are homes in Laughlin, but added that many workers live across the river in Bullhead City, Ariz. And it didn't take long before curiosity, or maybe boredom with the same old casino sights and sounds, lured me across the bridge Don Laughlin built.

There, I found the Colorado River Museum, which tells the history of an area where the edges of Nevada, Arizona and California are woven so tightly it almost should have its own license plate. (Please don't take that seriously. The Nevada Legislature can tangle itself up for weeks over a new license plate.)

The museum sits on U.S. 95 just north of the Laughlin bridge and is housed in a building that once served as a Catholic church for workers who built the Davis Dam in the 1940s.

Dioramas, newspaper clippings and artifacts tell of Mohave Indians, ranchers and miners who once lived in the area. They speak of steamships that brought supplies to communities along the Colorado River and of Fort Mohave, an 1850s fort built for protection from local Indians and later used as a government school to indoctrinate the Indian children.

Some tales are courageous. Others are heartbreaking. One rare piece is an iron ankle cuff affixed to a ball and chain and worn by an Indian child, who also was whipped for running away from the school. Children ran because they were forced to cut their hair, wear white society's clothes and abandon their native languages.

"The current Fort Mohave tribal chairman said his grandmother used to hide him so he wouldn't have to go to the school. He didn't want to wear shoes or cut his hair," Virginia Sutherland, a museum volunteer, said.

Sutherland probably is the most valuable find in the museum's walls. The woman, who turns 73 in April, has spent nearly all her life in this region of the West. She founded the Colorado River Historical Society and museum, where she works three days a week. The place is staffed by volunteers and run on donations.

Sutherland lives in a home built on the site of the Katherine Mine upriver, which brought fleeting fortune to miners until the gold ran out. A Colorado River steamship delivered goods to her great-uncle's general store. Her father and husband helped build Davis Dam, which sits downriver from Hoover Dam but is visible from the museum's parking lot.

"I was almost widowed that first year we were married," she said. "My husband fell 60 feet into two feet of water."

Visitors typically find the museum after they've exhausted the novelty of Laughlin's casinos and outlet mall, she said. And she has some advice for those who need more than a little curiosity to ramble across the bridge.

"Come here before you go to the casinos, and you'll have some money left."