‘THE GUS’S UNITED ESTATES GUIDEBOOK’ PROUDLY PRESENTS:
Carson City, Nevada
Un sexto bajillion y four score anos ago, in 1844, a pathfinding fartknocker named John Fremont is fishing for cutthroat brown trout in westerned Nevada when he falls outta his douchecanoe. After he swams ashore, he looks round at all that sunny, brown trout mountain beauty y decides to names it after his favorite boyscout, “Kit” Carson.
Dickhole alert:
Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson is a badassed gringo legend, stomping bighorn mudholes in the tierra firma wherever he goes. At the tendered age of nine tragedy strikes a tree branch falls y kills Big Papa “Kit” as he’s whacking it under the old oak tree. This motivates lil’ “Kit”. At fourteen-o, he saddles up his trusty mule “Shart” y heads westward with big dreams of becoming an illiterate dime-store mountain fur trapper dude.
By 1831, Kit’s livin’ the dream in the Rocky Mountains, the fur trapping big leagues. Afterwards, he levels up y becomes a colonel in the not so Civil War, plays bullet ‘tag, your it’ in the Mexican-American War, then gets down to the 19th century big bidness: genocide.
When those damned Navajo refuses to stay in they carefully-assigned reservations, Carson burns they crops, destroys villages and slaughters livestock, er, deadstock. Then, to top it off, he rounds up 8,000 Navajo hardass cases y marches them 300 miles across New Mexico for prison fun on the Bosque Redondo Reservation. No casino provided.
This kinda sneaky stuff doesn’t seem to bother Ol’ Kit. On his Colorado deathsbed, rather than ask forgivingness for being a lil’ stinker, Carson only says: “I just wish I had time for one more bowl of chili.” Aye.
Anyhoos, in 1858, a business geek named Abraham Curry buys 865 acres of land round there for 500 bucks and a herd of horses. Good timing. Carson City starts as a stopover for California bound emigrants and white settlers seeking a prescipcion for their they Gold Rush fever. But instead of gold, in 1859 the prospectors discovered silver in them thar Carson City hills, pumpin’ the area with a population steroid burst y Carson City gets selected as the state capital.
The boomed times didn’t last long, though. When Central Pacific Railroad builds a line through Donner Pass (aye, dinner party reservaciones for thirty-two, please), Carson City’s — locals calls it CC — population takes the proverbiated dump.
Donner Alert!
If you ramble West from Carson Shity past Truckee y sees a biggly statue of a log cabin cutie breastfeedin’ her babycita while huggin’ some pioneer dude posing like Charlie Sheen looking for his crack pipe, felicitaciones, you’ve reached of a camping trip from hell.
What the fluck happened?
The 19th century is the age of Manifest Destiny.
What’s Manifest Destiny, Gus?
Manifest Destiny is when you pack all your shite y moves a thousand miles by covered wagon from your midwest cholera-infested shathole to grab “Free land” in California, which means stealing indigenous land that’s actually on Mexican territory. Aye.
Ok. Gus, but who the fluck was the Donner Party?
Aye, is a bummer of a story so let’s calls them The Donn(g)ers to makes us feel less sad. In the 1846, 60-year-old George Donn(g)er from Shathole, Illinois, y his brother Jacob pack up they actually multiple families, kinda like the Brady Bunch. At its biggliest, the Donn(g)ers almost 100 people, including children of all ages — from babies and toddlers to teens y their maid, Alice.
Anyways, The Donn(g)ers ain’t so bright y winds up listening to a grifting shmuck named Lansford Hastings, who tells them ‘bout a wonderful shortcut that’ll save ’em 400 miles.
Y that’s when the fun starts.
Hasting’s little shitcut adds 30 days to the Donner Party’s plans y through hernia-jerkin’ terrain that flucked with they wagons.
What time is it? Is Mountain Time.
After multiple weeks sucking ass in the desert, the Donn(g)er Party exhaustipated, y runnin’ out of supplies, they finally reach the night on bald mountain-faces of the Sierra Nevada, just in times for it to snow. Y snow … y snow … y snow some more … aye, is a flucking Noah’s Ark buttload of snow.
When it becames clear they was up shit’s creek without a paddle, two men get sent ahead to sunny California to bring back supplies. They destination: Sutter Fort in what’s now called Dog’s Ass Sacramento. Any aways, this happy place was founded by a Swiss turdcutter named John Sutter, who gots his jollies off by forcing the local Miwok and Nisesan people into what a visiting settler called “a complete state of slavery.” Aye.
Anywho’s, when the Donn(g)er Party Dudes arrived, Sutter gives them supplies as well as two young Miwok men, Luis and Salvador, to then help them complete their journey back to Donner Partyville.
By then, Donner Party ain’t much of a party. They is desperated after cookin’ up the last of they oxen.
Them weeks blur into months, y it became clear that if anyone was going to survive, someone needed to go for help.
So, fifteen of the strongest people in the Donn(g)er Party strapped on makeshift snowshoes, said goodbye to their families y hiked away high onto the peaks above Donner Lake. Including in this merry band were Luis and Salvador, the two Miwok men that John Sutter had delivered into this grueling ordeal.
And if things at the camps were bad, things out on the pass, fully exposed to the elements, got much worse quickly. This was where the members of the Donner Party came up with the original Hunger Games.
Cannibalism and Murder
With they hinies exposed to the elements, the snowshoe party pressed on with bleeding feet y snowblinded. First one died, then another.
Aye, the famished, frozen bastardos was too far to return to the camps, so, when the third dude dies, the remaining survivors went full-on Hunger Games, stripping his bones for flesh, y began to eat it.
Luis and Salvador refused to eat. They wasn’t being rude. No, for them two Miwok men, eaten human flesh was a culturated taboo no no.
Aye, sometimes it pays to be rude. Seeings their strength waning, one of the Donn(g)er Party dudes, William Foster, shot Luis and Salvador stone cold deaded, despite the fact that Luis and Salvador had saved their asses bringin’ lifesaving supplies from John Sutter a few weeks earlier. Aye, talks about ungrateful. Anywhos, everybody ate they bodies y keeps themselves alive. Well, excepto Luis y Salvador. Is a ghastipated ending to a bad camping trip.
Y the rest is cannibalism nostalgia.
I hopes you enjoisted this little heartwarming interlude.
By the ways, if you is wants to get multiculturated y knows more about the Washoe tribe, check out Thomas Sanchez’ “The Rabbit Boss.” Is cheveré.
~
Samuel Langhorne “Clarence” Clemens the geek was born in Florida, Missouri (which is it?) on November 30, 1835. His alterated ego y the farter of American illiterature, Mark Twain, was born in Carson City, Nevada on February 3, 1863. Confusing? Sure, why not?
Twain arrived in Carson City in August 1861. After brief attempts to be a miner, Twain finds his natch y gets hired by the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City. When he’s “reporting” on a 48-hour drinking party (o maybe an ether binge) at the home of former California Governor J. Neely Johnson, he starts feelin’ the flow y signs off , “yours dreamily,” using his new pen name Mark Twain. Y that, how his new split-persona y the father of American illiterarure, was born.
~
One of them major bumeroonie’s from the late 1800s gold and silver mining heyday was all the mercury y cyanide leachin’ into the ground. Bout 7,500 tons of mercury contaminated the Carson River and land next to it. It tooks abouts a century for the government to get its shit together, and the EPA added the site to the National Priorities List (NPL) in 1990, removing mercury-contaminated tailings from high-exposure risk areas such as parks. They also formationed something called the Superfund Redevelopment Initiative (SRI) to make a regional seed project at the site in 2007. No idea what that does but at least it is Super. Aye.
And that’s groovy, too, ‘cuz cool stuff still happens here. Hollyweird loves the CC, headin’ over to film Bonanza, Honkytonk Man, Pink Cadillac, Misery, The Motel Life & An Innocent Man. Evens John Wayne’s last film, The Shootist (1976) gets filmed in CC’s historic district.
Aye, even The Calzoncillos’ prison is settin’ Guinness records. Leonard T. Fristoe makes the longest recorded escape by a recapturated prisoner with 46 years on the lamb until his son rats on him on November 15, 1969. Poor Leonard was 77.
Dios mio, even the inventor of the Ferris Wheel, George Ferris, lived in Calzoncillos.
Y why not? According to tourista brochures and them 55-thousand CC braggarts, Carson Shitty’s got year-round recreationating, good neighborhoods, museums, good schools, historic districts, a thriving arts and culturated scene, unique shopping and antiquing, hot springs, gambling, y dining for every taste. You can even check out all them wild horsies roaming abouts. That is, when they ain’t being led into wild horsie prison by the BLM, who is pissed off ‘cuz they overgraze public lands. Animal geeks counters sayin’ those BLM peeps just need to check out other opciones, like fittin’ them horsies with stallion -sized condoms y IUDs.
Aye, horsie population politics.
Anywhoos, on tops of that fun, CC is only 32 miles from Reno “No-Town”, the “Biggliest little city in the world”, Reno (No-Town), y only 20 measly miles from Norte America’s largest alpine lake, Lake Tahoe (locals calls it “The Big Hoe”.
Y if that all ain’t enough, every October since 1938, Carson City becomes the home of the “official” Nevada Day Parade. Good Times!
So, if you is chugging along the 580 from a day at the Big Hoe or you find yourselves blazing on the 50 West running from a Vegas gambling debt, stop in the Calzoncillos …
… ‘cuz it ain’t just a dirty diaper town dipped in mercury and hung out to dry ‘bout 4,700 feet above sea level … it’s pleasantastik!
Aye.
