September 6, 2007
Lincoln County Record 137 Years Old

By Dave Maxwell

The Nevada Territory was the place to be for hard rock gold miners in the early 1860’s. By the mid-1860s the famous Comstock Lode had turned Virginia City into a bustling community of nearly 30,000. There was a good newspaper there too, The Territorial Enterprise. One man who spent the year of 1863 honing and refining his own writing skills at the newspaper was a young fella from Missouri named Sam Clemens. It was at the Enterprise that he occasionally used what would become his pen name: Mark Twain.

Near the end of the Civil War gold had been discovered on the east side of Nevada, over in the Ely district. A boomtown grew up quickly and adopted the name of Pioche, taken after Francois Louis Alfred Pioche, a Frenchman who owned quite a few of the mining properties in the area.

By the early 1870’s, Pioche had a population of some 6,000. A daily line of six-horse Concord coaches carried the U.S. Mail and Wells Fargo express to the Central City Railroad in Utah; another one ran to Salt Lake City. Three daily coach runs were made to Bullionville, about 12 miles to the south. Three different railroad lines were being planned to come in to Pioche. In addition, there were two telegraph offices in town: the Western Union to San Francisco and the Desert Telegraph (owned by Brigham Young) to Salt Lake. There was even a narrow gauge railroad running to Bullionville to carry the raw ore to the stamping mills there. The later-to-be famous Million Dollar Courthouse had just been built.

In addition, Pioche had 72 saloons, three hurdy-gurdy houses, 32 maison de joie (brothels), two theatres, two breweries, two fire departments, 5 fire hydrants, a livery stable maintaining 300 horses, and a Boot Hill that was filling up fast. The six-gun was the law and it spoke often. Pioche was undoubtedly “the toughest town in the West,” a decade before Tombstone, Arizona earned the name. Those who didn’t have a gun, or couldn’t handle one well, shouldn’t really be there. Claim-jumping was rampant and hired guns were brought in to protect the mine owners’ claims. Open shoot-outs, even on Main Street, were common. Local lore says that 75 men were killed by gun-fire before the first person died in the town of natural causes. And Pioche had two daily newspapers to report “all the news that’s fit to print.”

This is where our story begins. Accounts taken from the 1890 book “History of Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming,” by Herbert Bancroft and Francis Fuller, state that the first newspaper in Pioche was started September 17, 1870 and was named the Pioche-Ely Record. It was a weekly operated by W.H. Pitchford and Company. That paper continued for two years until Pat Holland began the Pioche Daily Record on Sept. 17, 1872.

Then for a period of about two months, September to November, 1872, another newspaper, the Pioche Review run by F. Kenyon and W.B. Taylor, was in direct competition with the Record. Why that paper failed is unknown.

From Dec 15, 1874 to May 3, 1876, O.K. Westcott and Frank Wyatt operated the Pioche Daily Journal, which may have been a new name for the Daily Record.

Admittedly, for this article we were unable to account for some missing dates. It seems that after 1876 the paper became a weekly rather than a daily and was named the Lincoln County Record on January 4, 1900. But it didn’t always keep that name. At some point it again became the Pioche Record, at least until 1925; possibly because the Caliente Herald newspaper had begun.

However, according to a front page story on June 27, 1925, the Pioche Record and the Caliente Herald newspapers consolidated into the Lincoln County Record. But somewhere along the line the Pioche and Caliente papers re-emerged, because the May 30, 1968 issue of the Pioche Record announced that “Due to the continued economic condition, the Caliente Herald and Pioche Record would be known as the Lincoln County Record as of June 6, 1968.” It retains that name to this day, and is owned by Mrs. Cecilia Thompson of Las Vegas, while her son, Raymond, is the Publisher and Managing Editor.