Battle Mountain Hillside Letters

Look to the hillside and you will see two big letters, a B and an M, spelled out in whitewashed rock above Battle Mountain, Nevada. It is a Western tradition, high school students claiming their town on the mountainside, the same way Winnemucca has its W and Reno has its N. The town below sprang up around eighteen seventy, when the railroad moved its depot here.

Its living came from its location, sitting on the railroad near where the Humboldt and Reese Rivers meet. That made it a supply and shipping hub for a big stretch of north central Nevada. In nineteen seventy nine, the voters of Lander County moved the county seat here from the old mining town of Austin.

So that hillside B and M mark a railroad town that outlasted the mines around it.