Battle Mountain: The Name, the Rail, and the Reese River

The name Battle Mountain carries a violent ring, and the stories behind it are suitably murky. Most historians trace it to an eighteen fifty skirmish in the mountain range to the southwest, where a party of California-bound emigrants ambushed a group of Shoshone people after a wagon attack, though the precise details, as with many frontier confrontations, are disputed and shaped by whose account survived. A competing story gives the name to a prospector named George Tannihill, who claimed he fought off a group of Native Americans here in eighteen fifty-seven with twenty-three other settlers. That version is even harder to verify.

What is clear is that as a town, Battle Mountain did not exist until eighteen seventy. The Central Pacific Railroad had reached the area in eighteen sixty-eight, establishing a siding it called Reese River, named for the waterway draining the valley to the south. Five miles east, the railroad built its main station at a community called Argenta. Early in eighteen seventy, Argenta relocated to the railroad siding, absorbed it, and took the name Battle Mountain from the prominent ridge nearby.

The Reese River Valley had already fueled a silver boom in the eighteen sixties, making Lander County one of Nevada's first organized mining districts. Battle Mountain became the county seat, a natural function for the place where the railroad ran and goods moved.

The town never exploded into a major city, but it endured. Copper and gold mining have kept the local economy going through different eras. Today Battle Mountain sits at the midpoint of Interstate Eighty's long Nevada crossing, a quiet county seat in a county named for Frederick Lander, the federal surveyor who mapped wagon routes through this country before the Civil War took him east and killed him.

The mountain to the southwest still bears the name. Whatever happened there nearly one hundred seventy-five years ago, the landscape keeps the record.