Elko, Nevada: Elk, Railroads, and a Disputed Name

Before any town existed here, the Western Shoshone people had lived along the Humboldt River for generations. Fur trapper Peter Skene Ogden was among the first non-Native explorers through the region, in eighteen twenty-eight. But Elko as a town was a railroad creation.

In late eighteen sixty-eight, the Central Pacific laid tracks through and chose the site as a railhead and freight terminus for nearby mining camps. The name came with it, and nobody quite agrees on the origin. One story credits Charles Crocker, the railroad's superintendent, who supposedly kept a list of animal names and added an O to each one.

Elk was next on the list, so Elko it was. Another popular account links the name to a Shoshone term meaning white woman, though that origin is not documented. The Nevada Legislature made Elko the county seat in eighteen sixty-nine, which virtually guaranteed the town's future.

Today Elko is the largest city in northeastern Nevada, hub of the modern gold-mining industry that still shapes the region. Each January since nineteen eighty-five, the town has hosted the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a week of readings and music about rural Western life, and the Western Folklife Center has its home in the old Pioneer Hotel downtown. The Ruby Mountains and Lamoille Canyon lie about twenty-one miles away, and Elko counted twenty thousand five hundred sixty-four residents in the twenty twenty census.