Lovelock: Big Meadows, Old Bones, and a Generous Rancher

Travelers on the Emigrant Trail in the eighteen forties knew this stretch of the Humboldt Valley as Big Meadows, one of the last reliable water and grass stops before the brutal Forty-Mile Desert. Tens of thousands of pioneers bound for California rested their oxen here.

George Lovelock arrived in eighteen sixty-six, bought three hundred twenty acres, and when the Central Pacific Railroad came through in eighteen sixty-eight, he donated eighty-five acres for a townsite and depot. The railroad named the station for him.

The country around Lovelock holds one of the great archaeological sites of the Great Basin. Lovelock Cave, a few miles north of town, was occupied for more than four thousand years by the Northern Paiute and their predecessors. Guano miners began digging there in nineteen eleven, and archaeologists who excavated the cave over the following years, most thoroughly in nineteen twenty-four, uncovered duck decoys woven from tule reeds roughly two thousand years old, the oldest known duck decoys in the world and now officially recognized as Nevada's state artifact. DNA analysis published in twenty twenty-five confirmed a ten-thousand-year continuity between the cave's ancient inhabitants and modern Northern Paiute people.