McDermitt: The Town on Two State Lines
Nevada
McDermitt straddles the Nevada-Oregon border on US Ninety-Five, and the state line runs straight through the middle of the place. The community grew up around Fort McDermit, established in eighteen sixty-five by soldiers of the Second California Volunteer Cavalry to patrol the Quinn River country after the campaigns against Northern Paiute bands. When Lieutenant Colonel Charles McDermit was killed that August, the fort was renamed for him.
The town that eventually formed nearby was first called Dugout and later took the fort's name. The state border divided it in two. For years the White Horse Inn, a saloon and hotel that sat directly on the line, used that geography creatively: customers could pay for food in the Oregon side of the building, where Nevada's sales tax didn't apply.
About three quarters of McDermitt's current residents are Northern Paiute and Shoshone people from the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, whose homeland this has always been.
