The Heritage of an Empty Land: Independence Valley, Nevada

Abstract

Although emigrants, railroaders, cowboys and shepherds passed through northeastern Nevada's Independence Valley in the 19th century, colonization did not begin until the early 1900s when dozens of homesteader families occupied claims. Soon, parts of this drab basin contained houses, barns, fences, occasional irrigation ditches and fields of dry farmed grain and alfalfa. Plans were made to convert a solitary railroad section camp into a market town and to connect it via a spur track with a group of nearby mines. But drought and jack-rabbit invasions stifled the homesteaders, while the mining operations were squelched by the onset of the Great Depression. Today, Independence Valley is uninhabited, but its sunbaked flats still contain numerous homestead remnants, abandoned fields, section line roads and the section camp's ruins, which form a distinctive landscape mosaic that characterizes many parts of the Great Basin.