Lander County, Nevada

Lander County’s first seat was Jacobsville, founded on the Reese River in 1859 by George Washington Jacobs, who became the county’s first sheriff. It was an Overland Stage and mail station and became a Pony Express stop in 1860. In the early 1860s it had about 400 people. The county seat moved to Austin the same year it was set up in Jacobsville, and only a few foundation stones remain. Austin began on May 2, 1862, when William Talcott found silver while hauling wood out of Pony Canyon. His strike set off the “Rush to Reese.” Austin became the county seat in 1863 and was a city of several thousand people before its mines began to fail in the 1880s. Prospectors fanned out from it to open many other Great Basin camps. Stokes Castle, a granite tower built as a summer home for the sons of mine developer Anson Phelps Stokes, was finished in June 1897. The family used it for two months. The county’s rock art is far older. At Toquima Cave, pictographs in white, red, yellow, and black cover the walls and ceiling of a basalt outcrop on the east side of Pete’s Summit. A half-mile trail leads there from a Forest Service campground, and a cage-like structure keeps visitors back from the walls. The BLM’s Hickison Summit site has petroglyphs, shade, and camping. Rock art there is protected by federal law, so never carve, paint, or otherwise change the rock.