VIRGINIA CITY, Nev. — Beware of dandies who call themselves "Doc" and ask you to two-step at the Bucket of Blood Saloon.
It may lead to a long afternoon of dallying in a town that plays its Wild West heritage to the hilt — and has more fun than a barrel of feather boas doing so.
Living history (with a wink) is the name of the game in this time-capsule town of 1,000 perched precariously on a mine-riddled mountainside 40 miles east of Lake Tahoe. It's the largest national historic district in the United States, a place at once creaking with ghosts and laughing raucously in their faces.
Step inside Red Garter Western Wear, a fixture on C Street, the main drag, and you get an instant sense of the city's character — and characters.
"We make up most of our history around here," deadpans a bearded salesman assisting a customer with a Western shirt of a style not seen since Roy Rogers rode the silver screen. He identifies himself, appropriately enough, as "Codger."
"Most of it comes from Hollywood movies," he says, referring to the shirt, the history, or possibly both.
Storeowner John Bopko, seated behind the front counter, looks up from his book and rolls his eyes, but he's smiling behind his reading glasses.
Codger, who sports a carefully cultivated, crusty look, uses a wooden pole to spear a dusty hat on a rack overhead. Its wide brim and high, rounded crown are instantly familiar.
"See that? It's a Hoss hat," he proclaims. "Half the people who come to this town are looking for the Ponderosa. They want a hat like that, so we give 'em the hat they want. If it wasn't for 'Bonanza,' we'd be a ghost town."
He's not kidding.
The Comstock silver strike of 1859 saw prospectors from around the world swarm the mountains east of Lake Tahoe with unleashed greed. The ore they extracted helped to fund the Union Army during the Civil War, financed the transcontinental railroad, resulted in the countryside being torn up, made a handful of people really rich — and landed hundreds of others in the 14 cemeteries sprinkled amid the mine dumps on the outskirts of town.
Mark Twain recorded the raw goings-on during an 1862-63 stint at the Territorial Enterprise, a local newspaper. "We pine for murder — these fistfights are of no consequence to anybody," he wrote in an account of a "beautiful and ably conducted" brawl.
The boomtown of 25,000 (with 110 saloons, 50 dry-goods stores, 35 boardinghouses and eight dance halls) burned down in 1875 and was rebuilt almost overnight. Then the silver ran out, and for the next half-century, only tumbleweeds tumbled down C Street.
The place indeed might have become a ghost town had it not been for Ben, Adam, Hoss and Little Joe.
When "Bonanza," ostensibly set in and around Virginia City, debuted in 1959, it caused a sensation — not just because of the family-friendly plot, but also because it was one of the first television shows to be broadcast in color. Americans bought their first color sets just to see it. The show aired for 14 seasons, here and abroad, before going into still-popular reruns.
Susan Sutton, who lived in Germany in the 1960s, recalls the Cartwright saga as being the only regularly scheduled show on German television to be broadcast in English. Many Germans watched it to practice their English, she says — and in the process fell in love with the American West.
As executive director of the Virginia City Convention and Tourism authority, Sutton now finds herself having to dispel a lot of Hollywood misconceptions.
The real Virginia City is a good 40 miles by road from Lake Tahoe, not the easy wagon ride depicted on the show, she says. At any rate, most scenes from "Bonanza" were filmed on a Hollywood sound stage, though some were shot on a lakeshore property that from 1967 to 2004 operated as the Ponderosa Ranch tourist attraction. The Incline Village site was sold last year to a private investor, "Bonanza" artifacts and all.
Yet tourists still pour into the Virginia City Visitors Center, asking in German and French and Italian and Japanese to see "Bonanza" relics.
"We have to be very careful what we tell people," Sutton says. "Telling them there's no Ponderosa is almost like saying there's no Easter bunny."
In truth, Virginia City doesn't need a Ponderosa to keep its tourism engine humming. The town boasts enough museums, saloons, shops, architectural curiosities and offbeat events and attractions to keep the wooden sidewalks filled, the one-armed bandits pumping (this is Nevada, after all), and the cars and motorcycles groaning up Highway 341 from the state capital, Carson City, 15 miles away in the valley below.
The town's 6,200-foot altitude and dry climate combine to produce sparkling-clear skies that add depth and texture to a desert palette.
"On a clear day, you can see halfway across Nevada," says John Gray, whose family operates the Virginia & Truckee Railroad. "And the stars? Oh, man."
The V&T, as everybody calls it, operates excursion trains affording views of dizzyingly beautiful landscapes pocked with pinyon pine, mountain juniper and crumbling remnants of the days when the Chollar, Sutro, Crown Point and Yellow Jacket mines, among others, fueled the region's economy.
At the end of the line is the hamlet of Gold Hill, consisting of a few houses and the 19th-century Gold Hill Hotel. By rail or by road, it's worth a visit: The bar is dripping with Old West character, and the restaurant is reputed to be the best in the vicinity. The establishment also boasts an outdoor stage where community-theater productions of Shakespeare are performed.
Who said mining towns ain't got no culture?
Visitors whose feet tire of hiking up and down Virginia City's slanted streets also can opt for a narrated ride aboard a horse-drawn carriage or a motorized tourist trolley. Tours pass landmarks such as St. Mary's in the Mountains Catholic Church, where 18th-century vestments presented by Queen Isabella II of Spain recently were discovered in the basement; the antiques-filled Mackay Mansion; a circa-1863 showplace known simply as "The Castle"; the Piper Opera House; and the beautifully restored Fourth Ward School, now a museum.
Not on the standard circuit, but nevertheless worth a look, is St. Mary's Arts Center, in a former Catholic hospital that offers 15 guest rooms in a gracious brick building that can be rented for family reunions, weddings or other events during the off-season. In summer, the center hosts weeklong workshops in painting, drawing, photography and other disciplines.
Sad but true: Many visitors to Virginia City never wander past the board sidewalks and false-fronted buildings of C Street, where new diversions seem to appear at every step. On C Street you can dress up in old-time clothes and have your picture taken — or take a photo of your kids petting a monkey or even a live panther. (And no, we're not putting you on.)
The Virginia City Outlaws stage highly entertaining pretend gunfights several times daily during the summer at an outdoor set tucked into a vacant lot. The hilariously kitschy stunt show is well worth the price of admission ($1-$4).
Browse some more, and you'll find the Mark Twain Museum, Mark Twain Bookstore, Mark Twain Saloon and Mark Twain Casino, along with shops selling Western wear, Christmas decorations, country-themed decor and "pioneer" provisions.
And yes, that's a French accent you hear behind the counter at Pioneer Emporium. It seems general manager Pascal Baboulin came to America on a lark and, in his words, "got lozt."
Now as in the olden days, C Street boasts more saloons than you can shake a glass of Cemetery Gin at. Many advertise themselves as "world famous," and each has its own tourist come-on. The Delta Saloon, for example, is home to the "world famous suicide table"; the Silver Dollar has a painting of a woman whose dress is studded with hundreds of real silver dollars; the Visitors Center is home to the "world famous Crystal Bar."
The Bucket of Blood has them all beat, at least on weekend afternoons. That's when David John and the Comstock Cowboys, a traditional country band with a national following, pull out the guitars and fiddles. If you've never seen a dance floor spinning at 2 p.m., here's your chance.
What makes it such a hoot is that many of the patrons are locals who, on weekends, don period costumes and come to C Street to hang out.
That explains the gunslingers, the Civil War soldiers, the gamblers, the "doctor" with a knife strapped to his leg and the painted ladies who look like they've just sashayed down the stairs at Miss Kitty's ("Gunsmoke") saloon. But it doesn't explain J.P. O'Horgan.
O'Horgan, who calls himself "the poem painter," is the unofficial poet laureate of Virginia City. His knapsack is a repository of dozens of notebooks filled with poems written in a small, precise script. The lyrical, galloping verse he pens captures the spirit and history of the town:
"On the wind history rambles/ in Virginia City town/ While the mines rock and rumble/beneath the shaky ground . . . "
The poet credits his talent to his genes: "I'm third down from Twain, on his mother's side," he says.
Hang awhile on C Street, and you might also meet a guy named John, from "down the road apiece."
"I came from back East," he says, eyes following a couple on the Bucket's dance floor. "Just followed the setting sun."
A gunslinger swaggers by, checking out the ladies. "They're all like this," John says with a dismissive wave. His eyes lock again on the couple.
"Every time I teach a woman to dance really well, she goes off with somebody else," he laments.
A barstool patron named P.J., wearing a red rodeo shirt and the obligatory cowboy hat, jokes that it might have something to do with money. P.J. says he's 60-odd years old and a professional steer wrestler.
"You know, cowboys never saved a dime, they just partied all the time," he offers, going on to allow as how he's broken "everything" in his body more than once during his rough-stock career. "I've had 25 skull fractures, been gored twice."
But this cowboy can dance, as he is quick to demonstrate when a woman in a red cowboy hat approaches and holds wide her arms. And dancing, in one form or another, is what has kept Virginia City alive and thriving all these years.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com