The White Pine News Archive

In its 55 years of near continuous publication from 1868 to 1923, the White Pine News moved six times to six different mining camps and towns, all within a 45-mile radius, including Treasure City, Ely, and East Ely. White Pine County in eastern Nevada epitomized the dramatic and sometimes violent boom and bust of western mining and mining camps. After the initial discovery of gold and silver deposits on Treasure Hill in 1868, there was an explosion of furious but relatively short-lived booms that traveled from one new mining claim to the next leaving a trail of recently bustling but soon deserted camps behind.

The White Pine News began its life in the town of Treasure City perched just below the top of Treasure Hill at an elevation of 9,000 feet. In 1868, W.H. Pritchard and Robert W. Simpson acquired the press of the defunct Silver Bend Reporter in Belmont, in Central Nevada, then moved it to the new boomtown of Treasure City. In December, they began publishing the weekly White Pine News; it quickly grew to a tri-weekly, and by April of 1869, it was a daily paper. The paper changed ownership frequently: by August 1869, it was reduced back to a tri-weekly, and by then October back to a weekly. The owner William J. Forbes, a staunch Republican who was engaged in a bitter rivalry with the newspaper in neighboring town and newly designated county seat of Hamilton, finally decided to suspend the News in Treasure City and haul his press down the mountain to Hamilton. There he resumed the News as a daily in January 1870 and his battle with the Inland Empire, which succumbed and suspended publication in April. Forbes reduced his paper to a weekly in 1872, only to sell the paper in 1873 to new owners who changed the paper's politics to Democratic.

As the mines the town of Hamilton declined, the paper and its owners struggled. Publication was suspended in 1878, after a number of unsuccessful attempts to revive it. In 1880, its owners moved the White Pine News with its plant to the new boom town of Cherry Creek, where it resumed publication in January 1881 as a weekly. W.L. Davis published it in Cherry Creek until August 1885 when he removed the paper from that waning town to the newest boomtown of Taylor. Davis bought out the other paper in Taylor, the White Pine Reflex, and combined the two presses to publish the White Pine News. But Taylor's prosperity also proved short-lived.

When the county courthouse in Hamilton burned down in 1887, the county seat moved to the new town of Ely, and Davis followed the next year, re-establishing the peripatetic White Pine News there. With Ely established as a relatively stable town, the White Pine News became an established newspaper.

In 1907, the News, now a daily, began a separate weekly edition, the White Pine News Weekly Mining Review. In 1908, the paper moved for the last time to the end of town to the new industrial suburb of East Ely where it stayed (the Mining Review was absorbed back into the News in 1909), until 1923 when this seemingly indefatigable paper suspended publication for the final time.