Nevada Famous Quotes

OLD GRIZZLY ADAMS. [37-*] James C. Adams, or “Grizzly Adams,” as he was generally termed, from the fact of his having captured so many grizzly bears, and encountered such fearful perils by his unexampled daring, was an extraordinary character. For many years a hunter and trapper in the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains, he acquired a recklessness which, added to his natural invincible courage, rendered him truly one of the most striking men of the age. He was emphatically what the English call a man of “pluck.” In 1860, he arrived in New York with his famous collection of California animals, captured by himself, consisting of twenty or thirty immense grizzly bears, at the head of which stood “Old Sampson”—now in the American Museum—wolves, half a dozen other species of bear, California lions, tigers, buffalo, elk, etc., and Old Neptune, the great sea-lion, from the Pacific.

There was a gold rush atmosphere in the fledgling days of the internet boom, and indeed it evoked memories of the first California gold rush, which was its own sort of bubble. Exactly a century and a half earlier, gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada by a former carpenter from New Jersey. Hordes of fortune seekers then invaded the state from every corner of the globe, striding into the hills with picks and shovels and pans—and nearly all of them ended up penniless. Yet there were some pioneers whose wealth and success endured, and typically they were the people not especially interested in pulling gold out of the ground. A famous maxim was coined: If you want to get rich during a gold rush, sell shovels.

I have always fancied myself as a fairly objective looker, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I do not miss whole categories of things. Let me give you an example of what I mean, Alicia. Some years ago the U.S. Information Service paid the expenses of a famous and fine Italian photographer to go to America and to take pictures of our country. It was thought that pictures by an Italian would be valuable to Italians because they would be of things of interest to Italy. I was living in Florence at the time and I saw the portfolio as soon as the pictures were printed. The man had traveled everywhere in America, and do you know what his pictures were? Italy, in every American city he had unconsciously sought and found Italy. The portraits—Italians; the countryside—Tuscany and the Po Valley and the Abruzzi. His eye looked for what was familiar to him and found it. . . . This man did not see the America which is not like Italy, and there is very much that isn’t. And I wonder what I have missed in the wonderful trip to the south that I have just completed. Did I see only America? I confess I caught myself at it. Traveling over those breathtaking mountains and looking down at the shimmering deserts . . . I found myself saying or agreeing—yes, that’s like the Texas panhandle— that could be Nevada, and that might be Death Valley. . . . [B]y identifying them with something I knew, was I not cutting myself off completely from the things I did not know, not seeing, not even recognizing, because I did not have the easy bridge of recognition . . . the shadings, the nuance, how many of those I must not have seen. (Newsday, 2 Apr. 1966)