The American West’s Latest Boomtown

American small towns too often get their hearts broken. Especially Out West, where the vast distances breed a sense of isolation and despair. 

They don’t call it the sticks for nothing. Or Earth’s answer to Mars.

Many towns never even got the chance to prosper; they lacked that thriving economic engine to fuel growth, like a scrawny incel teen in high school ignored by all the girls. Or they’re places that once had game — a legitimate mine or a factory that brought people and jobs — only to eventually lose that shining light when the sole employer closed it doors and the darkness returned and the tumbleweeds rolled back in.

I once lived in such a place. In the fall of 2022, while reporting my book “No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America,” about a group of luckless rural teenagers learning how to lose like men, I rented a house tiny McDermitt, (pop. 95), a deserted outpost that straddles the Nevada-Oregon line, adjacent to a sprawling Pauite-Shoshone reservation that is home to another 310 residents.

In McDermitt’s heyday, a thriving mercury mine brought hardy miners and their families, swelling the population to 600. In the age before TV, a dozen bars lined the downtown drag, where a randy cowboy once rode his horse up a flight of stairs to the second-floor brothel over the rowdy White Horse saloon.

Resident Herman Hereford, a local schoolteacher and imbiber, wrote a book called McDermitt Days that captured the fistfights and poker games and budding relationships forged between hardworking risk-takers who didn’t realize just how good they had it, or that the good times would not last.

Not everyone had it so good. Local Paiutes were dismissed as second-class citizens. Native schoolchildren were forbidden from speaking their own language, men were harassed and beaten up and banned from bars and from the better-paying jobs.

The party ended in 1992 when the Cordero mine closed and McDermitt wilted like a wildflower brought briefly to life by a hard desert rain. The miners and their families moved on, houses became vacant and McDermitt could hear its own death rattle. Talk about a last call.

The only businesses left were the venerable Say When casino, a couple of gas stations and seedy motels. For everyday services — doctors, dentists, food shopping, swimming pools an auto repair — residents have always had to drive 70 miles to Winnemucca.

Today, the relationship with area ranchers and local Native Americans remains frosty even though the Paiute and Shoshone kids are the only thing keeping the school from closing. Their attendance brings in tax dollars. Native American boys and girls now fill the ranks of the sport teams and keep afloat the town’s social life.

Still, some folks have never given up hope that McDermitt could one day return to the land of the living. Writing in his 1995 book, Herman Hereford believed caches of still-buried minerals could attract new mining enterprises, and that the town’s location along U.S. Highway 95 could set the stage for another boom.

“McDermitt,” he wrote, “is ready.”

Now comes the latest glimmer of hope. Once again, an outlier is rolling the dice on the town’s future.

A national gaming company recently purchased the reeling Say When and new owners plan to create a major gambling and hotel-retail complex they say will put the town back on the map. Like previous investors, Florida-based Gary Green Gaming is betting that untapped resources beneath the region will fuel McDermitt’s relevance. 

The development of an 18,000-acre lithium mine in nearby Thacker Pass, with corporate infrastructure investment already topping $3.5 billion by such industry giants as Lithium Americas and General Motors, is projected to to supply up to 25% of the world’s surging lithium demand by 2028. Construction began on the project in 2023.

Green estimates that between 3,000 and 10,000 miners, engineers, executives and contractors will soon flood the area to work full-time on Thacker Pass for decades. They’ll need housing, schools, conveniences and, this being Nevada, somewhere to place their bets and wager away their hard-earned salaries.

The company plans to transform the 12,000-square-foot Say When, a roadhouse-style casino established a half-century ago, into a modern entertainment epicenter. Blueprints include a massive 60,000-square-foot gaming floor, three-story hotel, 24-hour restaurant, media broadcast center, live concert venues, and a full shopping district.

A shopping district in McDermitt? Talk about a roll of the dice.

“This is not just a casino acquisition,” Green says. “It’s a stake in the next great American boomtown. We see this not as a gamble, but a guaranteed play. Lithium is the new oil, and we’re building the infrastructure for its human side — the place where business gets done, where workers unwind, and where the culture of this new economy gets defined. This is the New West electrified.”

That’s big talk, the kind you might expect from a businessman trying to legitimize his investment. But what about the people who already live here, the ones with long institutional memories who remember how the soil and ground-water supply was damaged by previous mining ventures, which means the tap water is dangerous and everyone is forced to drink bottled water. 

Is genuflecting to the Lithium and Gambling Gods, the latest business interests whispering promises of jobs and streets paved with casino chips, something the community can get behind? Thacker Pass has been most controversial among local Native Americans, who protested that the mine was being built on sacred burial grounds. But it’s coming anyway.

Will McDermitt face the same fate as countless other desperate western towns, who opened their arms to outsiders only to be left for dead when the profits dried up?

Can a forgotten place without jobs or culture win a poker game against a cagey opponent who very well could turn out to be the Devil himself?

*

Look around tiny McDermitt and you’ll see a town slowly deteriorating back into the desert.

At night, the Say When’s neon lights only illuminate a few of the letters, so the sign imparts more gibberish than advertising. The gutters are falling. There’s a hole in the exterior after some drinker lost control of his car. The parking lot is crumbling to dust, ground down by the big semis turning their heavy wheels.

The Say When is a symbol of McDermitt. Not yet dead, but on life support.

When I lived in town in 2022, I made good friends here, people who hail from the other side of the political spectrum but whom I respect. Their lives are a mix of Saturday Night Live hilarity and Shakespearean in their complexity.

Most are wary of large-scale mining and gambling, but what choice do they have? 

“It’s McDermitt’s time to shine. If the lithium and the gambling people come, the town may boom. But is that what we want?” said Howard Huttman, whom everyone calls Junior, my former landlord who recently relocated with his wife Lorraine to a ranch outside town. “If it happens, I’ll be glad I moved out out of town.”

Junior knows that small-town beggars can’t be choosers. They play the cards they’re dealt.

McDermitt has seen its share of lousy poker hands and broken promises. Years ago, an outsider bought the old White Horse Saloon with plans to create a marijuana-themed hotel. Then a gas station owner opened a Subway sandwich franchise. People got excited. Then the pot guy with big dreams left town and the sandwich shop flopped.

Thierry Veyrié is fluent in both of the town’s ethnic communities. The French-born anthropologist moved here in 2013 to begin his doctoral work on the history of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shosone reservation. He’s a romantic figure with a cowboy hat and a Parisian accent, more Paiute than white.

He rolled up his sleeves to modernize the reservation. He launched a Paiute language class in the local school and even learned the ancient language himself. He helped tribal leaders write government grant applications and recently bought a small bus to ferry Paiute-Shoshone teens on field trips where he speaks Paiute to young people who are beginning to forget their own language.

He knows that tribal history is paved with the lies of outsiders, so Veyrié doesn’t blame leaders being skeptical of this latest pot at the end of the rainbow. Most Paiutes here aren’t gobsmacked by offers of company handouts. There are already enough problems on the reservation; who needs more gambling and the lawless breed it might attract to town? Or more bulldozers damaging land they hold sacred?

Most people know that McDermitt doesn’t really have a say in its own future. The money men will come with their earthmovers and promises and leave when the mirage turns into a mound of desert clay. And so the town awaits its next chapter. What more can it do?

But residents can find hope in the tiniest crevice. A new gas station recently opened next to the Say When and owners have hired local Native Americans as both workers and managers.

And now, after years of having tribal leadership hold him at arm’s length, Veyrié is becoming an accepted voice in a sovereign land distrustful of outsiders. Paiute elders invite him on hunting trips, talking about their customs, showing him a connection with the land that has been shaped through the eons.

When the mining men and carloads of gamblers come, there is a precious part of McDermitt that their fantasies and foibles cannot touch, or ruin: Knowledge and traditions that date back before the first outsiders ever set foot here.

Thierry Veyrié has been shown that side of life here. He knows.