The Midnight Raid - Did it Happen?

  by Scott W. Elliott The place was Fallon, Nevada, formally a dusty crossroads called “Jim’s Town.” Much of the area consisted of Mike Fallon’s ranch in which a post office had opened in 1896. The tiny settlement, situated between Stillwater and St. Clair, had begun to grow. The time was 1903. Senator Warren Williams, who had purchased Fallon’s ranch in 1901 was promoting the townsite. As the population approached 200, he decided it was time for a change, a very big change. The rest of Fallon concurred. Senator Williams introduced a bill to the State Legislature to have the Churchill County seat moved from Stillwater to Fallon. Upon approval, Governor John Sparks signed it into law and the wooden two-story courthouse, of Neo-Classical design, was erected at the corner of Williams and Maine. On January 4^th, 1904, Fallon officially became the county seat. It has been noted that the residents of Stillwater, where the county seat had been since 1868, were none too thrilled with the news. It has also been added that attempts to retrieve county records from the courthouse in Stillwater were met with resistance. Or were they? In his book, “The History of Nevada,” Sam P. Davis states the move was “made without contention.” Of course, Fallon lore has a very different approach to this. Many of us have heard the tales of people from Fallon sneaking wagons into Stillwater under cover of darkness and stealing the county papers, resulting in a wagon chase over the bumpy 17 miles back to Fallon. Could this be more than just a tale? The late Phillip I. Earl, a curator of The Nevada Historical Society, wrote in the Reno Gazette Journal in 1987: “Rather than going to the trouble and expense of taking the matter to court, a group of Fallonites got a raiding party together early one morning, drove out to Stillwater in their wagons and emptied the vault. A local resident passing by discovered them just as they were finishing their work and raised the alarm. The intruders took off posthaste for Fallon, pursued by a hastily organized posse.” Earl seems to have some details of the incident. Given his title he may have had some information that the rest of us are not privy too. On the contrary, Davis’s book was written in 1913, merely a decade after the event. As for myself, I tend to conjure up the visual of a desperate wagon chase through the breaking dawn; the Stillwater Wagon slowly gaining on the Fallon wagon, with some shouting back and forth and perhaps even a gun shot or two for good measure. All the while the wagons thumping and creaking as they bounce off rocks and clumps of sage, the most important of county records catapulted high into the air, only to eventually flutter to the desert floor and never be retrieved by either side. It turns out, most, if not all, of those most important county documents that were in the old courthouse, now safely reside in the new courthouse. So, which was it? A peaceful exchange of power with handshakes and a dinner, or was it the cowboy ninja pursuit?  Either way, the fact of the matter is that Stillwater, upon losing the county seat, shrunk to a scant few dozen residents and the eventual demise as a town. Fallon, on the other hand, continued to grow and only a few years later, entertained an agricultural boom with the completion of the Newlands Project and thousands of acres of added farmland. We, most likely, will never know the answer to this argument, since the outcome is the same no matter how the transfer of county documents occurred. However, if the raid did indeed happen, I find it hard to blame either the Stillwater residents or the Fallon residents for their actions, had they the slightest inkling of what the county seat move would bestow upon the future of their communities.     Sign up to receive updates and the Friday File email notices. Support local, independent news – contribute to The Fallon Post, your non-profit (501c3) online news source for all things Fallon.