Jamison's Station: The First Business in the Truckee Meadows

Behind a locked fence inside the Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility, where the river comes out of the canyon east of Sparks, there is about an acre of stone foundations in the sagebrush. A steel rail carries a brass plate. The plate says:

Jameson's Station. Emigrant Trading Post. Site of first Settlement in Truckee Meadows — 1852.

The station is real. The man is real. The date is right. The place is almost certainly wrong, and the stones belong to somebody else entirely.

What is true is that in 1852 a man set up the first business of any kind in the Truckee Meadows — sixteen years before Reno, five before Glendale, a decade before the ranches — and that he did it, on the best evidence anyone has assembled, about two miles west of those stones, on a bend of the river now crossed by East McCarran Boulevard.

The Man from Weber County

He appears in the record as H. H. Jamison, and sometimes as Jameson, and those two initials are the most anyone has ever been able to put to him. No first name survives.

He was a Mormon. He turns up in the Utah census of 1850 as a resident of Weber County, and again in 1851, and some time in that year he came west over the mountains into Carson Valley — possibly in the party that brought John Reese, who founded Mormon Station at Genoa. By November 1851 he was prominent enough among the Carson Valley settlers to be named an officer of the squatter government they threw together in the absence of any real law.

And he had a job. He was the Carson Valley agent for George Chorpenning, who held the United States mail contract between Salt Lake and Sacramento — a route that in winter was less a mail service than an endurance test. Chorpenning's riders came through the Truckee Meadows. That is very likely why Jamison went there.

In 1852 he moved up from Carson Valley to the Truckee and opened a trading post on the river. It was the first one in the meadows. Nobody had been there before him in any commercial sense at all.

What He Actually Sold

He sold provisions — flour, bacon, tobacco, clothing, the things people run out of — but that was not the business. The business was cattle.

By the time an emigrant train reached the Truckee Meadows it had come across the Forty Mile Desert, which is the stretch that broke stock. The animals that survived it arrived gaunt, footsore and worth almost nothing, and their owners still had the Sierra in front of them. Jamison would buy those animals cheap, or trade a sound ox for two ruined ones, and then turn the ruined ones out onto the meadow grass.

The Truckee Meadows was the best natural pasture between the Humboldt and the summit. A month on that grass and a broken ox was an ox again, worth real money to the next train coming through. He was running an arbitrage on exhaustion, and the raw material walked to him for free.

It may also make him the first person to attempt anything like agriculture in the Truckee Meadows, which is a reasonable thing to claim for a man who built a business entirely out of what the grass could do.

The Stones Belong to Someone Else

Now to the marker, and why it is wrong.

The United States surveyed this township in 1861 and 1862. The General Land Office plat for Township 19 North, Range 20 East shows a structure on the south side of the Truckee at precisely the spot where those stone foundations are — the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 14. The surveyor wrote a name beside it. The name is J. Guery.

The Washoe County Recorder's own plat, drawn a few months later, shows two structures on that ground and records the owner of them and of the land around them as John Georges. Guery and Georges are the same man with two spellings, which is ordinary for the period and for a surname nobody could spell.

So the oldest maps of this ground, made within a decade of Jamison and by men standing on the spot, say the buildings there belonged to a homesteader of the early 1860s. They do not mention a trading post, and they do not mention Jamison.

Thirty-Five Diaries

Here is the other problem, and it is the more interesting one.

Emigrants kept journals. Thirty-five of them survive describing the passage down the canyon from the Big Bend of the Truckee into the meadows in 1852, 1853, 1854, 1855 and 1857 — the exact years and the exact ground. The wagon road ran directly past the front of those stone foundations.

Not one of the thirty-five mentions a trading post there.

They mention trading posts constantly. They mention them further back at the Big Bend, where the road came off the desert. And three of them mention a post in the meadows themselves, in terms that put it somewhere else:

• Virginia Ivins, in 1853, noted "a trading post near by" while camped in the Truckee Meadow.
• William Woodham, on July 14, 1854, saw "the flag of a trading post" — and he saw it on the north side of the river, at the crossing.
• Arthur Menefee, on October 4, 1857, camped "near a shanty of the traders" on the riverbank.

A flag and a shanty. That is the other half of the answer. An emigrant trading post in 1852 was not a building. It was wagons and tents and a flag on a pole, pitched in the spring when the trains started coming and struck in the autumn when they stopped. The first genuinely permanent structure anybody put up in the Truckee Meadows came five years later, and it was not Jamison's.

Which means there is probably nothing left of Jamison's Station to find, anywhere, because there was never anything there to leave.

Where It Actually Stood

Strip away the stones and the diaries point one direction: west, into the meadows proper, to the place where the emigrant road crossed to the north bank.

In 1852 a new route opened over the mountains. Jim Beckwourth had found a low pass at the north end of the Sierra, and the trail to it left the Truckee in the middle of the meadows and ran north toward Long Valley. Together with the Henness Pass road it pulled a new wave of traffic through this ground, and the crossing where that trail left the river became the busiest point in the valley.

That crossing is about two miles west of Steamboat Creek. It is where East McCarran Boulevard goes over the Truckee today. The old trail ran south from it along a line that is now, for about a mile and a half, Stanford Way — and only two blocks of it near the river still follow the original alignment, the rest having been straightened out by a century of Sparks.

Everything fits there. Woodham's flag on the north side at the crossing. Menefee's shanty on the bank. The earliest published account, written in the 1920s by someone close enough to the old settlers to ask them, which put the station flatly "where Glendale is now." A trader who, in another account from the same period, "dwelt in a tent some distance northward from what later became Glendale."

If you have read the piece about the two gateposts on McCarran, you will recognise the ground. This is the same bend of the same river. The first business in the Truckee Meadows and the vanished mansion behind the pillars are separated by ninety years and perhaps a few hundred yards.

1857

In 1857 Brigham Young called the Mormons home. The settlements in western Utah Territory — which is what Nevada was — emptied as families sold what they could and started east over the mountains they had come across. Mormon Station changed hands. Carson Valley lost a third of its people in a season.

Jamison was a Mormon, and after 1857 he is gone from the record completely. Nobody has found where he went, or when he died, or what his first name was.

That same year, John F. Stone and Charles C. Gates built a hotel and trading post on the north side of the river at the Beckwourth crossing — the first permanent building in the Truckee Meadows. The county's own history records that their post had been "formerly called Jamison's Station."

That is a single sentence in a single source and it deserves to be said carefully: no contemporary document confirms it. But the shape of it is right. A Mormon trader leaves in the year the Mormons were recalled, and two men with money take over the best crossing in the valley and make it permanent. What they built became Stone and Gates' Crossing, and Stone and Gates' Crossing became Glendale, and Glendale lost to Reno in 1868 and became a road.

The Silence

One more thing, because it explains why you have never heard of any of this.

There is no newspaper account of Jamison's Station. Not one, anywhere, ever. I went looking properly — the name against the river, the name against Chorpenning, the name on its own across the whole Nevada run of the papers, and then across the 1890s and 1900s when the surviving pioneers were being interviewed and every old-timer in the state was getting his reminiscences printed. Nothing. The searches come back empty or come back full of a modern subdivision in Tennessee that happens to share the name.

The reason is simple arithmetic. Nevada's digitised newspapers effectively begin around 1870. Jamison set up in 1852 and was gone by 1857. The press arrived in this valley eighteen years after the first business in it had already closed.

Everything we know about him therefore comes from four places: a paragraph in an 1881 county history, two papers read before the state historical society in the 1920s, the federal and county survey plats of 1861 and 1862, and thirty-five emigrants who wrote down what they saw and mostly did not see him. That is the whole file on the first business in the Truckee Meadows.

At a Glance: Jamison's Station

• What: the first trading post — the first business of any kind — in the Truckee Meadows.
• When: established 1852. Sixteen years before Reno, five before Stone and Gates built at the crossing.
• Who: H. H. Jamison, a Mormon, recorded in the Utah census in Weber County in 1850 and 1851; an officer of the Carson Valley squatter government in November 1851; and the Carson Valley agent for George Chorpenning, who held the Salt Lake–Sacramento mail contract. No first name survives.
• The business: provisions, and above all buying emigrants' broken-down stock cheap off the Forty Mile Desert, fattening it on meadow grass, and selling it back to the next train.
• Where it probably was: at the Beckwourth Trail crossing, about two miles west of Steamboat Creek — where East McCarran Boulevard crosses the Truckee today, on the same ground that later became Glendale.
• Where the marker is: on stone ruins at the canyon mouth, inside the Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility — almost certainly the wrong site. The 1861–62 federal survey plat labels that structure “J. Guery”; the Washoe County plat of 1862–63 names the owner John Georges. It is an early-1860s homestead.
• Why there is nothing to dig up: emigrant posts were seasonal — wagons, tents and a flag. None of thirty-five emigrant diaries from 1852–57 mentions a post at the ruins, though the road ran past the door. Three mention one out in the meadows instead.
• The end: Jamison disappears from the record after the 1857 Mormon recall from western Utah Territory. The same year, Stone and Gates built the meadows' first permanent structure at the crossing — a post the county history says was "formerly called Jamison's Station."
• In the newspapers: nothing, ever. Nevada's press arrived about eighteen years after the station closed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Jamison's Station really the first settlement in the Truckee Meadows?

It was the first business, and almost certainly the first non-native occupation of any permanence, in 1852. Whether it was a settlement depends on what you will accept as one: the evidence says tents and wagons, not buildings. The first permanent structure came in 1857, when Stone and Gates built at the river crossing.

Can you visit the site?

No. The stone ruins with the marker sit on fenced ground inside the Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility and are not open to the public. And on the best evidence they are not the station anyway — they are an early-1860s homestead belonging to a man recorded as J. Guery or John Georges. The likelier site, at the McCarran crossing, is under a road.

Who was George Chorpenning?

The contractor who carried the United States mail between Salt Lake City and Sacramento from 1851, over a route that crossed the worst country in the West in the worst months of the year. Jamison was his agent in Carson Valley before moving to the Truckee, and the post probably doubled as a stop for Chorpenning's riders.

Is this the same as Jamison in California?

No. Jamison City in Plumas County, California, is a gold camp in what is now Plumas-Eureka State Park, with its own creek, its own mine and no connection to the Truckee whatsoever. The two get confused constantly.

What happened to Jamison?

Nobody knows. He vanishes from the record after 1857, the year the Mormons were called back to Utah. No death record, no later mention, no first name.

Conclusion

There is a particular unfairness in how places get remembered. The man who opened the first business in this valley left a tent, two initials and a disputed acre of somebody else's stonework. The men who came five years later and built in timber got a crossing named after them, then a town, then a road that is still there.

What strikes me is how completely the record depends on luck. If the surveyor in 1861 had not written a name on his plat, the stones would simply be Jamison's and nobody would ever have asked. If thirty-five emigrants had not kept journals, there would be no way to know that the busy crossing was two miles west. The whole correction rests on a few men writing down, in pencil, in the field, what was actually in front of them.

Go and stand on the McCarran bridge over the Truckee and look upstream. Somewhere in that reach, in the spring of 1852, a man from Weber County pitched a tent and put up a flag and waited for the first wagons of the season to come down out of the canyon, driving cattle that were barely alive. He was in business before there was a county, a state, a town or a road. He did not leave so much as a first name.

We are always drawn to the places where Nevada's history is still out there to be touched. To bring a piece of that era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points. The single most important piece of work on this subject is Don Buck's research paper for Trails West, which is where the survey-plat evidence and the thirty-five emigrant diaries were first brought together; the account above follows his conclusions. The earliest printed source is Thompson and West's History of Nevada of 1881, page 623. The two state historical society papers are Annie Prouty's of 1923–24 and F. B. Kingsbury's of 1925–26. The identification of H. H. Jamison and the Chorpenning connection is John M. Townley's, in Tough Little Town on the Truckee.

• Don Buck, “Where Was Jameson's Station Located?”, Trails West (2002) — the only original research ever done on the question, and the source of the plat and diary evidence.
• Thompson & West, History of Nevada (1881) — the original paragraph, page 623. Public domain and readable in full.
• History of Washoe County (Washoe County) — the source of the claim that Stone and Gates' post was formerly called Jamison's Station.
• Terri McBride, Exploration and Early Settlement in Nevada (Nevada State Historic Preservation Office, 2002) — the state's own context statement for the period.
• Nevada Historical Society — the Prouty and Kingsbury papers, and the manuscript material on the Chorpenning mail contract.
• Sparks Museum & Cultural Center — the local authority on this stretch of the Truckee.