Dennis Cassinelli’s exciting prehistoric novel, Legends of Spirit Cave, is now available as an ebook!
Legends of Spirit Cave is now available for download as an e-book.
The price? Only $4.99.
Legends of Spirit Cave is available from such ebook retailers as Amazon, the iBookstore, Borders, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Copia and many more! Look for it today and download a copy to your favorite e-reader!
Happy summer reading!
The summer reading season is upon us! And in celebration, we’re pleased to announce that Dennis Cassinelli’s exciting prehistoric novel, “Legends of Spirit Cave,” will be available for purchase soon from most major e-book retailers, including Amazon, the iBookstore, Borders, and Barnes and Noble.
Legends of Spirit Cave will be released as an ebook this summer!
The price? A low $4.99!
So grab your preferred reading device and stay tuned for announcements! Additional details to come!
Dennis’s annual Gold Hill Hotel lecture is scheduled for April 17! This year, the topic will be “Transportation in the Comstock Days.”
The Gold Hill Hotel
Dennis has been giving lectures at the Gold Hill Hotel for more than a decade, covering such topics as Great Basin Indian artifacts, Nevada archaeology and Comstock history. Dinner is served at 5 p.m., and the lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. Also, Dennis’s books will be available for purchase and for signing at the event. Hope to see you there!
WHERE: Gold Hill Hotel, 1540 Main St., Virginia City, NV.
WHEN: Tuesday, April 17. Dinner begins at 5 p.m.; lecture begins at 7:30 p.m.
COST: $15 dinner and lecture; $5 lecture only
DETAILS: To make reservations, call the Gold Hill Hotel at 775-847-0111.
Dennis signing books at the 2010 lecture
In the early 1990s, Northern Nevada author and historian Dennis Cassinelli inherited a collection of Great Basin Indian artifacts from his aunt, Clare Perino. By using a projectile-point identification system developed by David Hurst Thomas called the Thomas Key, Cassinelli was able to type and date nearly every piece in the collection. He then decided to donate the artifacts to a suitable museum where they could be enjoyed by anybody interested in early Great Basin culture and history.
The Cassinelli-Perino Artifact Collection
In his book Preserving Traces of the Great Basin Indians, Dennis discusses the process of putting the collection together and includes detailed descriptions of the artifacts, as well as up-close photographs and stunning pen-and-ink drawings. The book also includes a fold-out chronology chart showing the projectile points across a 12,000-year time scale.
The Cassinelli-Perino Artifact Collection is on permanent display at the Carson Valley Museum and Cultural Center at 1477 U.S. Hwy. 395 in Gardnerville, Nevada. Be sure to drop in when you get a chance to see the artifacts, as well as the museum’s many other fascinating exhibits!
The collection contains hundreds of Great Basin projectile points laid over a beautifully painted display board.
You wouldn’t know it driving past, but this scenic, cottonwood-shaded area alongside Highway 50 through Dayton was once home to a spellbinding ore-processing operation. And though nature’s started to reclaim it, the Rock Point Mill still stands as one of the many reminders of the Comstock mining district and the tremendous wealth it generated.
The Rock Point Mill site in Dayton, Nevada
The mill was built in 1861 by Charles C. Stevenson, who also served as Nevada’s governor from 1887 to 1890. Forty stamps crushed the ore that came from Gold Hill, Silver City and, of course, Virginia City. Flumes carried water from the nearby Carson River to the mill site. At one time, the mill had the capacity to crush 40 tons of ore per day.
A fire ravaged the original mill in 1882, and another fire wreaked havoc in 1909. Though it was immediately rebuilt, the new mill closed in 1920 and was moved to Silver City. Between 1920 and 1954, the site was used a dump.
Now part of the Dayton State Park, the remains of the historic Rock Point Mill include rock walls strung along the hillsides and concrete slabs sprouting from the earth. A wood-framed doorway leads into a room enclosed in rock. Outside, a stone staircase winds up a hill that provides amazing views of the surrounding town. An earthen dam still exists and provides a scenic basin hidden from the highway.
A sign near the base of the ruins tells the mill’s story through words and photographs. Rock-lined pathways wind uphill toward the dam, around the dump and to a round concrete structure at the top of a high hill. A convenient bench allows visitors to sit and admire the view. In addition, the site is connected to the Dayton State Park through a tunnel that runs underneath Highway 50.
Venturing among the ruins, you get a sense of the operation’s vast scale. As one of three ore-processing plants in Dayton, The Rock Point Mill was a crucial fixture not only of the town, but of the Comstock mining district as well. Today, it serves as an historical remnant of a bygone era, reminding contemporary Dayton of its roots and the role it played in the shaping of the west.
Perhaps no other area best symbolizes the Comstock region than Virginia City, Nev. Nestled high in the mountains and only minutes from Reno and Lake Tahoe, V.C. is the quintessential portrait of the rugged Old West, complete with ramshackle boardwalks, historical storefronts and a bonanza of interesting sites to explore.
A byproduct of the Comstock Lode, Virginia City sprouted into a blossoming metropolis with more than 30,000 residents during its glory days. Today, it’s recognized as the largest federally designated historical landmark in the U.S.
Scores of tourists flock here each year to take in the town. Famous sites – and there are too many to feature here – include Piper’s Opera House, the Mackay Mansion and the Bucket of Blood Saloon, not to mention the Fourth Ward School and St. Mary’s in the Mountains Catholic Church.
You literally can spend hours walking up and down the streets here, absorbing the scenery and history. Old mines still scar the surrounding hilltops, a testament to the city’s rowdy days of riches, a time when the allure of gold and silver beckoned dreamers from all around to strike their claims and try their luck.
Virginia City is an important link to a past that helped define the character of Nevada and the Old West. Through sheer determination and rugged self-reliance, ordinary people amassed great fortunes. The story of the Comstock – and of Virginia City – is the quintessential story of the American Dream.
So if you have an avid interest in history and a passion for exploring the Old West, Virginia City is definitely worth a visit. Perhaps no other place so transports you with its spellbinding scenery, its historical buildings and its rustic ambiance.
Dennis recently took home a first-place prize in the Nevada Press Association’s 2011 “Better Newspaper Contest.”
Dennis recently won a first-place prize for his column in the "Comstock Chronicle."
The award, for “Best Local Non-Staff Column, Class III,” was in recognition of Dennis’s history column for the Comstock Chronicle, and specifically for his write-ups on Alf Doten, John Mackay’s silver and the Pyramid Lake Indian wars.
Dennis has been writing for the Comstock Chronicle since 2007. The newspaper, published weekly, is available in Virginia City and outlying areas.
In 2009, Dennis compiled many of his articles into the book “Chronicles of the Comstock,” which also featured a foreword by Comstock Chronicle editor Angela Mann.
Dennis recently received a plaque for his award, and he says he is grateful to the Nevada Press Association, as well as to the Comstock Chronicle and its loyal readers.
Way to go, Dennis!
— Allen Coyle
Today, this parcel off Glendale Avenue in Sparks, Nev., is a serene and shady park. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, its history is downright horrific.
Venture inside and you’ll find an impressive 9-foot granite obelisk memorial stretching toward the sky. Bronze plaques feature the names of 767 people. Each was a patient at the Nevada State Asylum — and each, until recently, had been buried in an unmarked grave, forgotten by history.
Nevada State Asylum Memorial Marker
From 1882 to 1949, asylum patients were buried on the hospital grounds. What started out as an orderly cemetery devolved to a mass grave. Bodies were stacked atop one another, and burials often were done by other patients.
When a large pipeline was installed in the 1940s, several graves were ripped apart and the remains used as backfill. When 21st Street was constructed in 1977, several graves were accidentally dug up and had to be reinterred inside the cemetery boundary.
These atrocities went unaddressed until a group known as the Friends of the Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services Cemetery appealed the state legislature to designate the area as an historical cemetery. SB 256, passed on May 22, 2009, finally brought an end to years of neglect.
Improvements included converting this parcel from a kid park to a memorial park and reinterring 18 graves buried west of the main cemetery. And, of course, the granite obelisk monument was installed. In addition to the 767 people known to be buried in the cemetery, there may be as many 400 others whose names have been lost to time.
On Jan. 21, 2011, a rededication ceremony took place to pay respect to the hundreds of souls who suffered untold neglect for so long. Attendees gathered in the new memorial park to give prayers and remembrance, and to recite histories of some of the people.
They were largely forgotten in life – and they were certainly forgotten in death – but with the hope, love and hard work of a caring group of people, these patients of the Nevada State Asylum can finally rest in peace.
As I travel around the Nevada deserts and mountains, I sometimes find things out there that defy description and logic. When I was working as an inspector on a highway construction project on Interstate 80 near Fernley recently, I encountered one of these strange and seemingly unexplainable enigmas.
Tracks left by the mysterious walking rocks near Fernley, Nev.
Much of northwestern Nevada was once covered with a huge freshwater lake known as Lake Lahontan. If you look closely at the hills and mountains along Interstate 80 between Fernley and Lovelock, you can see many parallel horizontal lines that mark the water level of ancient Lake Lahontan through thousands of years of fluctuating water levels. Natural climate changes have caused the water level to drop over the last several thousand years to the point where the former lake is now mostly desert. Sometimes during a particularly wet season, some of the desert lowlands once again accumulate a few inches of water.
The lake bottom consists of a fine silt mixed with alkali that becomes slick as axle grease when it gets wet. Such was the case during the spring of 2009 when I happened to notice some rocks and small boulders out on one of these mud flats that seemed to have moved across the mud leaving a distinctive irregular path or track behind. There were no footprints or vehicle tracks anywhere near the rocks or the tracks they had made. Some force had caused these rocks to move for a considerable distance across the mud flat and leave a distinct groove or track behind where it had traveled.
I stopped alongside the highway and walked out to the edge of the mud flat which at that time had begun to dry out and crust over. The surface of the mud was still too soft to support my weight without leaving footprints in the soft mud under the crust. Much of the surface of the mud had a white powder of alkali dust that was especially noticeable in the tracks that the rock had made as it had moved across the flat surface. At other places alongside this same section of highway, I noticed places where cars had ventured too far out onto the muddy surface and had sunk down to the axles. Evidence of tow truck assistance was visible indicating help was needed to remove these vehicles.
The question remains, how could these rocks have moved across the surface of the lakebed leaving the distinctive irregular track behind them as they moved? Any outside assistance to motivate the rocks would have left a mark in the soft mud just as the moving rocks had done. There had to be some motivating force to push the rocks across the mud, but it is difficult to wrap one’s imagination around the problem to arrive at an answer.
I have a theory that may explain this phenomenon after dwelling on this enigma for over two years of deep concentration. As unlikely as it may seem, I believe the motivating force that moved the rocks was the wind. You may ask how can the wind even begin to shove a rock around on the surface of a muddy lake? I have arrived at this conclusion by the process of eliminating every other unlikely explanation.
If you look at the photograph, you can see by the tracks that the rock made several stops and direction changes. Desert winds often change direction and intensity. If you were to feel a handful of the mud from the surface of this lake when it is wet, you would see that it is as slick as snot. Just like a curling stone sliding across the ice, the stones were pushed across the slick mud by being pushed by gusts of wind that changed direction and left not a mark except the track of the stone itself. Some of the other stones in the photograph were either imbedded in the mud or were too small to catch enough wind to sail across the surface. I have photos of other walking rocks that seem to confirm this theory.
I’m changing things up a bit and am in the process of transferring my old site to this new system. I hope to have more posts published soon. In the meantime, you can learn more about my writing and published works by visiting the “books” and “biography” links above!
Thanks for visiting, and happy trails!
