Two history buffs go to court over pioneer trail dispute

RENO - Two Reno history buffs have gone to court to block a plan by a history group to re-mark the trail traversed by the Donner Party and thousands of other covered-wagon pioneers through Reno in the 1840s and 1850s.

Stanley Paher, a history writer and owner of Nevada Publications, and Marshall Fey, a partner in the Liberty Belle restaurant in Reno, filed Friday for a temporary restraining order against the changing of the markers.

Their request is pending before Washoe District Judge Jim Hardesty.

''Those pioneer markers in Reno should be left alone,'' Paher told a Reno newspaper. ''We can't let a handful of know-it-alls come in here and tamper with our history.''

Paher and Fey argue that Reno-based Trails West must prove it has a legal right to change markers placed by the now-defunct Nevada Emigrant Trail Marking Committee in the 1970s.

They asked the court to restrain Trails West from disturbing three existing markers in south Reno.

Trails West spokesman Don Buck of Sunnyvale, Calif., said his group has never intended to remove the existing markers.

But he said new research shows the pioneers took a more northerly route through Reno past the present main Reno Post Office on Vassar Street, and his group plans to place markers along that route.

Buck said no emigrant diarist described a more southerly route as marked by the earlier Reno-based group. That route had emigrants going by Rattlesnake Mountain and the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in south Reno.

''The rerouting of the Truckee Route with our markers is based not on subjective opinion, as so many critics seem to think, but on hard, sound documentary and field evidence,'' Buck said.

''It's unfortunate that some have not considered seriously this new documentary evidence ... Our historical knowledge of trails is not frozen in time, but expands and grows as we discover new evidence.''

Making it difficult for both sides to pinpoint the trail's location is the fact that the wagon ruts have long since vanished under concrete and asphalt.