Town's ruins emerge from water to whisper a warning about our future

A few miles outside Overton on State Route 169, we turned left at the small sign marking the way to St. Thomas Cove and the dirt road that led into Southern Nevada's past.

The washboard tested the shocks of the Subaru, but the road was wide and dry and flat enough for passenger cars as it wound across sandy washes that can roar like rivers during heavy rains.

We had come to stand where pioneers once stood, where intrepid Mormon missionaries and farmers set the foundation of early Southern Nevada's white civilization. The Paiute and Shoshone had roamed the area for centuries, and primitive Indians had camped, hunted and grown corn by the Muddy River for many centuries before that.

Descending from a sandstone and till hillside down to what was only three years ago the water line of St. Thomas Cove, we stepped through tamarisk that grows like iron weeds in the shallows of the lake, slogged over a short mud flat to within 20 feet of the greatly receded water line and sat on foundations last used when FDR was president. A few feet away, bass anglers cast lines from the bank into once deep-blue water now gone a pale green from drought.

For lovers of Nevada history, it was awesome stuff.

What compelling artifacts there might have been, according to published reports, probably were plucked by the curious not long after word spread that the ghost of St. Thomas was reappearing at the lakeside. That's a shame.

In a place where history is more cherished, such a sighting might have provided a chance for university graduate students to descend and begin excavation and cataloging of remnants of Nevada's past. But Southern Nevada has been much too busy growing to care much about preserving its beginnings.

By now, however, there isn't much left to see beyond those foundations, cottonwood stumps and what appears to be the undercarriage of an old automobile.

Not that the trip is less than fascinating. Far from it.

Combine a 90-minute drive to St. Thomas with a stop at the Lost City Museum and its impressive Pueblo Grande de Nevada exhibit, a stroll through the Valley of Fire and lunch at the Inside Scoop in Logandale, and you have the makings of a seminar in Southern Nevada history.

Why was lowly, mud-caked St. Thomas so important, and what can we still learn from it?

It was at St. Thomas, with its water source and essential location between St. George and the Mojave's San Bernardino, that the new world got a foothold back in 1865. It was a fertile oasis, a source of genuine rejoicing for desert travelers.

It was submergence of St. Thomas in 1938 by the waters of a newly created Lake Mead that became a symbol of the rapid approach of an even more modern world defined by the man-made wonder of Hoover Dam. With nature dramatically controlled and water apparently plentiful, there would be no end to Southern Nevada's desert prosperity.

And it is the barren, haunting image of the re-emerged foundations of St. Thomas in 2003 that again reminds us of our fragility and of a few facts of Nevada life: Booms will bust, the most important oasis might one day be forgotten, the richest claims eventually play out, and water is never in great abundance in the desert.

A mere five years of drought in the Southwest have dropped Lake Mead's water line and, combined with enormous consumer demands associated with the growth of the Las Vegas Valley, have forced the Southern Nevada Water Authority into a battle-stations mode. From pitched political battles over the future use of Colorado River allotments to unprecedented looks at conservation, the authority stands in the breach with nothing less than the future prosperity of the state at stake.

Las Vegas is Nevada's economic engine, and that engine runs not on cards and dice, but on water.

St. Thomas, then and now, has something important to teach us about ourselves.

Are we wise enough to learn its lesson?

Contact John L. Smith at (702) 383-0295 or via the Internet at smith@reviewjournal.com