Commissioned History · McGill, Nevada
McGill: The Man, The Town, The Bar
A year of archival research, a visit to a small Nevada mining town, and a story that had been waiting decades to be written.
A colleague who knew my work brought me this project. Her father had spent years amassing material for a book about the history of McGill, Nevada — a small copper mining town in the Great Basin — but wasn't able to complete it. The boxes he'd collected over decades were handed to me: news clippings, mine reports, historical records, photographs. A lifetime of gathering — full of stories.
My job was to find the book inside them. That meant reading everything, identifying a theme and structure, deciding which stories were worth telling — and then writing the whole thing and getting it published. I had never done anything like it before. It took a year.
I traveled to McGill to gather historical photographs and talk with people who remembered the town firsthand. I visited the bar, the old railroad station museum, and the local historical museum. The town is small and the history is specific — copper mining, immigrant labor, company-town life in the early twentieth century, a famous outlaw connection — and all of it mattered to the people who lived it or descended from those who did.
The McGill Club, McGill, Nevada
Finding the Story in the Boxes
The material I was given wasn't organized into chapters. It was a lifetime of collecting — clippings from local papers, reports from the Kennecott copper mine, photographs without labels, documents without context. The first task was just to read all of it and start to understand what the book wanted to be.
What emerged was a story about a place that mattered — to the workers who built it, to the families who stayed, and to the descendants who still feel the pull of it. The Jesse James connection didn't hurt either. The book was printed in large type at the co-author's request, so the old-timers in town could read it comfortably. It was stocked at the train station and at local shops. That felt right.
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