Carson City, Nevada: Kit Carson's Name, Abe Curry's Town

Carson City, Nevada, carries Kit Carson’s name, but the town got started because Abram Curry wouldn’t pay $1,000 for a corner lot in Genoa. The name honors the frontier guide, whose name was already on the Carson River and its valley, and it went on a town Curry laid out that, for a while, existed only on paper.

A thousand dollars too much

Sam Davis’s 1913 History of Nevada tells it this way. Curry came over the Sierra from California in 1858 planning to settle in Genoa, then known as Mormontown, and buy a few lots to speculate on. The sellers wanted $1,000 cash for a corner lot and wouldn’t come down a dollar. Curry got on his horse and said, “I will go farther down the valley and start a town of my own.”

The next day he was in Eagle Valley. With B. F. Green, Frank M. Proctor and J. J. Musser, who’d crossed the mountains with him, he bought a ranch from a Mr. Mankin.

The eagle over the door

That ranch already had a name, and it came from a dead bird. In November 1851, a handful of men from the California mines set up a trading post on the spot. Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his 1890 history of Nevada, says Frank Hall “one day shot an eagle and stretched its skin on the front of their cabin,” and travelers called the place Eagle station, then Eagle rancho, and finally spoke of Eagle Valley. The 1881 History of Nevada edited by Myron Angel calls that post “the beginning of Carson City.” You can still see Eagle Valley lettered just north of the town on the 1891 map above.

A city on paper

In September 1858 Curry talked his partners into surveying a town site. Angel quotes the Nevada Tribune of July 22, 1876: the surveyor, Jerry Long, “doubted very much the propriety and feasibility of the enterprise, and urged its abandonment.” Curry pushed ahead anyway, “and for the first time Carson City, that being the name given it, figured as a city on paper only.”

Long wouldn’t even take a city block as his fee. He said he’d rather have Curry owe him. Curry, meanwhile, kept saying while they surveyed the plaza that the Capitol of the state would be built on that square, years before there was any state to build it. By 1876 the Tribune could tell its readers they could “now see the wisdom of his predictions and their fulfillment.”

So why Carson?

None of these histories says who wrote “Carson City” on the plat. They’re clear about whom it honors, though. Henry Gannett, who compiled place-name origins for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, says the city was “Named for Christopher, or Kit Carson, the Rocky Mountain guide.” Davis says the town “took its name from that picturesque character, Kit Carson,” who came into the county “by way of the river which also bears his name.” Bancroft didn’t think it needed explaining: “all that is Carson comes of course from Kit Carson, the famous frontiersman.”

The name was on the river and the valley before there was a town. In the 1913 history’s chapter on Douglas County, George Springmeyer writes that John C. Frémont, “it is said,” named the valley and river “in honor of Kit Carson, his guide.” Note the hedge. Springmeyer also says it’s only tradition that Carson was the first white man to see the Carson Valley.

So you’ve got a capital named for a scout who passed through, on land first named for an eagle, laid out by a man who thought a corner lot cost too much.

Sources & further reading

• Sam P. Davis (ed.), The History of Nevada, vol. 2 (1913). Frémont naming the river and valley for Carson, “it is said,” in George Springmeyer’s Douglas County chapter (p. 806); the name from Kit Carson (p. 975); Curry, the $1,000 corner lot in Mormontown, and the ranch in Eagle Valley (p. 978).
• Myron Angel (ed.), History of Nevada (Thompson & West, 1881), p. 530. The eagle sign as “the beginning of Carson City,” the 1858 survey as told by the Nevada Tribune, Jerry Long’s doubts, and Curry’s plaza.
• H. H. Bancroft, History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming (1890). “All that is Carson comes of course from Kit Carson” (p. 24); Frank Hall’s eagle and the names Eagle Station, Eagle Ranch, and Eagle Valley (p. 71); Curry laying out the town (p. 86).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Carson City “Named for Christopher, or Kit Carson.”
• GNIS feature 863976 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Carson City, capital of Nevada, platted in 1858.