USA Past: Panaca, Lincoln’s first town

Lincoln County?s town of Panaca celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, and in keeping with the observance set for July 24-26 this summer, it will mark a major milestone for the current residents and descendants of those first settlers.

This year is also the observance of Nevada statehood, although that happened in late October 1864, whereas the town of Panaca was established by Mormon pioneers sent there by Mormon leader Brigham Young, in May of 1864.

The Book of Isaiah 35:1 states,

?The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them;

and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as a rose.?

In their book A Century in Meadow Valley, Ruth Lee and Sylvia Wadsworth wrote as the first settlers arrived they took notice of what was before them. ?Already the grass was tall enough to bend obediently before the south wind. The spring sun had greened the landscape early that year and, although the air was crisp again, the smooth waving meadow against a spotless blue sky spoke a ready welcome to the travelers. They stopped low in the valley and observed, with satisfaction, the creek just west of them and the mountains beyond.?

It was early May 1864, and the place was Meadow Valley on the western edge of the Utah Territory.

The travelers had decided this valley, about 12 miles long and two miles wide, would be the end of their journey and the beginning of another pioneer settlement.

53-year old Francis Lee and his family had come to stay, and marked in their journal the date of May 4, 1864. ? ?

The Civil War was raging back east, Gen. Grant and Gen. Lee, were about to begin the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia, but all that was 2,000 miles away, a whole world behind them, and the travelers would have no knowledge of those events for months.

The Lee family had a major task confronting them, but with determination and diligence, they set to work constructing a house of sod and picket. They also plowed a piece of land and planted some wheat, in hopes of enjoying a nice harvest at summer?s end.

Meadow Valley had been visited before by white man. Historians say as early as 1849, an emigrant party, hoping to find a shorter, quicker, less troublesome route to California, had entered the valley. However, what they found was mostly desert, and pushing on,? later all perished in Death Valley.

Mountain man and explorer Jedediah Smith may have also come through the valley about 1826. In 1855, a group from the Utah Territory is known to also have passed through, and in 1858, while tensions were high between the Mormons in Utah and the federal government, Brigham Young sent word to some of the settlers in southern Utah to ?search out new areas where the ?Saints? could find safe retreat from the very real threat of military invasion of Utah.? A group did come, camped in the northern part of Meadow Valley (near the Panaca hot springs), but were later recalled to Utah by Brigham Young, after the threat from federal troops ended.

The short stay by the settlers did leave some things behind the new settlers could see, i.e. corrals, ditches, even corn stubble, giving proof of their one time existence.

The Lee family were the new pioneers in the valley, but they were not alone. Within a short period, perhaps only weeks, 18 other families had entered the valley, put up tents and shanties, and were hard at work planting and tending crops.

Wadsworth and Ruth Lee note an entry for May 21, 1864, in the Panaca L.D.S. Ward records that a visit by church elders from St. George, headed by President Erastus Snow of the Dixie Mission of The Church of Latter Day Saints, encouraged the settlers to choose a site for a new town. A site was selected and planning and layout of a town was begun.

On June 19, 1864, President Snow wrote to Brigham Young, informing him that the name Panaca for the town in Meadow Valley had been chosen.

The name Panaca is believed to have come from the Ute Indians. Definition of the word is uncertain, either it means ?white metal? (silver), or ?warm water,? although modern Ute language experts believe Panaca better resembles the word for warm water.

In reference to the word being white metal, or possibly silver, in the winter of 1863-64, miner William Hamblin wrote he was shown a rich body of silver ore in the hills northwest of Meadow Valley. A few other historians claim the name comes from that silver strike, a Southern Paiute word Pan-nuk-ker, which means ?metal, money, wealth?.

Whatever the meaning of the Paiute word, as news of the find spread, the inevitable influx of fortune hunters began, a new area to explore for mineral riches.

? Thus, be it warm water or silver, both have been a sustaining factor for the town of Panaca since, and into the 21st Century.