Please remember to exercise caution when exploring Nevada's Ghost Towns & Mining Camps. Open shafts, drifts going into mountainsides, and old buildings, are all DANGEROUS. Be aware of your surroundings, and let someone know where you are, especially if your plans change.

 

Butte Station (Bates) (Thieves' Delight)
(Robbers' Roost)

DIRECTIONS: From Cherry Creek, head west on good road for 7.5 miles. Exit left and follow this road, which gradually bends south, for 7 miles. Exit right and follow for 6 miles to Butte Station.

"Butte Station served as a station for the Pony Express, Overland Mail and Telegraph, and Chorpenning Mail Line. Chorpenning used the station during 1859, and the Pony Express took it over in spring 1860. The Pony Express station was called Bates, although most writers list it as Butte. Butte Station was built in 1862 when the Overland line was improved. Indian troubles plagued Butte Station. On June 27, 1860, the station was burned. The station was quickly rebuilt, and Sir Richard Burton gave this report when he visited the station on October 5:

About 3 a.m. this enjoyment (riding on the stage) was brought
to a close by arriving at the end of the stage, at Butte Station.
The good stationmaster, Mr. Thomas, a Cambrian Mormon…
bade us kindly welcome, built a roaring fire, added meat to our
supper of coffee and doughboy, and cleared by a summary
process amongst the snorers, places for us on the floor of
Robber's Roost or Thieves' Delight, as the place is facetiously
known throughout the countryside.
It is about as civilized as the Galway shanty, or the normal
dwelling place in Central Equatorial Africa. A cabin fronting east
and west, long walls thirty feet, with portholes for windows, short
ditto fifteen; material, sandstone and log ironstone slabs compacted
with mud, the whole roofed with split cedar trunks reposing on
horizontals which rested on perpendiculars. Behind the house
rested a corral of rails planted in the ground; the enclosed space
a mass of earth, and a mere shed in one corner the only shelter.
Outside the door-the hingeless and lockless backboard of a wagon
bearing wounds of bullets-and staples, which also formed parts of
locomotives, a slab acting stepping-stone over a mass of sloppy
black soil strewed with ashes, gobs of meat offals, and other
delicacies. On the right hand a load of wood; on the left a tank
formed by damming a dirty pool which had flowed through a corral
behind the Roost. There was a regular line of drip distilling from the
caked and hollowed snow which toppled from the thick thatch above
the cedar braces.
The inside reflected the outside. The length was devided by two
perpendiculars, the southern most of which, assisted by a half-way
canvas partition, cut the hut into unequal parts. Behind it were two
bunks for four men; standing bedsteads of poles planted in the
ground, as in Australia and Umuamwezi, and covered with piles of
ragged blankets. Beneath the framework were heaps of rubbish,
saddles, cloths, harness and straps, sacks of wheat, oats, meat
and potatoes, defended from the ground by underlying logs, and
dogs nestled where they found room. The floor, which also frequently
represented bedsteads was rough, uneven earth, neither tamped nor
swept, and the fine end of a spring oozing through the western wall
kept part of it in a state of eternal mud. A redeeming point was the
fire-place, which occupied half of the northern short wall… there
was no sign of Bible, Shakespeare or Milton; a Holywell Street
romance or two was the only attempt at literature. Instead, weapons
of the flesh, rifles, guns, and pistols, lay and hung about the house,
carelessly stowed as usual.

Don Salisbury, the tender at Egan Station, came to Bates Station and stayed for ten months to help rebuild it after the Indians burned it. He was born on October 25, 1841, in Illinois, to Catherine Smith Salisbury, sister of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith.

The Overland Mail and Telegraph Company left the station in 1869. While some people continued to live nearby, the area was abandoned by the mid-1880s. Today parts of the Overland station are still standing. Sections of the walls and part of the huge fireplace are all that remain of the once-popular outlaw hangout. Bates, the earlier station, was located four miles north at Pony Spring. Foundations mark the site."

 

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