The town that died laughing

Abstract

Austin, Nevada, was the town, a boom-and-bust mining camp of the 1860's that ran prodigally through its wealth and then withered away. The celebrated Reese River Reveille was it paper, an uninhibited, wide-ranging jester that kept the town laughing--even as it died. This is the story of Austin and of the Reveille--an uproarious, intimate picture of the men and the manners, the hey-day and the decline, of a typical frontier boom town.