COLUMN ONE : Seeking Gold in the Silver State : A flood of new arrivals, drawn by dreams of the good life, are shaking up once-lonely Nevada. In boom towns like Elko, you’ll now find cowboys and caffe latte.

The chuck wagon is parked by the man-made lake at giant Maggie Creek Ranch, a lonely figure in a vast landscape, all but abandoned save for the occasional company picnic. Most cowboys here no longer ride the sage-strewn range in solitary search for wayward cattle; instead, they truck their horses in to round up, rope and brand the herd.

The smell’s the same, but the job is different: There are benefits now, and higher salaries, more vandals, fewer rustlers. These cowboys probably have wives with careers; they may live in town and drive to work. The spaces here are still wide open, but there are far more people in them.

“You could drive down Idaho Street halfway through town on the wrong side of the street and not meet anybody,” says retired cowboy and Elko native George Smiraldo, 68. “Can’t do that anymore.”

Can’t do that anymore because Elko, in Nevada’s northeast corner, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the fastest-growing state, a place of boom times and bad times, wealth and shortage, where cattle still outnumber people 5 to 1, but people are slowly, slowly gaining.

Transplants from throughout the nation have flooded Nevada in the last 10 years, drawn by plentiful jobs and cheap housing, the lack of a state income tax and a perception that anything is possible out here on the cultural frontier. A record 6,292 people turned in out-of-state driver’s licenses in March to live in Las Vegas, which is home to three-quarters of the state’s population. Nevada as a whole created 48,300 jobs, a 7.4% gain, in the year ending in March.

This latest migration “is overwhelming compared to anything that’s ever happened in Nevada,” says historian James W. Hulse. In 1980, the population hovered around 800,000; today, it is nearly 1.5 million. Both counts are a far cry from the 1940s, when the state had a bare 110,000 residents, “one square man for every square mile,” as locals were fond of recounting.

“Nevada is quite an interesting laboratory,” says Hulse, author of “The Silver State: Nevada’s Heritage Reinterpreted.” “The modern business of gambling was largely hammered out here. The atomic test site was in a sense a laboratory. It is a place of social experimentation.”

The latest experiment is how to live with rapid growth and change, with stress on everything from the infrastructure to the environment, the political system to the classroom. Much of the pressure comes from Californians who are fleeing a sagging economy and bringing their pluses and problems east. In the 16 months ending in April, expatriates from the Golden State accounted for 40% of Nevada transplants, outpacing Arizona, the closest competitor with 6%.

These newcomers have changed Nevada for good, and nowhere is that change more visible than here in Cowboy Central, where past and present coexist, albeit not always in perfect comfort. The contrast begins on the inbound airplane, a tiny prop number whose passengers are warned against using cellular phones and chewing tobacco. Where, after all, would a gentleman spit in a plane that seats 30?

At J. M. Capriola Co. in Elko’s old downtown, Paula and Doug Wright still sell rawhide reins and hand-tooled saddles, silver spurs and leather chaps. At nearby Stockmen’s Motor Hotel, founded by a Basque shepherd and now run by his son, a rare penny slot machine promises a five-buck payoff--all copper, of course. By day, the neighborhood is pungent with cow manure, by night, perfumed with cooking Basque lamb.

But halfway between J. M. Capriola and Stockmen’s is Donuts n’ Mor, where “mor” these days means caffe latte. The Elko Coffee Co. sells espresso for 80 cents. Kmart came to town in 1991, and rumor has it that Wal-Mart is not far behind. Emergency 911 service was installed last year but has yet to touch the farthest reaches of the county. The number of stoplights has jumped from two to six.

The growth rate has cooled from a blistering 21% in 1987 to about 5%. Mayor Jim Polkinghorne would like to see it subside even further, but so far his wish has not been granted. “Right now, with the infrastructure, we’re keeping our head above water,” he says. “But we don’t have much margin.”

Sure Elko’s small, but it used to be smaller, having doubled in size in the last 10 years. The census never has got it right, they say, but if you look real hard you’ll find 25,000 people--if you include Spring Creek, a bedroom community of houses and mobile homes eight miles to the south.

Jobs are more plentiful than ever, but just try to find a place to live. When you do, just try to pay for it; Elko County has the highest average household income in Nevada--an annual $38,900 compared to $31,000 in Clark County, home to Las Vegas--but its rents rival those in parts of Southern California, more than $750 a month for a house.

When a guidebook named Elko the No. 1 small town in America last winter, the Chamber of Commerce received 800 calls in a single month from people nationwide who wanted to relocate. It was a real stretch on the small chamber’s budget just to mail them all maps and stats, Executive Director Lorrie Kocinski says.

“And we told people not to come here unless they already had a place to live,” she says. “Spring Creek High School opened this year, and we put an appeal in the paper asking that if anyone had rental units or rooms in their homes to consider renting to teachers first. It worked.”

Good thing, too, because not everyone is as lucky as this new crop of instructors. Shawn Hall, for example, spent three months looking for a house to rent when he got a job in Elko three years ago. He found a place just four days before he reported for work at the Northeastern Nevada Museum.

“I put a desperation ad in the paper: ‘I need a home, and I need it quick,’ ” said the museum’s acting director, who is originally from Massachusetts. “Someone called and said they just had a house vacated. They asked if I wanted to come look. I said I’d take it now and look later.”

All of which begs the question: Why Elko? If you listen to Hunter S. Thompson, author of a recent Rolling Stone article titled “Fear and Loathing in Elko,” it certainly isn’t for the scenery.

“Jesus, who made this map?” Thompson wrote of the stretch of Interstate 80 between Elko and Winnemucca, in neighboring Humboldt County. “Only a lunatic could have come up with a list of places like this: Imlay, Valmy, Golconda, Nixon, Midas, Metropolis, Jiggs, Judasville-- all of them empty. . . . The federal government owns 90% of this land, and most of it is useless for anything except weapons testing and poison-gas experiments.”

Hunter S. doth protest too much, but he has a point. While the city of Elko is barely longer than the runway at the local airport, Elko County is 17,127 square miles, larger than Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware combined.

Interstate 80 threads its way through the barren, arid countryside, linking Elko with Salt Lake City 240 miles to the east and Reno 290 miles to the west. Boise is 235 miles north and Las Vegas 475 miles south. The space in between is just that: space.

Northeast Nevada’s scenic claim to fame is the rugged Ruby Mountain range, known by some as the “Alps of Nevada.” The snowcapped Rubies loom above Elko’s aging Commercial Hotel and Casino, site of the first casino floor show: Ted Lewis and the Rhythm Rhapsody Revue, 1941. They add a little flair to growing rows of tract houses on streets with names like High Noon Road and Lariat Circle.

They rise over Idaho Street, the main drag and an architectural timeline that ticks off the decades, west to east, old to new: 1930s, the Commercial with a multistory plaster polar bear a.k.a. White King; 1950s, Karen’s Kloset, hot pink with bright white wedding gowns in the windows; 1980s, the Red Lion Inn and Casino, concrete newness with large marquee.

Ranching is Elko County’s economic constant, but the trailer homes and brand-new schools aren’t filled with the kids of cowboys; the cash cow here cannot be roped and branded. The real draw is below the sage and scrub: a deposit of gold so big the region ranks among the world’s top three producers.

“You cannot talk about the growth of Elko without talking about the growth of mining,” says the chamber’s Kocinski, who moved here four years ago when her husband got a mining job. Mining accounts for 54% of the economy here, with gambling a distant second and ranching third.

At its peak, the mining boom brought so many newcomers so fast that the city could not absorb them all. Houses filled, apartments were snapped up, the overflow camped illicitly on the shores of the Humboldt River to be regularly run off by ranchers. While the boom cooled some in the early 1990s, hotel rooms that should house would-be gamblers still are home to mine workers renting week to week.

“We have 1,000 construction workers here right now,” says Jim Mullin, general manager of the Newmont Gold Co., currently the top gold producer in the area. “They have consumed nearly all the spaces in the RV lots. All rental spots are taken. . . . Elko doesn’t contain a lot of people who are from Elko. The street I live on wasn’t there last year.”

Companies such as Newmont, Barrick Goldstrike Mines and Independence are mining the Carlin Trend, a wealth of microscopic gold discovered in 1964. Local mining officials estimate that those three mines alone pour $660 million into the area each year. High technology allows them to blast ore out of open pits, then process the gold using potassium cyanide, acids and other harsh chemicals.

But if the gold deposit is big--some say it will last at least 35 years--it is nowhere near the size of the northeast Nevada attitude. The area’s always-healthy scorn for government intervention has blossomed into full-scale animosity.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, disgusted over Barrick’s recent acquisition of a huge mine here, is pushing changes in 1872 laws that could force mining companies to pay royalties on the minerals they remove from U.S. lands.

There are questions about chemicals used in high-tech mining and about how the land will look when the mines shut down. Local ranchers worry that the mines’ “dewatering” processes could disrupt the water table in these drought-ridden times. Mine representatives dispute such claims.

“What isn’t GROWN . . . Must be MINED” is the bumper sticker of choice in these parts. A touchy Kocinski, bitter about bad press, acknowledges the fact that there’s a huge hole in the scenery in the form of a massive pit mine. “But who cares? . . . You’re not talking about Yosemite.”

“We like our mining here,” says Terry Lockhart, Avis manager at the Elko Airport, even before she greets two prospective customers. “We’re the only state in the union that wants mining. It provides jobs. What else is Nevada good for?”

If you ask historian James Hulse, he’ll tell you Nevada is good for tourism. Although the mining boom is mostly confined to Elko and Eureka counties, the state as a whole is currently driven by a gaming boom the likes of which has not been seen before. Even Elko, where mining is king, has benefited from the growth of gambling.

“I guess we’ll gamble tonight and all day tomorrow,” Lois Zaremba says as she disembarked at the Elko airport one recent evening. “I don’t think I want to spend any more than $100 or $150. It’s our honeymoon; we won’t have time to spend too much money.”

Lois and her husband, Joe, of East Peoria, Ill., were hoping to honeymoon at a resort hotel in Donner’s Grove outside of Chicago, a luxurious place where “all the rooms have saunas,” Lois says dreamily. But the price was better for a gambling getaway, so the happy couple ended up on the Elko Tarmac.

They flew in on the Queen of Hearts, a Casino Express Boeing 737 named not for romance but for the playing card on the big jet’s tail. The Ace of Clubs touched down moments earlier from Oklahoma City; the King of Diamonds is off in the Bahamas. Casino Express, after all, is Elko’s only international airline.

Every month Casino Express brings 12,000 Joes and Loises to town, small-town dwellers from places like Elko, middle-rollers unlikely to visit Sin City South.

“We go to places like Waterloo, Iowa; Ft. Dodge, Iowa; Akron, Colo.,” says David Cimo, airline general manager. “How many people have ever heard of Akron, Colo.? There are 1,600 people in Akron, and we have yet to come out of there with an empty seat. Every time we come out of there, we’ve got 124 people on the plane.”

That’s 124 people to fill the Red Lion’s rooms and empty their pockets at the Red Lion’s casino. Without the airline, the hotel is sunk; without the hotel, why have an airline? “It seems so weird to have a full-service airline in a place like Elko, Nev.,” Cimo says, “this tiny little place in the middle of nowhere.”

Yes, it is small and very remote, dependent on mining, hooked on gaming, praying for rain so the ranches survive. But Elko, Nev., is looking ahead to that far-off day when the mines play out; like the rest of the state, it’s scrambling to find another way to make a buck.

Its first success in the struggle for economic diversity was luring away Reno’s Dodd-Beals Fire Protection Training Academy--an enterprise that could pump an annual $10 million into the local economy.

The information superhighway runs through town, but, so far, there aren’t any off-ramps. The fiber-optics here are fine, but CompuServe to date does not offer local phone service for the so-called lone eagle telecommuters. As a result, computer users who sign on pay long-distance charges, a real deterrent for living in Elko and doing business on-line.

But the city is working on it.

“We want people to come here and telecommute,” says Debbie Smith, executive director of the Northeast Nevada Development Assn. “We want to do what we can to get you to do that. We have been pursuing the ‘lone eagles.’ And we already have two here.”

Coming to Nevada

Lots of jobs, cheap housing, no income tax and a feeling that anything is possible--that’s why people move to Nevada. Elko, in the far northeast corner, is among the fastest growing cities in the state, helped by a mining boom and growth in gambling.

How the Population Has Grown

Nevada is the fastest growing state in the United States, with a 50% increase in population from 1980-1990. California’s population, by comparison, has increased 26% in the same period.

1950: 161,145

1960: 287,660

1970: 494,990

1980: 800,508

1990: 1,201,833

Path of Immigration

The top states from which residents move to Nevada, according to drivers’ licenses of people who have immigrated:

State 1993 1994* California 18,893 8,618 Arizona 3,127 1,266 Texas 2,341 903 New York 2,047 721 Florida 1,933 766

* Statistics are Clark County, home to 75% of the state’s population, 1994 figures are for Jan.-April.

Making a Living

The top sources of industrial employment in the state, as of December, 1993:

Job Employees Hotels/gaming 182,100 Retail 113,500 Service 91,600 State/local government 78,400 Construction 46,300

Community Profile: Elko

Here is a look at the people and history of Elko, Nev.

Founded: At the end of 1868, when railroad agents laid out streets and lots. First town parcels sold Jan. 15, 1869. Within six months, it had 45 saloons and several brothels. An early amenity was an opera house.

Vital statistics: Elko County is 17,127 square miles, larger than Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware combined. It is nearly uninhabited, with 33,530 residents--or about two people per square mile--according to the 1990 census. The city of Elko has 14,736 residents.

Location: The city is 240 miles west of Salt Lake City, 290 miles east of Reno, 235 miles south of Boise and 475 miles north of Las Vegas.

Growth rate: Although sparsely populated, Elko County is the second fastest-growing county (after Nye) in the fastest-growing state. The city of Elko is Nevada’s fourth fastest-growing, after Henderson (a Las Vegas bedroom community), Mesquite and Carlin. Las Vegas ranks No. 5.

University: Got one in 1874. Lost it to Reno in 1886. When in Elko, it never had more than 35 students.

Look Out, Barbra Streisand: Newton Crumley Jr., who bought the 62-year-old Commercial Hotel in 1931, is credited with introducing the floor show to the world of casinos. In 1941, Ted Lewis and the Rhythm Rhapsody Revue played a weeklong gig in Elko; 52 years later, Streisand got $1,000 per ticket for the best seats at her sold-out New Year’s Eve show in Las Vegas.

Sources: Nevada Handbook, Deke Castleman; University of Nevada, Reno, Bureau of Business and Economic Research; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Center for Business and Economic Research.