Discovering Nevada – Pioche

Approaching from the south on NV-321, we saw the sign welcoming us to Pioche. Our free subscription to Travel Nevada has inspired us to visit lots of towns and out-of-the-way places that we’d never have known about or visited otherwise. Many times we’ve whizzed past a town on our way to somewhere else, unaware of what there was to see there. So, on our way back from Cathedral Gorge State Park, we decided we’d stop in Pioche after having just read an article about why it might be worth a visit. Pioche (that’s Pee-oh-sh… we were corrected on the pronunciation) is a town of about 900 people located about 9 miles north of Cathedral Gorge. The town was named after the Frenchman, François Louis Alfred Pioche, a land speculator and financier, who in 1869 bought the silver mining settlement established there in 1864 and developed it into one of the most important silver-mining towns in Nevada by the early 1870s. The town was remote and isolated, and where previously Indian raids were common,…