Organization

WashoeZephyr Chapter, was organized October 12, 1991, Virginia City, Nevada. 

Meetings are the fourth Saturday of each month except for June - August.   Meeting time, place and program are listed in our Chapter yearbook.

Chapter Name

The Washoe Zephyrs were first named by Mark Twain, of Virginia City, NV, who described the furious westerly winds that blow down the eastern Sierra ranges of western Nevada.  These mighty gusts, were as Mark Twain described, "a peculiarly scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth whence it cometh".

"On Nevada Summer Breezes"
by Mark Twain

"I was pleased to see that those traveling to Carson City on business could still receive accommodations more in keeping with what I paid when my brother Orlon and I first took residence in the Ormsby House in 1861.

I recall that we arrived by stage.  Twenty eventful days from St. Joseph, Missouri.  We were plowing through great deeps of powdery alkali dust that rose in thick clouds and floated across the plain like smoke from a burning house.   We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the mailbags, the driver - we and the sagebrush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color.

We arrived, disembarked in the capital of Nevada Territory and the stage went on.  It was a "wooden" town in those days, its population two thousand souls.  The main street consisted of four or five blocks of little white frame stores which were too high to sit down on but not to high for other purposes.

That was all we say that day, for it was two o'clock, and according to custom the daily "Washoe Zephyr" set in; a soaring dust drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it, and the capital of Nevada Territory disappeared from view.

Still, there were sights to be seen which were not wholly uninteresting to newcomers; for the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air - things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust - hats, chickens, and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sagebrush and shingles a shade lower; doormats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles out the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumberyards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots.

It was something to see that much.  I could have seen more, if I could have kept the dust out of my eyes.

Ah! It's great to be back in Nevada.

Sincerely,
Mark Twain"