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Among the prospectors who hastened to Nevada after the discovery of gold and silver in that region was Joseph Webb. He was not successful prospecting and settled for a while at the Carson River Crossing where Dayton now stands. Gold had been found there in some quantities and then it became a station for immigrants along the trail on their way to California. Webb gathered up the gossip of the trail, supplemented by what news was told him by passersby, and then with pen and ink made a written newspaper which he sold to travelers, who paid for it with gold dust taken from Carson River with milk-pans and wash-basins. He called his written newspaper The Golden Switch. Unfortunately, but few copies of this written newspaper have survived. It was started some time in 1854 and lasted not later than 1858. At about the same time that Webb was getting out his sheet, Stephen A. Kensey was issuing a rival written newspaper called The Scorpion in the little village of Genoa at the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The first printed newspaper, however, in Nevada was The Territorial Enterprise, issued November 18, 1858, at Genoa by Alfred Jones and W. L. Jernegan. On November 5, 1859, it was purchased by Jonathan Williams and J. B. Woolard, who took the paper to Carson City, the Capital of the Territory, and where later it was purchased by Joseph T. Goodman and Dennis E. McCarthy and again moved to Virginia City, where it became the mouthpiece for the mines of that place. Its fortune fared in direct ratio to the prosperity of the mining camps in that vicinity. The Enterprise lasted until May 30, 1916, when it was merged with The Virginia City Chronicle.

The Enterprise is best remembered as the paper on which Mark Twain worked. In response to a request to attend a reunion at Virginia City, Mr. Clemens wrote: "Those were the days those old ones. They will come no more. Youth will come no more. They were full to the brim with the wine of life. There have been no others like them. But I cannot come out. Would you like me to come out and cry? It would not become my white head. Good-bye. I drink to you all. Have a good time, take an old man's blessing."