Between 1904 and the end of 1910, eighteen families and single individuals occupied homesteads on Tobar Flat (Map 3). Examination of these settlers’ backgrounds shows that they can be divided into four groups: teamsters, railroad people, ranch people, and Salt Lake City people. With the exception of the men and women from Salt Lake City, who were the vanguard of a much larger number from the Utah capital who would arrive after 1910, most of these settlers were already familiar with the Flat before they filed their homestead claims. The teamsters had become acquainted with the land while hauling ore and supplies between Spruce Mountain and Wells. Most of the men classified as railroad people learned about the area while working on construction of the Western Pacific Railroad across Tobar Flat in 1908, while the others were family members who came to Nevada to live on homesteads near their relatives. Some of the third group were from established Clover Valley families, while the remainder were employed by the area’s ranchers; each knew what the Flat was like. Prior knowledge of the area’s land and water resources enabled these people to lay claim to what they perceived as the most promising sites, while those who followed had to settle for what remained. The same applied to the first arrivals from the Salt Lake City area. Although they lacked the personal familiarity with the land that the teamsters, railroaders, and ranch people enjoyed, they did manage to choose fairly good sites, where soils seemed productive and surface water was thought to be available, although, to be fair, their homesteads were probably not quite as fortuitously situated as most parcels taken by people in the other groups. Still, their claims were better than those obtained by settlers from the city who came later, lending support to the premise that the earliest arrivals, regardless of how they first learned about Tobar Flat and its rather limited potential, selected the best land that was available at the time.
Some of the first settlers remained on Tobar Flat for very short periods of time, others stayed for roughly a half‐dozen years, and a very few endured for two decades or more. Although one man later became the mayor of Wells and three others achieved some notoriety because of their brushes with the law, most went about their business in near‐anonymity, and were quickly forgotten. But thanks to a remarkable array of written sources, scattered from the east coast to the west, supplemented by interviews with people who had once lived on Tobar Flat and those who knew them, it is now possible to piece together the details of their lives, enabling the legacy of these homesteaders and the land that they occupied to live on. These are their stories.