Shopping: Tome on the Range
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Bound to be Fun
Friendly and welcoming, Tome on the Range, in Las Vegas, is the quintessential small-town bookstore. The well-organized shop, owned by Nancy Colalillo, specializes in new and used regional, children’s, and Spanish-language books, but you can also find here the latest New York Times best seller or selection from Oprah’s Book Club. The shop occupies a historic commercial building on Bridge Street, on the original Santa Fe Trail. Here you can almost see the Old West come to life as you browse the selection of regional books.
In particular, Howard Bryan’s Wildest of the Wild West: True Tales of a Frontier Town on the Santa Fe Trail (Clear Light Books, 1988) is chock-full of stories about the colorful characters who passed through Las Vegas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The book is our No. 1 seller, year in and year out,” says Colalillo. It reads like a Western novel, except that the tales are historical accounts of actual events researched by Bryan, a longtime staff writer and columnist for the now-defunct Albuquerque Tribune.
Beginning in 1879, when the railroad reached Las Vegas, the town quickly developed a reputation for being a magnet for murderers, thieves, gamblers, swindlers, and women of ill repute. Bryan writes, “Unlike most of the notorious frontier towns in the American West, where the violence lasted for only brief periods, Las Vegas experienced the violent frontier with but few interruptions for more than a half-century, earning it the reputation as ‘the toughest town in the West’ and ‘wildest of the Wild West.’”
Among the Who’s Who of the riffraff of Las Vegas were Doc Holliday and his wife Big Nose Kate (read more about them in “Classic New Mexico Couples,” page 42), Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Mysterious Dave Mather, Hoodoo Brown, Rattlesnake Sam, Cock-Eyed Frank, Web-Fingered Billy, Hook Nose Jim, and Billy the Kid, whose finger, after his death, was reputedly sent to the Las Vegas Optic in a jar. If you want the details, pick up a copy of Wildest of the Wild West; more than 20 years after its publication, the book remains one of the best compilations of Las Vegas history.
158 Bridge St., (505) 454-9944, www.tomeontherange.com—Laura Watilo Blake
