While Sam had been away in San Francisco [May to July of 1863], the impresario Tom Maguire, a former cab driver and gambler, had built a sixteen-hundred-seat theater on D Street near Union in Virginia City patterned after his opulent opera house in San Francisco, and it was routinely crowded with folks eager to see such popular local favorites as Lotta Crabtree, Julia Dean Hayne, and Frank Mayo.

Chapter 38 of Roughing It:

Loving and Carter identify Desert Wells as a station between Ragtown and Dayton. Pierson locates Desert Wells after Reed's Station, between Nevada and Dayton. Desert Wells existed sometime after July 1861, when it began to serve as a relay station for the Overland Mail Company line. During the last few months of its existence, the Pony Express also used the Desert Wells station facilities. (NPS)