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It is believed that Native Americans inhabited what is now the Elko area for 10,000 - 13,000 years prior to the first visits by European trappers and explorers. They lived by hunting, fishing and gathering native plants, including seeds, berries, rose hips and pinenuts. The early Indians trapped fish with willow traps woven out of pliant willow branches, narrow at the neck and widening at the bottom. The first contact with the white man in Nevada was in 1826 when Jedediah Smith made contact with the Shoshone Indians in central Nevada and relayed this information to Meriweather Clark of Lewis and Clark fame.

The first recorded white men in the Elko area were fur trappers led by Peter Skene Ogden in 1827. In 1841, the first of an almost continuous stream of pioneers passed through Elko's hills, following the Humboldt River westward. These travelers included the ill-fated Donner Party and later the '49ers. Through the 1850s the wagons creaked painfully along the twisted course of the Humbolt River, their metal rimmed wheels cutting tracks so deep in the rock that in some places they can still be seen today.

The origin of the name Elko has been lost in the mists of time, but several stories have been handed down to us. The most probable story is that Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific Railroad liked to name railhead towns after animals. He added an "o" to "Elk" to ease the pronunciation and thus named this new town Elko.

The earliest form of scheduled, routine transportation for passengers, freight and mail were the stage lines. As early as 1851, stagecoaches crossed the Humbolt Valley from Salt Lake Utah, to Sacramento California carrying the mail.

The Central Pacific railroad gave birth to the town of Elko in 1868 as it pushed its tracks eastward. On new Year's Day in 1869, there were just a few tents among the sagebrush, but two weeks later, hastily laid out plots were selling for $300 to $500 each. From that beginning, the town grew rapidly as a freight terminus to supply the mines in the region. On March 5, 1869, the State Legislature created Elko County form part of Lander County and made Elko the county seat.

Elko is the sixth largest county in the United States, consisting of 17,181 square miles, as big as five of the New England states plus the District of Columbia. In May 1869, when the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory Point Utah, linking the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. The Chinese laborers from the Central Pacific's track crew were abandoned. On foot, hundreds headed west and many stayed in Elko. One of their chief occupations during the summer months was the raising of vegetables for the town. Their gardens were mostly on the northern banks of the Humbolt River and were watered by hand. Eventually the Chinese built the first water system in Elko. They built a reservoir and dug a ditch to carry the water from Osino to the reservoir, a distance of 8-10 miles (right through what is now City Park).

Scottish herders brought bands of sheep into Nevada from California and Oregon in the 1860's. When cattlemen were struggling under the impact of the disastrous Winter of the White Death, the sheepmen invaded! They grazed on the pubic lands that the cattlemen had come to think of as their own. The cattlemen responded with armed force, but the sheepmen were as tough as the cattlemen, and they stayed!

At this time, to say sheepherder was to say Basque. The men from the Pyrenees Mountains in Spain and France had proven their reliability and herding skills. They had become the preferred employees on sheep ranches throughout the west.

By late 1869, Elko's population had climbed to 2,000.