Letter from Lorena E. Meadows to Hugh A. Shamberger

Hugh A. Shamberger was born in Idaho in 1900. He attended schools in the Payette region and graduated from Stanford University with an engineering degree. He worked at surveying and engineering jobs in California, and when Hoover Dam was in the planning stages, decided to make a home in Nevada. Arriving in Las Vegas early in 1929, Shamberger began a new phase of his career, working at mining and engineering in the developing community.

One of Shamberger’s new friends in Las Vegas was Alfred Merritt Smith, who became the state engineer of Nevada. Under Smith’s sponsorship, Shamberger also entered the state service, first in the State Highway Department, and then in the office of the state engineer. While in this office Shamberger pioneered several techniques of studying the water resources of his adopted state, and wrote of his researches in several monographs that are widely used. As state engineer, he was instrumental in aiding Nevada’s cause in the Colorado River litigation, Arizona vs. California, in the 1950s.

Shamberger was also interested in the history of Nevada mining camps. Over the years, he wrote numerous books on the subject, including a ten volume set titled Historic Mining Camps of Nevada.

Lorena Edwards Meadows was born in 1902 in Candelaria, Nevada. A few years after she was born, her family relocated to Berkeley, California. She graduated from the University of California in 1923 and married Earl Edwards; they had two daughters. Lorena's father, Benjamin Franklin Edwards, was an early pioneer to Candelaria and spent 20 years working in the borax industry as well as other supporting jobs in the town. Her first book, A Sagebrush Heritage, explores her family heritage and her father's story and relationship with the state of Nevada.

[Biography of Hugh Shamberger partially taken from his oral history, High A. Shambeger: Memoirs of a Nevada Engineer and Conservationist, completed by the University of Nevada Oral History Project in 1967]