# Toana, Elko County, Nevada Toana was a small railroad settlement in the high desert of eastern Nevada, near the Utah line, where the Central Pacific line crossed a landscape of sage, distant peaks, and long horizons. It was the kind of place that existed because the railroad passed through it — a stopping point, a name on the line, a cluster of purpose amid empty country. For the Spence family, it marks a single, important moment. On 5 July 1875, John W. Spence and Sophia Margaret Anderson recorded their union in connection with Toana. John, born in Pontefract, England, in 1835, was a teamster whose work carried him across an enormous stretch of the American West — Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, North Dakota, California, Oregon, and Washington. He was a man who helped others move west, often gone for months at a time as he guided people and goods across the frontier. Sophia had come from Stockholm, arriving in the United States in 1871 as part of a wave of Swedish housemaids seeking work and a new life. The two came together in this part of Nevada, near Elko, where the railroad and the movement of people brought a Swedish immigrant woman and an English teamster into the same orbit. Their life in this country was shaped by John's long absences. During one of his extended trips east, the family was left without enough to eat, and it was the local Indians who brought them food — refusing to let the family of John Spence go hungry. That act, remembered and passed down, speaks to the standing John had earned in a hard land, and to the vulnerability of a family left behind while its provider traveled. The children of John and Sophia — Bertha May, John William, Thomas Edward, Mary Amelia "Nell," Margaret, Alice Beatrice, Fredrick Reif Verner, James Joseph, Josephine Lillian, Richard Lyle, Marcus De Lafayette, and Raymond Adren — would carry the family forward across the same western map their father traveled. The family's movements reached well beyond Nevada; Josephine and her twin James were born in Gridley, California, and Josephine later married William Strong and settled north of Spokane, Washington. Toana itself was never home for long. It was a threshold — a place where two lives from opposite sides of the ocean met and began, before the family scattered across the West that John knew so well.