Deep red tiny NV town is in shock. ENTIRELY 100% dependent on national park that just lost 20% of staff in Elon's purge

[haele]

77. That's how a lot of their grandparents started.

Poor hardscrabble farmers, tavern/store owners who couldn't compete back east or in Midwest towns, and itinerant miners.

Found a source of water, settled down near roads and railroads on homestead deeds, and tried to make a go of it in shacks or sod or adobe houses.
Most of them couldn't make it through winter on their own, no matter how clever they were. If disease and exposure didn't get them, starvation drove them back into town to work as skivvies or to hire on as hands.

The Wild West (which was circa 1870 - 1900) wasn't filled with lone gunslingers riding aimlessly around searching for a meaning to their lives or old miners living in caves with a pack mule and a dog working his claim.
It was filled with dead bodies and company towns built to make some robber Barron on the coasts or in big cities like Chicago or Kansas City lots of money off near indentured servitude.
On edit -
After the 1900's with more irrigation, reliable roads and more rail commerce, you started seeing homesteaders being able to settle and start larger ranching operations or build businesses near way stations to support those ranches and more remote resources extraction - and later, tourism - but you still don't find a lot of lone libertarian cowboy types - or families - able to survive on their own without a larger support infrastructure (as in a rich patron or the Federal or State Government) within a day's wagon trip. It wasn't until the 1920's and paved highways that these "individualists" were actually able to make it on their own.