John W. North - Nevada Judiciary

Nevada Judiciary

In 1861 President Abraham Lincoln appointed North to be the official surveyor of the new Territory of Nevada, and North moved to Virginia City, Nevada. The territorial surveyor was a sensitive position in a mining region such as Nevada’s Comstock Lode, where the boundaries of mining claims were the constant subject of lawsuits. Lincoln may have counted on North to keep Nevada Territory loyal to the Union, and to bring Nevada in as a Republican state, as he had Minnesota. North surveyed, invested in silver mining properties, began building an ore-treatment mill he named the Minnesota Mill, and practiced law.

In early 1863, when Justice Gordon Mott's resignation from the Supreme Court of Nevada Territory was a certainty, Judge Horatio M. Jones recommended North for the vacancy. On August 20, 1863, President Lincoln granted North a temporary presidential appointment to Nevada's highest court, the predecessor of the United States District Court for the District of Nevada. Initially, North won praise both for his decisions and for removing the backlog of cases on his docket. He was also elected president of the 1863 constitutional convention (in Carson City) assigned to draft a proposed state constitution for Nevada. In both positions he clashed with William M. Stewart, a prominent lawyer with political ambitions and large mining companies as clients. North’s rulings supported the "many-ledge" interpretation of mining law on the Comstock Lode, which favored the smaller mining companies over the larger companies that were Stewart’s clients.

Stewart accused North of accepting bribes from litigants. North denied the charge, and Stewart was forced to publicly recant, but Stewart continued to attack North’s honesty, and orchestrated a campaign against North in the Nevada newspapers allied with Stewart. Other newspapers supported North.

North resigned because of ill health after less than a year on the bench, but he sued Stewart for slander. North agreed to submit his suit to arbitration, and after hearing both sides, the court declared that Stewart had indeed slandered North, and that there was no evidence that North had engaged in corruption. Nevertheless, North left the Territory for California, and Stewart remained and became the U.S. Senator from the new state of Nevada.