Currently, the hamlet consists of a single business – a tourist inn – and a few small houses clustered along or near the gravel roadway which permits vehicular ingress and egress.

Mark Twain arrived in Unionville with the intention of prospecting for silver in 1862, describing the town as consisting of "eleven cabins and a liberty-pole".

The decline was speeded by the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad through the Humboldt valley, and the establishment of Winnemucca as a major trading and shipping center.

Some abandoned buildings such as Twain's cabin and a one-room schoolhouse remain standing in various stages of disrepair, but there is no ongoing, active effort to preserve any of these.

The Democratic party newspaper in town, the Humboldt Register, equated the Chinese to "baboons or trained monkeys."

The Chinese, outnumbered and outgunned, did nothing to resist expulsion, nor did any of the town's religious or fraternal organizations attempt to stop it.

The 35 Chinese males that resided in town were put on a wagon and taken twenty-five miles to Mill City, the nearest station on the Central Pacific Railway.

Lewis Dunn was released under a writ of habeas corpus by District Judge George G. Berry.

As late as 1905 there were still Chinese miners that continued to work in the American Canyon, but by that time they were quite elderly and numbered fewer than ten.