VIII.

History

The first peoples in Nevada probably arrived about 12,000 years ago. Dart points made of stone, called Clovis points, have been found in the state that are at least 10,000 years old. Early inhabitants lived in rock shelters or caves, and gathered most of their food. People who lived in Lovelock Cave near Lake Lahontan about 3,000 years ago hunted animals with darts rather than bows and arrows. Archaeologists have even found decoy ducks that were used to attract birds.

About 300 bc people of the Anasazi culture appeared, living in pit houses around the Muddy and Virgin rivers. The Anasazi built their houses with adobe and rocks, mastered pottery and basketry, and may have mined salt. Between about ad 700 and 1100 the Anasazi began raising corn, beans, and squash, and also developed irrigation. Before the migrating Paiutes pushed them out of Nevada, the Anasazi had domesticated dogs and begun growing cotton.

When the first European entered what is now Nevada, it was peopled chiefly by three native groups: the Paiute, the Shoshone, and the Washoe. Of these, the Northern Paiute were perhaps the best known. Their home territory included most of western Nevada, particularly the area from Pyramid Lake to Walker Lake. The Shoshone ranged mainly along the Humboldt River east of present-day Winnemucca. The Washoe lived in the Carson and Washoe valleys, the Truckee Meadows, and around Lake Tahoe. The Southern Paiute lived in the southeast.

The Great Basin environment forced all native peoples in Nevada to live a nomadic existence as hunter-gatherers. The continuous search for food was the dominant aspect of life in this harsh land, and the native inhabitants of Nevada demonstrated remarkable survival skills. While their material culture was limited, these Native Americans, particularly the Washoe, are known for their excellent basketry. One Washoe woman, called Datsolalee, achieved wide recognition for the intricate designs on the baskets she wove in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A.

Arrival of Europeans

The Spanish founded no settlements in Nevada as they had in other parts of what became the southwest United States. In 1776 Father Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante attempted to find a route from Santa Fe (in present-day New Mexico) to California and may have entered eastern Nevada. They were convinced that a river they called the San Buenaventura must flow from the Rocky Mountains across Nevada through the Sierra Nevada mountain range to the Pacific Ocean, but they were unable to find it. That same year Father Francisco Garces tried to find a route from the upper Sonora settlements in Mexico to California. During his search he may have come through the Las Vegas meadows in southern Nevada.

B.

Exploration

The territory that is now Nevada came under Mexican control when Mexico won its freedom from Spain in 1821. Exploration of Nevada began with two fur trappers, Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson’s Bay Company of Great Britain and Jedediah Smith of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, who were followed by others. Ogden and Smith entered at opposite ends of Nevada, seeking new beaver ponds and the elusive river, the San Buenaventura.

B.1.

Jedediah Smith

On his way overland to California, Smith entered Nevada in August 1826 (near present-day Bunkerville) and his party arrived at San Gabriel Mission in California in November. Mexican authorities ordered Smith to leave immediately by the same route. Instead, he turned north, and in 1827 crossed the Sierra, accompanied by two of his men, and entered the central part of Nevada, following a route from Tonopah to Ely. Smith thereby became the first white man to cross Nevada, the first to be aware of the extent of what came to be called the Great Basin, and the first to trade with and report on the native peoples of the area. He, too, failed to discover the San Buenaventura River.

B.2.

Peter Skene Ogden

Ogden probably preceded Smith into Nevada, going a short distance into the northeastern corner of the territory in the spring of 1826. Ogden’s important expeditions, however, were in 1828, 1829, and 1830. He entered Nevada in November 1828 near the present town of Denio and proceeded south. He discovered a river, which he named the Unknown (the present-day Humboldt) River. The party did some trapping as it proceeded west, then it turned east along the river to buffalo country near present-day Ogden’s Hole in Utah. In the spring of 1829, Ogden retraced his route into Nevada, this time following the Unknown River until he reached its sink, the point where the river, having no outlet toward the ocean, pools into swampy flats and evaporates. He then turned north, leaving Nevada at present-day McDermitt.

Returning to Nevada in the fall of 1829, Ogden again traveled to the Humboldt Sink, but then turned southward to Walker Lake and continued southeast into California. Ogden was the first white man to follow the Humboldt River from its source to its sink. Ogden concluded that the San Buenaventura River did not exist.

B.3.

Joseph Walker

Trapper Joseph R. Walker, attached to an expedition headed by U.S. Army Captain Benjamin Bonneville, led about 40 men to explore the Great Salt Lake. Whether he was ordered to proceed to the Pacific Ocean remains uncertain, but in August 1833 Walker and his men went west to California by way of the Unknown River. The trip included the first battle between native Nevadans and whites along the Unknown River. On the return journey in 1834 the Walker party left the Unknown near the site of present-day Wells. Moving northeast from there, Walker blazed a trail that later became a route for settlers from Fort Hall to the Unknown River.

B.4.

Bidwell Trail

In 1841 an extraordinary band of emigrants passed through the entire Great Basin region. A young teacher, John Bidwell, helped to organize the Western Emigration Society in 1840 to publicize a journey overland to California. Of the 500 people who originally pledged to leave the following spring, only 69 appeared when the time for departure arrived. Under the leadership of Captain John Bartleson, and with Bidwell as secretary and historian, the party left Westport (now part of Kansas City), Missouri, in May 1841.

The group was able to travel to Soda Springs, Idaho, with Father Pierre De Smet’s missionary party, which was guided by the experienced Thomas (“Broken Hand”) Fitzpatrick. At Soda Springs the party split up. Thirty-two of the original Bidwell-Bartleson party continued on to Oregon with the De Smet party, while the others turned south to the Great Salt Lake and then directly west to cross Nevada, including the Sierra Nevada. They arrived at the home of John Marsh at the foot of Mount Diablo in California in November 1842. Despite the group’s ignorance of the route they followed and their complete lack of experience, they all arrived in California, although without their wagons and animals.

B.5.

John Charles Frémont

The first thorough exploration of the Great Basin was carried out by an explorer and future Republican candidate for president of the United States, John Charles Frémont. Frémont led three expeditions into the area, which were at least partly inspired by the growing idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States was destined to occupy all the lands between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The first Frémont expedition into Nevada was made in 1843 and 1844. The party entered the northwestern corner of the state and proceeded south to the large desert lake that Frémont named Pyramid after an island in the middle of it. It then continued south and then west to cross the Sierra near Carson Pass. The party arrived at Sutter’s Fort (present-day Sacramento, California) in March 1844. In his report and on his excellent maps, Frémont called this land the Great Basin.

Frémont again explored the Great Basin in 1845. This time he entered Nevada from the east near Pilot Peak and proceeded southwest, splitting the party twice, first in the Ruby Mountains and again at Walker Lake. On the way Frémont, seeing the Unknown River from a distance, named it after the prominent German geographer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The information gathered on these two journeys was widely circulated and greatly helped settlers crossing the Great Basin on their way to California. The information also helped the Mormons in planning their migration to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.

C.

Emigrant Trails

The hope of a bright future in California lured settlers west in the 1840s. The Bidwell-Bartleson group was followed in 1844 by the Stevens-Murphy party, which blazed a trail over Truckee River pass. In 1846 the Donner party tried to use this route but became stranded by heavy snows. Forty of its 87 members died of starvation and cold, and the survivors were reduced to eating the dead bodies to remain alive. Emigrant travel across the northern Great Basin slowed after the tragedy.

However, the end of the Mexican War and the discovery of gold in California, both in 1848, spurred further emigration, and by 1849 the Humboldt River had become an important link in the trail west to California. Temporary way stations grew up along the emigrant trails to sell supplies to the travelers. Mormon Station (present-day Genoa), a trading post built in 1850 by Mormon traders from Salt Lake City, became Nevada’s first permanent settlement. Although they abandoned the unfinished outpost in 1850, John Reese purchased the site in 1851 and built a store that became the center of Mormon Station. Other Mormons came to the region to farm and a few settlers on their way to California decided to stay, increasing the size of the settlement. By the end of 1851, about 100 settlers were living in Nevada’s western river valleys.

D.

Territory of Nevada

The United States acquired Nevada, as well as California, Arizona, Utah, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, from Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Two years later, the Congress of the United States created the Territory of Utah, which included much of Nevada, or Western Utah, as it was then called. The southern region of modern Nevada was included in the New Mexico Territory. Mormon leader Brigham Young was named governor of the territory, but his government was located in Salt Lake City and could not assert authority in Western Utah. Settlers there wanted to establish law and order and escape Mormon rule by joining California. To prevent this, Young created Carson County in 1854, which included most of Western Utah, and sent Orson Hyde to organize the county government. Hyde arrived at Mormon Station in June 1856 and made it the county seat. The establishment of Franktown in Washoe Valley and a Mormon mission in Las Vegas far to the south extended Mormon control in the area. Two years later, however, Young summoned all Mormons back to Salt Lake City to help repel a federal army sent to punish the Mormons there for allegedly ignoring the orders of federal judges. Mormon influence in Western Utah ended.

The settlers who remained petitioned Congress unsuccessfully for their own territorial government in 1857 and again in 1859. Representatives were sent to each session of Congress to plead the cause. On March 2, 1861, outgoing President James Buchanan signed a bill creating the Territory of Nevada. An important reason for congressional approval was the newly discovered Comstock Lode, a rich source of gold and silver that was first tapped in 1859.

E.

Struggle for Statehood

James W. Nye, appointed territorial governor by Buchanan’s successor, Abraham Lincoln, arrived in Nevada early in July 1861. He organized the new territory and called an election in which members of the territorial legislature and a delegate to Congress were chosen. A referendum showed overwhelming support for statehood, and a constitutional convention met in 1863 in Carson City, although without congressional approval, and drafted a constitution.

The contest over ratification of the new state constitution was bitter. To vote “yes” meant the automatic approval of a slate of candidates for state offices, as well as a property tax on mines. Opponents denounced the proconstitution candidates as being too friendly to large mining interests. They also argued that powerful San Francisco mining corporations, which owned many Nevada mines, wanted an elected judiciary instead of the appointed territory judiciary because they believed elected judges would be easier to manipulate. A territorial judge had recently ruled against a large mining corporation in an important claims case. A prominent mining lawyer, William M. Stewart, who was associated with San Francisco mining interests, led the fight for the constitution, but small mine owners and workers were largely against it. In January 1864 voters rejected the constitution, and consequently statehood, because they believed it would largely benefit San Francisco mine owners. A severe depression then gripped the Comstock when the San Francisco corporations withdrew their investments.

Congress and the Lincoln administration, however, saw Nevada statehood as additional support for the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution (which outlawed slavery) and for Lincoln’s upcoming reelection. The U.S. Congress quickly passed the Nevada Enabling Act in March 1864 and by summer a new constitutional convention was convened.

The second constitutional convention met in the summer of 1864 with J. Neely Johnson as its president. The 1864 constitution was largely the same as the earlier one, with one major exception: Mine proceeds, not property, were to be taxed. A large majority ratified this constitution and the document was telegraphed to President Lincoln, who signed it. Nevada became the 36th state on October 31, 1864.

Republicans dominated the first state election, installing Henry G. Blasdel as governor. The legislature, meeting at Carson City in December 1864, selected two other Republicans as U.S. senators, the mining lawyer Stewart and the former territorial governor, Nye.

When Nevada joined the Union, it was smaller than it is today. The state’s eastern boundary had been extended east in 1862. It was extended again in 1866; in 1867 Nevada obtained its southern tip from the Arizona Territory.

F.

Mining Boom

F.1.

The Comstock Lode

The history of Nevada from 1860 to 1910 is largely a story of two mining booms separated by a 20-year depression from 1880 to 1900. The Comstock Lode began the first boom. Peter O’Riley and Patrick McLaughlin in 1859 discovered silver and gold on Sun Mountain (later named Mount Davidson), starting a rush to the so-called Washoe Diggings. Within a short time thousands of people arrived in the area. Immigrants composed a large portion of those who came to Nevada: Chinese immigrants helped build the Central Pacific Railroad across Nevada in the late 1860s; Italians and Swiss worked in smelters; and Irishmen worked deep in the mines. French-Canadians also lumbered the areas around Lake Tahoe, Germans farmed the Carson Valley, and later Basques and Scots tended sheep. Most of those working in the mining business were living in three new towns: Virginia City, Gold Hill, and Silver City. People lived in all types of buildings, and their diggings littered the landscape for miles around. Virginia City, especially, was a combination of industrial city and frontier town, with mine and mill buildings, foundries, and railroad yards alongside gambling houses, saloons, and dance halls.

The mineral wealth from the Comstock Lode financed hotels, foundries, banks, the Central Pacific Railroad, the mansions of San Francisco, and the trans-Atlantic cable; it was also responsible for some of the great American family fortunes. By 1877 production was decreasing, and by 1880 most of the Comstock ore had been mined. Until the next mining boom began in 1900, Nevada’s economy rested primarily on the other industries that had appeared. Raising livestock and maintaining the railroad were especially important in this period.

F.2.

Nevada Politics and Silver

The economic depression that followed the Comstock’s decline was blamed on the Coinage Act of 1873, which ended the minting of silver dollars. Due partly to this act the price of silver dropped dramatically. Proponents of silver money called the act the “Crime of ‘73,” and campaigned to restore bimetallism, the coining of gold and silver dollars. Some sought the unlimited coining of silver, called free silver. Between 1892 and 1894 free silver was the dominant issue in Nevada politics. Although the government slowly began coining silver dollars again in 1878, the gold dollar remained the monetary standard of value in the United States.

The decline in Nevada’s mining industry caused the state’s population to decrease. This in turn undermined Nevada’s cattle-raising industry in the 1880s because it reduced Nevada’s market for beef. Many of the ranchers who had survived were ruined by the hard winters in the late 1880s.

By 1900 the state had a population of only 42,335. National newspapers and magazines began to ridicule the lack of population in Nevada. One report suggested that Nevada should be deprived of statehood because it was a “rotten borough,” an area with representation in Congress but virtually no population.

F.3.

Second Mining Boom

The state’s economic fortunes turned around early in the 20th century. In the spring of 1900 Jim Butler discovered rich silver ore at Tonopah, in southwestern Nevada. Again prospectors spread out and found silver at other places, including Goldfield in 1902 and Rhyolite in 1904. The 1900 revival also included the exploitation of the Ruth mines, an extensive body of low-grade copper ore in eastern Nevada, in White Pine County. In 1902 investors from New York built a mill and smelter for copper at McGill and a railroad north to the Southern Pacific transcontinental line.

G.

Native Americans in the 19th Century

Tensions between whites and native peoples in Nevada had begun with the early fur trading expeditions of the 1820s and 1830s. Settlers traveling to California disrupted the nomadic habits of the native peoples and exhausted food resources along the Humboldt River route. Later, miners’ demands for fuel to process ore destroyed many of the piñon pines from which native inhabitants gathered pine nuts for their winter food supply.

Clashes between Native Americans and whites occurred sporadically until the mining rush to Virginia City sparked the Pyramid Lake War in 1860. The U.S. government had created the Pyramid Lake Reservation in 1859 to provide Native Americans with land away from white settlers. The next year local native inhabitants killed two white prospectors after they had kidnapped two young native women. When news about the killing of the whites reached towns around the Comstock Lode, a volunteer army formed and set off to take revenge. Paiutes on and near the Pyramid Lake Reservation had not been involved in the original attack, but they had determined to defend their land against the constant encroachment of whites.

When the disorganized army of whites reached Pyramid Lake, the Paiutes attacked, killing 76 men and wounding most of those who escaped. United States cavalry troops from California were called and exacted revenge in a second battle at Pyramid Lake in which perhaps 160 Paiutes were killed; the rest were forced to return to the Pyramid Lake Reservation. Some chose to live on the margins of white society providing ranch, farm, and domestic labor. Others joined groups of Paiute and Shoshone that continued to raid farms and isolated way stations into the late 1870s.

In the late 1880s Wovoka, a Northern Paiute, began teaching the ghost dance, which some Native Americans believed would enable them to recover their original land, to reunite them with their ancestors, and to make it possible for them to live in eternal peace and prosperity. The Plains peoples, especially in the Dakotas, soon performed the ghost dance nightly. The U.S. government tried to eliminate the dance, which they regarded as a sign of rebellion. On December 29, 1890, U.S. soldiers killed more than 200 Lakota (Sioux) men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

H.

20th Century

The mining booms of the first decade of the 20th century lifted the Nevada economy as the Comstock Lode had done earlier. Newcomers supplied most of the labor, and the population expanded rapidly, but the boom also brought labor disputes.

H.1.

Workers and Miners

The Goldfield mines had the biggest labor disputes. Miners often stole pieces of ore by hiding them in clothing designed specifically for that purpose. The practice, called high-grading, was widespread. The Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company tried to crack down on the practice in 1907 by ordering workers to change their clothing in front of company inspectors at the end of each day. After workers threatened to strike, union leaders and company officials agreed to a compromise which decreased, but did not stop, high-grading. When the company then tried to pay workers in scrip, or promissory notes, workers refused to work, although there was little violence. Governor John Sparks persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to send federal troops to the area, and the company hired strikebreakers to force the workers back into the mines.

H.2.

Early 20th Century

The labor disputes occurred just after Francis G. Newlands became a U.S. senator from Nevada. Newlands saw the future of Nevada not in mining, but in reclaiming the desert for agriculture by using irrigation. He believed agriculture could change Nevada’s boom-and-bust mining economy. Newlands was instrumental in passing the National Reclamation Act of 1902, which devoted the money from public land sales in 16 states to the construction of irrigation in desert states. Early projects were scheduled for Nevada. During this period Nevada also banned gambling (in 1910) and tried to limit the Reno divorce business, which had gained national and international attention after the turn of the century after it became known that under Nevada law many grounds existed for divorce. Divorce was much more difficult to obtain in other states at that time.

After World War I ended in 1918, attempts to suppress what others called immorality gave way to the values of a commercially oriented, wide-open frontier society that permitted such behavior. Illegal gambling, legalized prostitution, easy divorces, and the sale of alcoholic beverages in violation of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States became features of life in Reno and the small railroad town of Las Vegas. These businesses grew after 1931 when construction work began on Hoover Dam. In 1931, early in the Great Depression, gambling was again made legal and state residency required to obtain a divorce was reduced to six weeks.

Social reform did not much interest Nevadans in the post World War I period. The death of Newlands in 1917 dealt a severe blow to progressive reform in the state. Leaders who had begun their careers in mining towns dominated the state for the next 40 years, when Nevada approved businesses (gambling and prostitution) that other states called immoral. George Wingfield, Key Pittman, and Pat McCarran all began their careers in these mining towns. Wingfield first emerged as the economic mogul who, along with U.S. Senator George Nixon of Nevada and New York financier Bernard Baruch, put together the enormously profitable Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company. Through his control of several Nevada banks, Wingfield influenced both parties in the state from the 1910s until 1932, when the Wingfield banking chain collapsed. McCarran was elected to the Senate in 1932 and remained influential in Nevada until his death in 1954. Critics have identified McCarran with the anti-Communist crusade of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarran sponsored the controversial Internal Security Act of 1950, which required members of the Communist Party or Communist-front organizations to register with the government; allowed the internment of Communists during times of national emergency; prohibited the employment of Communists in defense plants; and prevented anyone who had been a member of a “totalitarian” government from entering the United States.

The federal government played an increasingly larger role in Nevada life after the beginning of the Great Depression in the 1930s. The recovery programs of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt included public projects such as the construction of the Hoover Dam. World War II (1939-1945) brought military air bases to Reno and Las Vegas. The Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service managed much of the 86 percent of the state still owned by the federal government. During the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission chose a Nevada site to test nuclear weapons in the 1950s, bringing additional jobs and prosperity to southern Nevada.

I.

Recent Developments

After World War II, the gambling and entertainment industries in Reno and Las Vegas expanded. The opening of the huge Flamingo Hotel in 1947 changed the character of gambling near Las Vegas. By 1951 there were five large hotel-resort casinos operating in Clark County, just outside of Las Vegas city jurisdiction and away from higher city taxes. During the late 1950s and 1960s low county tax rates encouraged a thriving resort economy based on the lure of legal gambling casinos that were open 24 hours a day, big-name entertainers, lavish food buffets, and bargain room rates. Although organized crime had initially funded much of the gaming industry, Congress pressured the state to tighten gaming-license regulations in the mid-1950s.

Since the 1960s Nevada has grown faster than any other state in the nation; most of the growth has been concentrated in Las Vegas. By 2000 the state’s population was 2 million, with two-thirds of the population in and near Las Vegas. California and Nevada formed the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) to regulate population growth and property use in the Lake Tahoe area. Water resources are critical to sustain growth in both Las Vegas and Reno. Gold mining in eastern Nevada, near Elko, has made Nevada among the top producers of gold in the world.

The successes of the Nevada economy and the consequent increase in population have created environmental problems. Air pollution has appeared in Reno and Las Vegas. Gold processing techniques that employ cyanide leaching ponds threaten underground water supplies. The state’s rapid population growth, especially in the Las Vegas region, has put pressure on the state’s water resources and overwhelmed such systems as education and mass transit. Some experts fear that Lake Mead, which supplies 90 percent of the water in southern Nevada, may eventually dry up.

The gaming economy has also caused an increase in social problems. Crime has increased, and people who live in a 24-hour economy serviced by minimum-wage jobs have problems with high teenage-pregnancy rates, divorce, alcoholism, drugs, gangs, and suicide.

Despite its wide-open spaces, Nevada is one of the most urban states in the nation. The population is concentrated along the California border, particularly in Reno and Las Vegas. The resort industry of Las Vegas has built huge casinos and hotel complexes that use ancient Egyptian, medieval, pirate, and jungle themes to attract the public. The new hotels and casinos have fueled a construction boom, as has an influx of new residents who require housing.

Key contributors to Nevada’s economy—the gambling casinos, ranchers, and the new mining ventures in the eastern counties—share an antipathy to federal government control. Since the 1950s the gaming industry has feared taxation and regulation; the ranching community has opposed regulations controlling grazing on environmentally sensitive federal lands; and the mining industry has fought any revisions of the Mining Act of 1872, which allows private companies to remove precious metals from federal lands with no charge or royalty fee.

Tourism continues to contribute heavily to Nevada’s economy. The state’s gaming industry has consistently paid over 40 percent of the cost of state government. Its revenues have enabled the state to spend more on education and to support two major state universities and a community college system, but experts warn that the state’s tax base is too narrow to support major increases in education. In recent decades Nevada has tried to diversify its economy, attracting new businesses by advertising its climate, relatively low housing costs, and absence of corporate, state, or local income taxes.

The History section of this article was contributed by William D. Rowley. The remainder of the article was contributed by Paul F. Starrs.