Nevada

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.

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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.