Nevada

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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 was 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

After World War I had 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.

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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 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 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. In the 1990s the resort economy of Las Vegas built several huge casinos that used ancient Egyptian, medieval, and jungle themes to attract the public. Circus Circus Enterprises opened the Excalibur in 1990 and the Luxor in 1993. Mirage Resorts, Incorporated, opened the Mirage and Treasure Island resorts.

Nevada’s economy includes the large gambling cities, ranches, and the new mining boom areas in the eastern counties. Despite their differences, all share an antipathy to federal government control. Since the 1950s the gaming industry has feared taxation and regulation; the ranching community is opposed to regulations controlling grazing on environmentally sensitive federal lands; and the mining industry 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. In addition, Nevada ranchers inspired what came to be called the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement in several Western states during the late 1970s to regain state control over federal lands. Although the movement was defeated in court, sympathy for the issue of states’ rights remained strong, and in December 1993 antipathy for federal government control in Nevada made headlines again when Nye County passed two resolutions that declared local public lands county property. The Nye County resolutions were only two of several county resolutions in Western states that were passed in an attempt to accomplish what the original Sagebrush Rebellion had failed to do: regain local control over local land currently administered by federal government agencies. In March 1996, however, a federal judge declared the Nye County ordinance illegal and reaffirmed federal ownership of land not specifically claimed by Nevada when it became a state.

The gaming industry, however, has occasionally argued that the mining industry should pay more in state taxes to lift some of its own tax burden. Nevada gaming 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.

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