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Las Vegas, Reno, Carson City, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Sparks, Fallon, Elko, Incline Village, Boulder City, Ely, Indian Springs, Jean, Laughlin, Mesquite, Pahrump, Winnemucca, Eureka, Empire, Glenbrook, Gerlach, Genoa, Gardnerville, Gabbs, Fernley, Carlin, Caliente, Cal Nev Ari, Bunkerville, Dyer
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The region now
occupied by the State of Nevada was held by the Goshute,
Mojave, Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe Indians and claimed by
the Spanish Empire until the early 1800s. The northern
extent of the Spanish claim was defined as the 42nd parallel
in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 between the United States
and Spain. This north latitude line serves currently as
Nevada's northern boundary with Oregon and Idaho.
Spanish explorations into this region have never been
documented clearly enough to establish any European party
constituting the earliest expedition into Nevada. If in fact
there was some penetration, it must have been by the Spanish
in the southernmost portion of our state, possibly as early
as 1776. Trappers and traders, including Jedediah Smith and
Peter Skene Ogden, entered the Nevada area in the 1820s.
In 1821 Mexico won its war of independence from Spain and
gained control over all the former Spanish territory in the
area of what is now our "Southwest." Spain had done nothing
to occupy or control what is now Nevada, a vast region
virtually "terra incognita," having no permanent non-Indian
population and considered barren, arid, and inhospitable.
Mexico's control over that interior portion of Alta
California, eventually to become Nevada, was hardly more
than a recognized claim in the absence of occupation or
counterclaim by other powers.
Before the discovery of gold in the West, the vast region
between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, including
what is now Nevada, was designated on many maps as "Great
American Desert." The "Great Basin," an area of interior
drainage by definition, named by John C. Frémont following
his expeditions of the 1840s, does not cover all of the
present area of the State of Nevada, since tributaries of
the Snake River in the north and those of the Colorado in
the south drain waters to the Pacific Ocean.
Jedediah S. Smith, an American frontiersman, and Peter Skeen
Ogden, an employee of the British Hudson's Bay Company, were
among the first, with lesser-known persons also reporting
their adventures. Smith and Ogden explored the area in the
1820s. In the 1830s and '40s American and Mexican parties
came through the southern part, with Antonio Armijo, Joseph
Walker, Louis Bonneville, Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and
others contributing more knowledge of this vast, arid,
intermontane area. The emigrant parties followed the
trappers and explorers, with the first one crossing in 1841,
the Bidwell-Bartleson group. Several others followed,
including the tragic Donner Party and those unfortunates who
crossed farther south and into Death Valley. However, mass
migration did not start across Nevada until after gold was
discovered in California in 1848. Extensive surveys for
wagon roads through the central part of what is now Nevada
were made in the 1850s. The Pony Express traversed Nevada
between April, 1860, and October, 1861, ending shortly after
the completion of the transcontinental telegraph.
The great trek of the Mormon people to the fertile Salt Lake
Valley in 1847 was the beginning of non-Indian settlement in
the Great Basin of North America, most of which was then a
part of the department of Alta California, Republic of
Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, concluded February
2, 1848; and ratifications exchanged at Queretaro May 30,
1848, and proclaimed on July 4, 1848, resulted in formal
acquisition by the United States of a vast tract of land
from Mexico. It included what is now California, Nevada,
Utah, and most of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico,
Colorado, and Wyoming, and corresponded by general agreement
to the Mexican administrative divisions of Alta California
and New Mexico. In 1853 the Gadsden Purchase resulted in the
final acquisition of Mexican territory and eliminated a
dispute over the latitude line cited in the Mexican Cession
of 1848, running west from the Rio Grande. This latter
territory was obtained from the Mexican states of Sonora and
Chihuahua.
When in 1850 the federal government set up the Utah
Territory, almost all of Nevada was included except the
southern tip, which was then part of New Mexico. Non-Mormons
had been averse to settling in Mormon-dominated territory,
but after gold was found in 1859 non-Mormons did come into
the area. A rush from California began and multiplied
manyfold as news of the Comstock Lode silver strike spread.
Most of the newcomers preferred to consider themselves as
still being within California, and a political question was
added to the general upheaval. Meanwhile, miners came
helter-skelter, raising camps that grew overnight into such
booming and raucous places as Virginia City.
Some non-Mormons came to Carson Valley. They did not want to
be part of the Utah Territory that was ruled by a Mormon
leader. Without Congressional approval they established
their own territorial government. In 1859, ore was
discovered near what is now Virginia City and thousands came
in search of gold and silver. With sufficient population in
1861, Congress could now create the Nevada Territory.
Nevada did not have a large enough population to become a
state during the Civil War (1861-1865). Partly to impose
order on the lawless, wide-open mining towns, Congress made
Nevada into a territory in 1861 as migrant prospectors and
settlers poured in. The territory was then enlarged by
increasing its eastern boundary by one degree of longitude
in 1862. It was rushed into statehood in 1864, with Carson
City as its capital. President Lincoln (in order to get more
votes to pass the Thirteenth Amendment) had signed the
proclamation even though the territory did not actually meet
the population requirement for statehood. On Oct. 31, 1864,
Nevada became the 36th state of the Union with Carson City
as its capital.
In 1866 Nevada acquired its present-day boundaries when the
southern tip was added and more eastern land was gained from
Utah.
The state continued to be dependent on its precious ores,
and its fate was affected so. During the late 1860s, several
miners settled the northwestern counties of Nevada. The
following decade, mines closed as the value of silver
dropped. Thousands of miners left Nevada looking for work,
others turned to ranching. The 1880s brought even harder
years on the economy. Unusually cold winters killed much of
the livestock and mines near Virginia City stopped producing
gold and silver.
During the early 1900s, new mines near Tonopah discovered
silver. Gold was found in Goldfield and copper near Ruth and
Mountain City. These discoveries provided new jobs and
strengthened Nevada's economy. Railroad expansion opened new
markets and the Newlands Irrigation Project made farming
possible through irrigation.
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, bringing jobs and tourists to the
state, 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.
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. After World War II, ,
the value of copper and lead dropped dramatically, causing
many mines to close and 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
In 1950, 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.
During the late 1900s, tourism remained the largest industry
in Nevada. Las Vegas alone attracted more than 15 million
tourists a year. Reno also built large casinos and ski
resorts were built at Lake Tahoe. Nevada's population grew
immensely and water became a major concern. In 1963, the
Supreme Court ruled on a water dispute of the Colorado River
between Nevada and neighboring states. Later in 1983, the
Water Project was created to provide increased water for
expected growth within Las Vegas.
In 2000 Nevada had 60,920 km (37,854 mi) of highways,
including 901 km (560 mi) of the federal interstate highway
system. U.S. Highway 50, which follows the route of the Pony
Express of the 1860s, has been called “The Loneliest Road in
America” because of its passage through some of the state's
most unpopulated landscapes.
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.
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.
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