The Making of Modern Nevada

Hal Rothman

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780874178333
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Nevada has always been different from other states. Almost from its beginning, Nevada sanctioned behaviors considered immoral elsewhere—gambling, prize-fighting, brothels, easy divorce—and embraced a culture of individualism and disdain for the constraints of more conventional society. In The Making of Modern Nevada, author Hal Rothman focuses on the factors that shaped the state's original maverick, colonial status and those that later allowed it to emerge as the new standard of American consumer- ism and postmodern liberalism. Rothman introduces the masters who sought to own Nevada, from bonanza kings to Mafia mobsters, as well as the politicians, miners, gamblers, civic and civil-rights leaders, union organ- izers, and casino corporate moguls who guided the state into prosperity and national importance. He also analyzes the role of mob and labor union money in the development of Las Vegas; the Sagebrush Rebellion; the rise of megaresorts and of Las Vegas as a world icon of leisure and pleasure; and the political and social impact of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. The Making of Modern Nevada is essential reading for anyone who wonders how the Silver State got this way, and where it may be going in the twenty-first century.

1. A Light Hand on a Difficult Land: European Exploration

AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY DAWNED, the historic condition of much of Nevada remained as it had been for hundreds of years. The major native groups that lived in large parts of the region that would later form the state continued their subsistence ways, largely without participating in the great changes taking place elsewhere in the West. Although most were part of extended networks of trade, they rarely saw the Europeans and Americans who put so much pressure on native people elsewhere on the North American continent. Beyond the mountains to the west, Spaniards arrived in the late eighteenth century and began a chain of missions, forts, and ranchos along the coast. East of the deserts of the interior West, competition between the Spanish, French, British, and later Americans transformed the lives of native peoples. If the Southern and Northern Paiute, Western Shoshone, and Washoe people knew of these great political upheavals, evidence came only from the trade goods that appeared in their world.

Yet geopolitical forces far from Nevada soon affected the lives of its peoples. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase gave the new United States an enormous but largely undetermined holding west of the Mississippi River. President Thomas Jefferson established a century-long pattern when he sent out William Clark and Meriwether Lewis and their Corps of Discovery to discern what the nation had acquired. A few years later in 1812, the U.S. found itself in another war with Great Britain, this one ending three years later, culminating in the battle of New Orleans, an American triumph that propelled the new nation westward. By the end of the 1810s, the U.S. had established itself as an important player in the West, a threat to the interests of European nations.

A struggle between the United States and Spain led to grim realities for the Spanish in the New World. Faced with internal strife in Spain and lacking resources to combat the American onslaught in the Southeast, the Spanish foreign minister, Luis de Oñis, agreed to a treaty with U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. In the Adams-Oñis Treaty of 1819, the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States, allowing the new nation to remove the last European power east of the Mississippi River. In return, the U.S. agreed to pay up to $5 million in claims to Spanish citizens, and ceded its claims to Texas west of the Sabine River. In addition, the treaty drew boundaries for the Louisiana Purchase, terminating U.S. jurisdiction at the Arkansas River and assigning lands south of that to Spain. In exchange for receiving all of the Far West, the Spanish gave up their claims to Oregon. With one signature, the lands that later became Nevada were codified as part of the failing Spanish empire. The U.S. ended its battles with Spanish Florida in the east, bringing to a halt the ongoing hostilities in the American South that dated from the War of 1812.

Yet that cession was fiction, the result of the arrogance of both the U.S. and Spain and their insistence that they could control a great deal more land than their explorers had visited. Since they arrived in the New World, European powers had claimed far more land than they had ever seen, oblivious to the ways of living and sometimes even the existence of native peoples upon it. Americans followed the pattern, both in completing the Louisiana Purchase and in signing the Adams-Oñis treaty. Once again, representatives of the new nation did not know what they ceded. As the ink on the treaty dried, neither Americans nor Spaniards had yet seen the lands that became the state of Nevada.

Adams-Oñis was only paper, an agreement that obscured a larger picture of on-the-ground realities in the western deserts. Even before Mexico became an independent nation in 1821, the treaty was more meaningful in national capitals than in the region it governed. With or without an international agreement, with little regard for jurisdiction, travelers and traders between Mexican California and the province of New Mexico became more common. Many were Mexicanos, engaged in conveying goods back and forth; others were wanderers and still more were native peoples, using the route for transportation and to reach the often vulnerable settlements of the California coast. But after American trappers and traders reached Santa Fe in the 1820s, they heard of California beyond and within a few years they became more frequent travelers on the Old Spanish Trail, an existent trade route between Santa Fe and California.

As such travelers arrived on the fringes of the Paiute world in the 1820s, they encountered a changed Southern Paiute community. The greatest vulnerability of the Southern Paiute had little to do with any choices they made; instead, it resulted from a specific addition to the regional repertoire that they did not acquire. One major consequence of the arrival of the Spanish was the spread of the horse. The peoples who acquired them—the Apache, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, and the Lakota—became the dominant native groups, imposing their will on others.

Those who did not so quickly adapt were forced into a subservient role. The Southern Paiute were in a particularly disadvantaged position. Paiute lands possessed little to sustain a domestic animal population, and for them the horse became as much a liability as an advantage. In the Paiute world, horses were competitors for scarce food resources and were relatively easy game to hunt. Simply put, Paiute ate horses instead of riding them.

The inability to turn the horse into an asset hurt the Paiute. Without horses, the Southern Paiute quickly became prey for their neighbors, native and newcomer alike. North and east of the Sevier River in what is now Utah, the Ute people shared much with the Southern Paiute, but lived in a world of more lush grasses. They could keep the horse and feed it, and over time they captured wild horses and domesticated them. Soon these turned into large herds, which in turn granted mobility, advantages in warfare, greater range in search of food, and the ability to avoid exploitation of their immediate surroundings. In particular, the horse allowed for better military organization, and the Utes became skilled at warfare and predatory behavior. The more sedentary Southern Paiute became a prime target for the newly horsed and lethally aggressive Utes.

The combination of the horse, the Utes, and the Spanish trade placed the Southern Paiute at the center of a changing world for which they were poorly equipped. The Utes mirrored the patterns of Spanish trade, exchanging horses in Mexico and bringing slaves for the labor market. Utes brought Paiute slaves to California and to Santa Fe in the province of New Mexico as a trade in slaves grew up in the Mexican provinces. The Southern Paiute often became the bait.

Astride animals that appeared enormous, the Utes captured slaves among nearby people. Sometimes they simply took people, often women and children. Ute preference for younger and weaker people reflected the Spanish assumption that women and children would be easier to keep as slaves. This predatory behavior took many forms. Ute horsemen might have appeared in a Southern Paiute village and used their horses as tools of intimidation to coerce people into surrendering their children to slavery. The image of a man using his horse to push another around for the purpose of intimidation, to take a family's future, offers a painful reminder of how hard life could be for the native people of southern Nevada.

For a generation, the Southern Paiute consistently lost members to the slave trade, forced upon them by their distant cousins from the north. Ute power increased and the Southern Paiute suffered. Population decline, social disorganization, and an inability to secure resources were all direct consequences of the slave trade. The relationship between Southern Paiute and slavery became so firm that a standardized scale of cost existed for Paiute slaves. By 1850, the standard value ranged from $50–$200 depending on their gender, age, and health.

After a generation or more of suffering, the Southern Paiute had devised strategies to protect themselves from hostile raiders. They learned to avoid places where resources were abundant, for such places drew the heaviest travel and the human predators who stalked their world. The Old Spanish Trail, which passed at the base of the Spring Mountains west of modern Las Vegas, and the springs at Las Vegas ceased to provide sustenance and became risky places to replenish their supplies. The largely peaceful Southern Paiute community had little recourse as other native groups and Mexican outlaws raided their communities. In some instances, the Southern Paiute fought back, but successful battles of this type were not the norm.

As a result of this constant pressure, Southern Paiute numbers dwindled. They could not maintain the resources that had long sustained them; they were poorly prepared for warfare against men on horses—some of whom had guns—and slavers depleted their numbers and their future. By the end of the 1820s, scarcely half of Southern Paiute children reached adulthood with their native band, creating a crisis of enormous proportions. Not only were hunting and gathering limited by these powerful intruders, the population became so small and so spread out that agriculture, their other staple, suffered as well. By 1830, the Southern Paiute were under great duress. They had become prey for many. They were too close to the peoples of the Mojave in ways of life to successfully defend themselves against more aggressive cultures.

Even as their lot worsened in the 1820s, the Southern Paiute had not yet encountered the most powerful culture that later influenced them. Despite the enthusiastic rhetoric of American exploration, the young nation had not yet reached the lands that became Nevada. Their multipronged westward movement took many forms. First came government representatives, men such as Lewis and Clark, who headed west in 1804 in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase. The addition of these lands gave the young nation an enormous stake in the West, but no one knew exactly what the new territory contained. Lewis and Clark set out to explore and to discern what was out there so that government officials could make policies for settlement. This pattern of exploration continued even beyond the Civil War.

American expansion took other forms as well. The mountains of the West were well stocked with fur-bearing animals, and a new breed of protocapitalist, the mountain man, set out to bring them in. The beaver became the most highly valued, their pelts a commodity prized for hats—from the standard tri-corner of the Revolutionary War era and beyond to broad-brimmed hats to keep off the rain to the high-crowned “Beau Brummell” that gentlemen of the era preferred. High fashion in the capitals of Europe, these hats of beaver skin created an unparalleled economic opportunity, but only for those bold enough to brave the high elevation winters of the American West.

The beaver trade and the mountain men who plied it were in the forefront of an entrepreneurial revolution. A handful of men, many of whom initially knew little of the West or even the outdoors, headed out into the lands of the Louisiana Purchase and beyond in search of beavers to trap. They found the animal in abundance in the mountains of the West—the Rockies, the Wasatch, the Sierra Nevada, and elsewhere. Despite the image of mountain men as people who chose to be apart from their society, most were unmarried economic entrepreneurs who, if asked, would likely say that their goal was to make enough money to live well in an eastern city.

By the 1820s, 100,000 beaver pelts a year were used in the hat trade, prompting a rush to the mountains by many who intended to profit from the opportunity. These entrepreneurs fanned out all over the mountains of the West and as they trapped, they served a dual function as explorers. They saw a great deal, drew maps for their own use, shared information with one another and with outsiders, and a few even wrote about their experiences, paving the way for subsequent settlement.

Mountain men led dangerous, hard, often miserable and lonely lives. They usually worked in pairs, wading in cold streams to lay traps. Most did not see anyone except their trapping partner for months at a time. If they did encounter anyone else, it was almost certain to be Native Americans, unlikely to welcome Anglo-Americans taking animals from their rivers. Although many mountain men integrated into native culture, many others found that positive relationships with the people around them remained out of reach.

By the time trappers reached the lands that became Nevada, they had a twenty-year history in the West that created the beginnings of a social structure. It centered on the annual rendezvous, when trappers would meet at an agreed-upon place on a specific day, often the Fourth of July, to trade their furs and enjoy themselves. The location and time had been selected months before when the factor, the representative of the trading company, supplied them for the coming season. Affiliated in loose organizations and funded by outside backers, trappers needed to be assured of resupply in the middle of the season. The factor would meet them at the predesignated time and place to take the furs they had already harvested and provide them with supplies to finish the trapping season. As the rendezvous developed, it became a week-long trade fair that simultaneously mimicked Indian trade fairs and the growing commercial markets of the East. The partying was legendary.

Possibly the first Anglo-American to see Nevada was a trapper, Jedediah Smith, an experienced mountain man and entrepreneur when he arrived at the Cache Valley Rendezvous in the summer of 1826. Twenty-seven years old at the time, Smith had just purchased the Rocky Mountain Fur Company along with William Sublette and David Jackson. Seeking to expand his new company's business, Smith left the Great Salt Lake on August 16, 1826, accompanied by seventeen men. They headed along the Sevier River, which disappeared into a dry lake bed; so they traversed a mountain range and found the Virgin River, entering present-day Nevada near Bunkerville. The Virgin led to the Colorado River, but food was scarce; they got pumpkins and other food from the Paiute, but they noted that these new people had much less to give than the mountain peoples they had earlier met. The constant assaults on them as well as the limits of the land they lived on had already begun to take a toll on the Southern Paiute.

When they reached the Colorado River, Smith recognized it as an important source of sustenance, not only for him and his men, but for the people whose lands they crossed. The party followed the river as their supplies ran short, getting hungrier and hungrier and finding no sign of beaver. As fall began to change to winter, Smith decided the expedition was a failure. He prepared to return to the Great Salt Lake, but then spoke to some Mojave people he encountered and decided to continue on to the west. Eventually, his party was attacked, most likely by Utes or Navajos returning home after raiding California, but possibly by Southern Paiute, who by that point had good reason to fear all newcomers.

Smith's party spent time in the California desert with the Mojave, and he compared these people favorably to the Southern Paiute. The Mojave lived better than the Paiute; they possessed horses, and they sowed fields in the flood- plain of the Colorado River. The Mojave told Smith that a ten-day journey to the west would bring them to the Mexican settlements in California. Smith pushed on, astonishing the Mexican authorities when he arrived at Mission San Gabriel near Los Angeles. Mexican officials were rightly upset by the appearance of an American trapper and they ordered the party to leave immediately. Smith and his men pleaded with the authorities and were allowed to stay into January. As ordered, they departed by the route they came, then took a sharp left and headed north. With fresh horses and stores, they once again crossed the San Bernardino Mountains and went north to the San Joaquin Valley. The party reached the American River, but could not find a way to cross the Sierra Nevada. They caught plenty of beaver and made plans to return in time for the rendezvous at Cache Valley.

Returning was more difficult than the men imagined. Smith and two men began a remarkable journey that took them along the south shore of Walker Lake and then east to Hot Creek. From there they made their way back to the Great Salt Lake roughly following what is now U.S. Highway 6 through Nevada. The trek took them by the Pancake Range, in the shadow of White Pine Peak and past Mount Wheeler. Smith reached the Cache River Rendezvous, where he had started the year before, on July 3, 1827. The journey had been an ordeal, but Jedediah Smith could rightly claim to be the first American in the land that later became Nevada.

Although Smith did not stay long in Nevada and never returned, he served as a harbinger of a new culture with different values than the Spanish. American culture, first and foremost, was a settler culture. When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their expedition, he asked for an inventory of the lands of the Louisiana Purchase to see what could be made of them. By the 1820s, Americans had shown their expansionist streak and anyone who looked would have seen a culture chafing to settle more land. Spanish and Mexican patterns of settlement were different. Rather than populate with their own people, they sought to convert and harness native peoples for their purposes. Their primary institutions—the mission, the source of faith, and the presidio, the garrison—differed greatly from the American emphasis on individuality, cloaked in the language of democracy. If the old axiom “to populate is to govern” held true, then the question of who would populate the Silver State was already answered.

Smith initiated a process of opening the way for future endeavors, but he was not alone. Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson's Bay Company, a competitor of Smith's Rocky Mountain Fur Company, may have entered the northeastern tip of what later became Nevada a few months before Smith. Ogden explored more substantially in 1828 and 1830, part of a move by the British company to keep Americans out of the Pacific Northwest by challenging them in the southern mountains. Ogden came into Nevada from the north, likely entering near modern Denio, and proceeded to the Humboldt River Valley. He called it the “Unknown River,” and he and his men trapped along the river long enough to find out that it did not reach the Pacific Ocean. When the weather got rough, they retreated to the Great Salt Lake, where they knew they could find buffalo to sustain them through the winter.

Ogden returned to Nevada in the spring of 1829 and again in the fall, furthering his own claim to be the leading explorer of the Silver State. He was followed by other explorers: Ewing Young in 1829, Antonio Armijo in 1829–1830, and William Wolfskill and George C. Yount in 1830–1831. Their efforts led to the first “road” across Nevada. The Old Spanish Trail was a Mexican internal road: it traveled from Mexican New Mexico across lands ceded to Mexico and on to Mexican California. The presence of Americans on that road was the same sort of threat Mexican authorities experienced in Texas, as the Anglo-American population grew in numbers and began its revolt. Subsequent English-speaking travelers found Mexican California no friendlier than had Smith.

At this early stage of American expansion, the primary motivation for most individuals who reached Nevada was economic gain. Finding lands for which there was yet little competition—at least among Europeans—they worked to exploit the resources of the state. Trapping parties came in numbers; hunters followed. They too collided with native peoples, worsening the lot of the already threatened Southern Paiute. One trapping party in 1832 with which mountain man Joe Meek traveled shot a Southern Paiute “to keep him from stealing traps,” an extreme act that smacked of the contempt that Anglo-Americans in that era often felt for Indian people.

From the point of view of these economic entrepreneurs, the Nevada they found offered them little. Most found the area barren and unappealing. Game was scarce and hard to track, especially in the higher mountains. The region was dry, except alongside the rivers, and in general its promise seemed limited to people who looked with nineteenth-century eyes that placed value on timber and grasslands. But this wide expanse of desert and mountains stood between the American Republic and the Pacific Coast. It would have to be addressed, dealt with in some fashion, if the United States was to carry out what more and more people believed was its continental destiny.

That destiny took some unusual forms. In 1831, Capt. Benjamin Bonneville of the U.S. Army requested a leave of absence to head a fur-trapping expedition in the Rocky Mountains. Bonneville's change of role, from Army officer to trapper, has led to questions about his motives. Clearly he constructed a story that made him simply an economic actor, not one tied, at least at that moment, to larger American goals of exploration. Whether anyone representing Mexico who he or his men encountered would believe that story was quite another question.

Bonneville's exploring expedition sent a group headed by Joseph Walker ostensibly to explore the western shore of the Great Salt Lake. In reality, Walker had been asked to spy on Mexican California. When he followed Ogden's Unknown River—which the group renamed the Barren River—Walker and his men found a climate that repelled them. One wrote of the region: “everything here seems to declare that, here man shall not dwell,” a fitting description of a place that challenged the skills of even these hardy explorers.

The party proceeded down the Humboldt River, finding an area of ample grass for grazing that immensely pleased them. They thought they could simply take it, but as many as nine hundred Northern Paiute blocked their way. The grass was theirs and they intended to defend it. Walker and his men piled their baggage up to build a barricade and refused Paiute entreaties to smoke a pipe. The situation seemed dire until Walker's men fired their guns at some ducks in a nearby marsh. At the sound, the Indians fell to the ground. When they saw that the ducks were dead, they were astonished. The trappers then shot holes through a beaver skin that the Northern Paiute held as a target. The power of technology extricated Walker and his men from a dicey situation.

After this impressive display, the party continued the next day, with the Indians trailing Walker and his men. Walker felt threatened by a group of about one hundred who wanted the party to stop and smoke with them, and Walker decided to assert h...