Interview with Michael Green

Question: What was the image of Nevada at the turn of the century?

Michael Green: In the years before 1900, Nevada was feeling and looking very depressed. After the Comstock petered out in the late 1870s, the state went through what's called the twenty-year depression. There was ranching, there were some minor mining booms, but nothing to compare with what had happened in Virginia City. The state economically was in trouble. It was losing population. Under the laws written in the 1780s, a state was supposed to have a population of sixty thousand. We had gotten in without sixty thousand in the first place and now it was dropping even lower to where the population in 1900 was around forty thousand. There was some talk of trying to revoke our statehood, which tells you that Nevada had gotten pretty far down in the well, so to speak. The economy was bad; the politics was dominated by what was left of the Comstock crowd and what was left of the Central Pacific crowd. And for the most part a lot of folks were figuring the state was going to die or they'd just hang out here a little longer hoping it would somehow bloom.

Question: But there was some activity that promised that bloom?

Green: Most definitely. Belmont in Nye County in the 1890s there's some activity. Delamar was discovered in the early 1890s in Lincoln County. Delamar was supposed to be the great hope and they developed Delamar lung, with Delamar dust, the silicosis that ended up causing a lot of trouble for a lot of miners. There's still some folks holding out hope in terms of mining. Certainly, folks still around Virginia City poking around the hills hoping they'd be able to imitate Finney and McLaughlin and O'Reilly and somehow find something. For the most part they weren't successful. The ranchers especially up around Elko County, Humboldt County up in the northeast were doing alright. But even then that wasn't enough for the state to hang its economic hat on.

Question: What about in southern Nevada? Las Vegas?

Green: There was no mining here, although some of the folks who moved came from nearby mining camps and thought of (William) Clark as being a copper baron. And therefore he might somehow be connected to mining in the vicinity. The attraction in a way was water, which today seems impossible to the average Las Vegan and probably to anybody else considering we now don't have very much water. But we weren't called "the meadows" for nothing so to speak. When Clark bought up the land he got the water rights as well and there was a creek running through the heart of the valley right next to the Mormon mission. And there were the big springs which is now on water district land out by I-95 and Valley View. So the water is there for the railroad to have its train stop. Usually, settlement patterns are going to follow the water. They may tell you to follow the money but water's money at least in this case. So water I think was the big attraction. And it worked out well for the sake of the railroad that the valley networks pretty much led through here. If you are going to build from Los Angeles to Salt Lake as Clark was going to do, you pretty much have to follow through Las Vegas.

The strange thing to me is that southern Nevada and northern Nevada are a lot alike in a lot of ways. The terrain is not incredibly different but there is a cultural difference. Southern Nevada is much more closely tied to southern California; northern Nevada is much more closely tied to northern California. And the railroad being built through here from Los Angeles to Salt Lake in a sense cements that connection. The odd thing about Las Vegas being so separate from Reno and the rest of northern Nevada is that the building of the railroad and the founding of Las Vegas early in the 20th century, might have been called a kind of Camelot. There was one brief shining moment I think where the state could have been connected. When Clark build the railroad through southern Nevada he also planned to build a railroad to Tonopah. Well, he got the tracks to Goldfield and by the time he got the tracks built, Goldfield was the hot spot more than Tonopah.

Question: What was Las Vegas like in those early days?

Green: Las Vegas in 1906-07 would have been one or two years old. And I think like most infants of age one or two it was trying to develop a personality. It was a railroad town and the folks here knew that. A lot of early Las Vegans expected it to become a mining town and that didn't work out too well. The railroad didn't encourage local development. In Clark's mind he had his townsite, he had his depot, he didn't need to do much else. So Fremont Street wasn't even paved for the whole area from Main to Fifth, which is now Las Vegas Blvd, until the 1920s. There was just no reason to in their mind. So a lot of folks around here are trying to develop a city, they're trying to promote it and they're not getting too far. Yet one of the promotions is the idea that we are the gateway to Goldfield. And about a quarter of a century later we call it the gateway to the Dam, gateway to Boulder or Hoover Dam depending on who you were asking at the time. That ties with the fact that early Las Vegas was a bridge to somewhere else. It was a gateway. Eventually it became "the" way.

Question: Who was William Clark?

Green: If you're looking at the turn of the century Sen. Edward Clark gets a lot of attention. It is after all Clark County and he's the one for whom it's named. Now, Edward Clark had come down here from Caliente. And Ed Clark, in a sense, was the operator of early Las Vegas. He had a piece of the bank. He had a piece of the power company and the telephone company. And if you were a Democrat, if you wanted to run for office, you went to Ed Clark for the blessing. And he was a revered figure and a controversial figure at the same time, especially among those who didn't revere him because naturally being one of the big bosses of the town he made some enemies in the process.

Question: What about Walter Bracken?

Green: Walter Bracken was the agent of the railroad. He was Clark's agent here and in the early years tried to create the impression that he, Bracken, was the decision-maker. He really wasn't because he checked everything in Las Angeles with the corporation headquarters before he made a decision. But he was one of the early community arbiters most definitely. And I think that folks who are nameless in a sense deserve the greatest tribute. They came to Las Vegas, this dusty railroad town in 1905 or shortly thereafter, with no air conditioning. My late advisor at UNLV always said the most important person in the history of Las Vegas wasn't Bugsy Seigel, or Helen Stewart, or anyone else you'd name, it was Willis Carrier. Because if Carrier didn't invent the air conditioner we would not be here. We would be imitating the mountain Indians of the 19th century who ran up to the mountain during the summer and well they might. But these folks who took a chance, took a risk, in some cases it was better than wherever it was they had been, but they were here making a living, fighting the dust, fighting the heat and just hoping to survive. And a lot of them did and went on to bigger and better things.

Question: 1900 is a turning point in Nevada's history, isn't it?

Green: In sense 1900 is a turning point in Nevada political history because Francis Newlands was the representative of the Comstock. The Newlands money was connected to Sharon and the Comstock Lode. And there will be folks tied to Newlands including Pat McCarran. It's William Sharon's nephew who comes to McCarran at the sheep ranch in 1902 and asks him to run for the assembly with the idea he'll vote for Newlands for the senate. But once Newlands is gone all the political leadership in early and mid 20th century Nevada comes out of Tonopah and Goldfield. And I really believe that it's not so much that they were incredibly talented although some of them were, or they were all great politicians which some of them were, but because in Nevada, one region, the region with the money, has always dominated the state. George Wingfield came out of Tonopah and Goldfield, especially Goldfield; he would be dominant for about a quarter of a century.

Question: George Wingfield comes out of Goldfield and to a lesser extent Tonopah and moves up to Reno.

Green: Well, in a sense the power follows the money and that has been common throughout Nevada history. Tonopah and Goldfield were major western mining rushes. Some Nevadans like Pat McCarran were attracted there. Some folks who had been involve in other western mining rushes were attracted there, Key Pittman who had been in the Klondike. And these people go on to be the dominant political presences in Nevada for many years thereafter. And if you think about it, McCarran is famous for the McCarran boys, he sired the next generation, Alan Bible and Grant Sawyer are the two most prominent names that come to mind who went to law school under his patronage. If you go down to the present here we have a Senator Harry Reid. Where is he from? Searchlight a turn of the century mining town that, as he put it in the title of his book, was the camp that didn't fail. And the title is a bit ironic because you can also admit that Searchlight never entirely succeeded. But it's a remnant of a turn of the century Nevada mining and here is one senator that's connected to that.

Question: What about George Wingfield?

Green: George Wingfield is probably the single most influential political boss in the history of Nevada. He holds one elected office in his life, university regent, which is not exactly a power base, with all respect to the University regents. But he was such a dominant force because he owned the major producing mines, he owned most of the states banks, he owned the hotels that were of any great importance in Reno in that time. And no one has compared with the kind of control that Wingfield could exert. He had his finger in every pie and if his finger was not in your pie, your pie was not going to go too far.