Program Transcript

INTRODUCTION:
There are those who say that the official symbols of Nevada ought to be the prospector and burro. After all, they trudged all over searching, chipping, and digging, to find the gold and silver that built this state. It was their hope and determination that uncovered Nevada's mineral wealth.

If Nevada ever needed that supply of optimism and doggedness, it was about 100 years ago as the 20th century approached.

The great mines had played out and the depression had hit Nevada especially hard. The state was faltering , even staggering.

But could the turn of a calendar page bring a turn of events big enough to make a difference? Would Nevada's hope that more wealth waited underground actually be realized?

Well, the answer turned out to be yes. The year 1900 was a turning point. Nevada struck it rich again, luckily just when the state needed it most.

The new mining boom brought economic vigor to Nevada, it opened a decade of growth and change. It attracted people who were eager about the future, who would lead the state for decades. It gave Nevada the breathing space it needed to develop its cultural and educational institutions, as well as to progress politically and socially, to look ahead.

This stroke of luck brought new hope.

NARRATOR:
As Nevada faced the new century, its footing was precarious. It was stagnant economically and out of the mainstream politically and socially. Other states by this time were pulling out of the long nationwide depression; not Nevada.

Growth, expansion and great optimism surged in the rest of the country as the 20th century opened. Why not in Nevada?

Because the state had nothing to work with.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
The Comstock had failed and really started to fail by 1877 and it never really recovered. What Nevada went into and I think it's recognized by everyone, certainly by 1880, a long, 20 years mining depression and there was no alternate agriculture really to take up the slack.

NARRATOR:
Ranching, which had been steady during the Comstock days, not only suffered from the mining depression but reeled again from the devastating 'white winter' of 1889-90 when a record 100 inches of snow wiped out cattle herds.

JEROME EDWARDS:
After 1880 when Nevada hit its height of population at something like 62 thousand, the Comstock went into sort of a terminal decline and so did the rest of the state as no considerable gold or silver discoveries were made. So by 1900 mining production was oh probably about a 15th of what it had been, let's say in the late1870s. And the population of the state went down to 42-thousand or so. A one third drop in 20 years. I know of no other state in the history of our country which suffered a net loss of one third of its population.

MICHAEL GREEN:
The economy was bad, the politics were 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 were just going to hang out here a little longer hoping it would somehow bloom.

SALLY ZANJANI:
It was being seriously debated whether this sorry shell of a state could be stripped of statehood. The Comstock was hard hit but in the counties to the east the losses were even more drastic. Six of those counties lost at least 30% of their population. If that happened today we'd think it was catastrophic. John Muir, when he was walking through Nevada on the brink of the long depression wrote that it reminded him of the ruins of a lost civilization. This was becoming increasingly true. Nevada was at risk of turning into a scattering of ghost towns in the desert.

NARRATOR:
What would become of a state in the 20th century that was struggling so desperately at the end of the 19th? How could it rebuild its economy?

JAMES HULSE:
Well if we were to turn back the clock a hundred years to late 1899 or to early 1900 the plight to Nevada was very serious, and the prospects were not very good at that point. So if we were to go back to the beginning of the new century, the 20th century, what hope was there?

WHAT HOPE WAS THERE?
NARRATOR:
Great hope was placed in two great crusades - silver and water. Many Nevadans fervently clung to the creed of the Silver Cause believing that if the federal government would only allow free coinage of silver, its value would rise and Nevada would flourish again. Starting in the early 1890's, Nevada politicians, local and national, took on the cause. The Silver Party controlled Nevada politics until 1906.

JEROME EDWARDS:
Nevada leadership I think around 1900 thought they had the panacea for recovery in the magic issue of silver. Silver and mining still seemed to have this aura for the state and so on. And I think there was a tendency to blame the state's malaise on outsiders whether it's the evil influences of wall street, eastern and perhaps more specifically British capitalists . Also a lot of blaming of the railroad and its pricing practices and so on. Actually the state had just sort of run out of discovered ore or didn't have the technology and the means to recover what was there.

NARRATOR:
Nevadans voted enthusiastically for The Silver Party candidate William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 presidential election but not many others did. William McKinley won the race and gold remained the standard. If the silver dream would not deliver for Nevada, maybe water would. Congressman Francis G. Newlands saw Nevada as no one had before. He saw farms filling the dry valleys.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
He thought well maybe the deserts could yield more, and a small farming population could be established here in Nevada, but in order to do that you needed water, you needed to put water on these lands. In other words you needed irrigation you needed community irrigation projects or state irrigation projects Or maybe eventually even national aid to western irrigation. Of course Nevada would be an important recipient of that national aid to western irrigation.

NARRATOR:
Newlands was a relative newcomer to the state, an easterner with connections to the power elite of the Comstock. He married into Comstock money and had come to Nevada in 1888 seeking a political future. But his view of government was different from those of the Comstock barons that he followed.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
Newlands looks increasingly towards government to bring about certain improvements in the society, to improve life in America and particularly the federal government. And this is kind of an important transition from the 19th century. He is, very much identifies himself with the up to date and modern forces that are changing, changing America. And as such I say his whole personal demeanor and style, he does not grow a beard like the older generation grew in the late 19th century. In some ways this marks him as more of a 20th century man ah and as many people will start calling him, and others like him, a progressive.

He's definitely a transitional figure.

NARRATOR:
Newlands valued the stability and wholesomeness of farming communities, he believed in irrigation, and he believed government had a role in improving arid areas of the west.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
In many ways that was the wrong vision too. He looked forward to Nevada becoming what he often said was a model commonwealth based upon a small farmer society that would be stable, would have stable economics, it would be insulated from the boom and bust cycles of the old 19th century mining economy.

NARRATOR:
Newlands made a name for himself in Congress fighting for federal aid to water projects. When The Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 passed, Nevada quickly benefited with federal money for the first reclamation project in the country, the Truckee Carson Irrigation District.

Construction began in 1903. Derby Dam and the Truckee Canal were finished in 1905.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
The Fallon Irrigation Project was built on very optimistic hopes and prospects. They thought that there would be 50-60-thousand people in the Lahontan Valley out there within a decade or so. Well first of all there was never enough water for the project. ... Secondly the soils out there did not lend themselves, to very good drainage. And they did not drain. The salts became accumulated in the soil, and all sorts of remedies had to be pursued to drain those soils.

The irrigation project came on line right at a time when agriculture is starting to take a back seat in the American economy. It simply is not going to be commanding the kind of returns, at least comparably, comparatively, to other segments of the society. It is simply going to be working I guess you would say against history in many ways as well as against the kind of difficult, well the very, very difficult environment in which they established it.

NARRATOR:
Newlands was elected to the United States Senate in 1903 replacing Comstock millionaire John P. Jones and served for 14 years. Although his Reclamation legislation led to massive and enduring western water projects, his hope that water would save Nevada was not realized. The Fallon project did bring money, construction, high hopes and a solid farming community to the state. But it couldn't energize all of Nevada.

While politicians looked for answers, the future of the state actually rested in the tough, callused hands of prospectors. Nomads blessed with infinite hope. Men, and women too, probably not worried about Nevada's economy or national status but relishing the hunt for precious ore, each one believing there would be another great boom.

ANOTHER GREAT BOOM
SALLY ZANJANI:
An impecunious central Nevada rancher named Jim Butler was travelling through the area that was to become Tonopah when he picked up a rock to throw at his burro and realized that he had something in his hand worth assaying. At least that's the legend.

NARRATOR:
The legend may be apocryphal but it's pure mining camp poetry. It tells of an ordinary guy with hope and luck. It begins a fabulous tale of enormous wealth that would end a long stretch of bad times.

Jim Butler knew prospecting and mining enough not to depend on them. He ranched and was the Nye County District Attorney, and he prospected when he could. In May of 1900 he was doing just that in the San Antonio Mountains southwest of Belmont.

SALLY ZANJANI:
The truth is probably that Butler, who spoke perfect Shoshone, had been told about the site by the Indians. Possibly the great Shoshone prospector Tom Fisherman who discovered Goldfield and a number of other sites, and that his presence there was no mere accident.

WILLIAM METSCHER:
He knew these veins were over here. He wasn't sure what they were I don't think, but he knew they were here and he came over here on that prospecting trip, picked up a few samples and he went to the town of Klondike. And he took the samples to the assayer there, he threw them out the window said they weren't worth anything, he wouldn't even assay them.

Well Butler knew he had something so he stopped on the way back to Belmont and he picked up a few more samples and he took them up to Belmont. Butler didn't enough money to make and assay so he laid them on the windowsill of Brougher's store, and they laid there for a couple of months while Butler went back to his ranch. Well an attorney by the name of Tasker Oddie came through and he saw them laying there and asked Brougher about them and they went back and talked to Butler and Butler told them if they paid for the assay he'd cut them in on the mine. And they took them to a Walter Gayhart in Austin and he assayed them, found out they were running 500 ounces of silver to the ton.

That was the strike that started Tonopah.

SALLY ZANJANI:
I'd like to say a word about Jim's wife Belle .... Jim was rather a lazy type and after this ore sample had been assayed, he procrastinated for several months. It took that long for Belle to get him wound up and going and got into a spring wagon, the two of them, drawn by 2 burros and went back to the site to stake some claims. Belle who was a prospector in her own right staked the best claim of all, the Mizpah.

NARRATOR:
Jim and Belle Butler worked their claims for about a year, but it was enough. By 1901 they sold their holdings for $336,000 to investors and later retired to California --- two of the few prospectors who actually made good money on a find.

Their friend Tasker Oddie, the young attorney and prospector, stayed on to manage the newly formed Tonopah Mining Company and other ventures.

Tonopah held stunning silver deposits. Its mines would produce one hundred million-dollars worth of ore over the next two decades. This was the start of Nevada's 2nd great mining boom and the beginning of the end of the 20-year depression.

Two years later in December 1902, 20 miles to the south - gold. Incredibly rich ore, some of the richest ore ever found in the American West. Two prospectors from Tonopah, Harry Stimler and Billy Marsh, who like Butler probably followed leads from the Shoshone prospector Tom Fisherman, found and staked the first claims on Columbia Mountain, in what became Goldfield.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
What everyone had been hoping for for 20 years, essentially new Comstocks had been developed. And really the outside capital, mining investors in the east coast and throughout the country couldn't believe it. That Nevada had struck it rich again because Nevada had been so long in borrasca. They refused to invest in Tonopah. Said that putting money in Nevada mines was like pouring money down a rathole.

NARRATOR:
Locals like Butler and Oddie made it work, then once the mines proved themselves, the eastern financiers signed on. Bernard Baruch, Fred Schwab, the Brock family and others bought into Nevada's 20th century mining boom. Their capital helped to bring in modern mine engineering mills, smelters, railroads, and the infrastructure of significant, modern cities.

The rush to the two mining camps was typical boomtown pandemonium. Canvas tents and shanties of all kinds popped up as excited boomers swarmed the area to find and stake their claims. Saloons, lodging houses, assay offices appeared almost instantly. Wagons and freight teams fought for space on the dirt roads.

SHAWN HALL:
But it was realized very early on that both Goldfield and Tonopah their ore deposits, were quite extensive and it wasn't going to be a short term thing. So that you immediately saw an emergence of more permanent stone buildings and multi-story wood buildings so that there was an air of permanence almost right off the bat for both of the towns.

WILLIAM METSCHER:
The mills ran 24-hours a day, the mines ran 24-hours a day. You can imagine what it was like in Tonopah in the 1910's late 1900s when there were five stamp mills running in town with all that noise, with blasts going off underground ... one of those mills made enough noise rock the town. And there was a 60 stamp mill at the Tonopah-Belmont, a 60 stamp mill at the Extension, a 20 stamp mill at the McNamara, and the West End had a I think it was a 40 stamp mill. And all those went 24 hours a day.

NARRATOR:
Nevada was on the map again. The glory days were back.

SALLY ZANJANI:
At the height of the boom, so my father told me, and he was Goldfield goldrusher in 1906, you couldn't walk down the Goldfield street fast. It was so crowded that you could only move at a slow shuffle. Other observers have said that if you went into a saloon it was like being in a beehive, it was so packed. You couldn't find accommodations, there was a tent hotel maybe. Or you could stay in the Esmeralda Hotel where people slept in 6-hour shifts with blankets and no change of bedding. There were, as well as people, all kinds of conveyances in the street, freighters, auto stages, burros, prospectors getting ready to set out in the hills again, imagining there might be another Goldfield out there. And most of all it was the excitement of that atmosphere. This was a gathering of adventurers from the four corners of the earth people from every country, or at least a great many countries, and many places in the United States... and not totally motivated by greed. Of course finding another bonanza would not have been a bad thing. But I think the adventure was perhaps foremost in the minds of many 'seeing the elephant' as they used to call it in the California goldrush. I know it was the adventure of it that drew my father.

NARRATOR:
Houses, businesses, tailings and headframes rolled together in Tonopah where the population grew to 10-thousand. Its mines produced 100-million dollars worth of silver in two decades.

Goldfield grew to be the largest and most sophisticated city in the state with 25,000 people by 1908. Gold worth 80-million dollars came from its mines within 20 years.

SALLY ZANJANI:
1900 was a real turning point for Nevada. The nadir at the end of the 20 year depression and the beginning of rebirth.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
Nevada is really a place to be in the first decade of the 20th century. Some people refer to it as the 'southern Klondike' because all of these happenings in Nevada start occurring right on the heels of the decline of the Klondike gold rush that occurred really 1898 to 1900. And many people of course had rushed north to Alaska in these years and that soon played out. And they were looking for other horizons and of course the events in Nevada attracted them.

REMARKABLE PEOPLE
JEROME EDWARDS:
The state began attracting remarkable people from out of state and Tonopah and Goldfield both sucked in people from elsewhere. And there's native born Nevadans who sort of begin making it politically or economically in Tonopah, Goldfield. And this leadership which is rather a remarkable leadership, it dominates the Nevada political scene for the next, at least two generations. To be from Tonopah or Goldfield, meant you were from somewhere.

NARRATOR:
One of the first major politicians connected to the new mining camps was George Nixon. He replaced the Comstock baron William Stewart in the United States Senate in 1905. Nixon owned Nevada banks and a newspaper. He had been active politically for years and had close ties to the old railroad interests. Nixon spent little time in Goldfield but was linked to it through his huge investments there.

He served in the senate from 1905 until he died in 1912, and during that time he and his partner George Wingfield made fortunes by gaining control of nearly every mining operation in Goldfield.

When Nixon died, attorney Key Pittman of Tonopah was elected to complete his term . He served for 27 years until his death in 1940.

Pittman was a southerner who had come west. He moved from the Klondike goldrush to Tonopah in 1902. There he practiced mining law until he began serving in the senate in 1913. Pittman held a leading role in foreign policy during and after the first World War as a member and then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of the most prestigious national positions ever held by a Nevadan.

WILLIAM METSCHER:
People were adventurous type of people and they were intelligent and they were educated type of people that came out to these two camps. And they, it, this gave them the chance that they needed to able to go on and make something out of themselves.

NARRATOR:
In 1911, another Tonopah leader gained statewide power when Tasker Oddie was elected governor. Oddie was an easterner who became a Nevadan. The energetic young man from New Jersey had been in the Belmont -Tonopah area before the Tonopah strike practicing law, prospecting and mining.

When investors bought the major Tonopah holdings that he owned with Jim Butler, Oddie stayed on as manager of the Tonopah Mining Company. He started in Nevada politics in 1900 as district attorney of Nye County, became a state senator then governor. By 1921 he joined Key Pittman in the United States Senate where he served for 12 years until 1933.

JAMES HULSE:
If you've got an area in which the old oligarchy is dying off, the old structures are being replaced and suddenly a new generation of pioneers, if you will, come on to the scene... people like Tasker Oddie, Key Pittman.. Actually in that context Newlands would be a bit of an old-timer because he'd been here a few years, but Pat McCarran and others were like fresh young Turks coming on to the scene at the right time.

NARRATOR:
Oddie was replaced in the senate by Pat McCarran, a Washoe County sheep rancher and lawyer who built a legal and political base in Tonopah.

In 1906, McCarran, like Tasker Oddie and Jim Butler before him, was Nye County District Attorney. He had served in the state assembly in 1903 and while in Tonopah established himself as a political independent of sorts although a democrat. McCarran spent 21 years in the senate. He gained national prominence and power, and was perhaps Nevada's most important politician on the national level.

Many say he may have become a senator sooner if George Wingfield had not been his political enemy.

JEROME EDWARDS:
I would argue for a quarter of a century Wingfield dominates the political and economic life of the state.

NARRATOR:
George Wingfield, former cowboy and gambler arrived in Tonopah in 1901 and moved on to Goldfield when the excitement hit. He and his partner George Nixon started buying mines and their Goldfield Consolidated Mines Company soon owned all but one of the operating mines in Goldfield.

SALLY ZANJANI:
I think Wingfield was the most influential of the new political elite to come out of central Nevada mining boom. He continued the tradition of corporate control of Nevada politics though, the tradition that had been carried on before him by the railroad bosses Black Wallace and Henry Yerington, and he always operated behind the scenes as they had.

NARRATOR:
Wingfield made a fortune, and by keeping it in Nevada, became an overwhelming economic force. He was a master at behind-the-scenes politics. And in this small state, his presence was magnified his power unquestioned.

MICHAEL GREEN:
He holds one elective office in his life, university regent, but he was such a dominant presence 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 Wingfield could exert.

NARRATOR:
Politicians needed Wingfield's support to get elected. Legislative and social initiatives were successful - if he liked them.

MICHAEL GREEN:
Nothing is being done by the gaming industry today, or nothing is being attempted by the gaming industry today that was not attempted by mine owners and railroad owners in the 19th and early 20th century. But the state was so much smaller and Wingfield himself so diverse in his economic holdings, that he is the power of his time and it is incredibly difficult for any individual to match today what Wingfield did in his time as Nevada's political and economic leader.

NARRATOR:
He dominated until his banks failed in the 1930s. He rebounded financially and made another fortune in gold but he had spent all his political chips. The 1932 election victory of the man he had battled since Tonopah days, Pat McCarran, began the end of the Wingfield era.

MICHAEL GREEN:
In a sense, 1900 is a turning point in Nevada political history because Francis Newlands in a sense was the representative of the Comstock.. the Newlands money was connected to Sharon and the Comstock Lode.

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 is 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.

PROSPECTORS HAD THE FEVER
SHAWN HALL:
Once the strikes had been made in Tonopah and Goldfield well then prospectors had the fever and so they would spread out. And then during that same period a few years afterward there was a lot of discovery in small towns springing up.

But there was a lot of towns that would spring up in the spring and be gone by fall. They'd find a little deposit, all the excitement and the publicity would happen, people would rush to the and then the vein would only last for a couple of months and then there wasn't anymore and the town would disappear and the prospectors would go off again.

What happens is that once there's a big strike made in one area, the prospectors normally they'll congregate near that main area and branch out figuring relatively logically that there's more deposits like the one that's been found and made people rich.

And so what you do see an extensive exploration by prospectors after a big strike is made in the immediate area hoping that there's something similar to that they can find.

NARRATOR:
They did find more deposits and revived some earlier finds.... Up to a hundred overall, starting with the famous Bullfrog District with its town of Rhyolite.

Manhattan, Round Mountain, Rawhide, Greenwater, Silver Peak, Kawich, Fairview, and Wonder, Reveille, Ramsey, Gold Crater, Silverbow, Johnnie, Cloverdale, Flourine, Golden Arrow, Cuprite and more...

Some were quite important. Some were very small and short-lived. They were all exciting and encouraging.

MICHAEL GREEN:
Tonopah especially because it's first, but certainly Goldfield and then the copper boom around Ely, really revived the state. And I really think that most of the folks around Nevada at the time breathed a sigh of relief partly because they had been in such a depression and now Tonopah and Goldfield are pulling them out. Partly because mining begets mining. Mining itself is an industry based on hope. It's one of the reasons that Nevada's history is in a lot of ways a continuum, if you go from mining to gaming you're really going from hope and luck, to hope and luck. And now they get the feeling our luck is changing. And just as the Comstock inspires a lot of people to go looking elsewhere in Nevada for mining, Tonopah and Goldfield inspire a lot activity in southern in central Nevada. Beatty, Bullfrog, Rhyolite, Goodsprings, Searchlight all benefit from this boom. So there's a great sense that Nevada is getting it turned around and now Nevada is on its way again to the prosperity it knew during the Comstock era and nothing can stop us now.

NOTHING CAN STOP US NOW
JEROME EDWARDS:
Maybe if there was a malaise, the state got over it. The state isn't so dominated by this silver issue as it was to be before 1900 and the state seemed to look in future directions more productively. The state just seems to have a more healthy attitude toward its future.

And temporarily, at least from 1900 to 1910 Nevada almost doubles in population. Of course, 1910 it's still dead last in population among all the states which it will, a position it will hold until almost 1960.

NARRATOR:
Nevada was reborn, and as exciting as Tonopah and Goldfield were, they were not the future. Instead, they gave Nevada the energy to find its future in other parts of the state.

1900, the same year as the Tonopah strike, copper was found in White Pine County. In 1906 more copper discoveries were made near Ely. The area had been mined earlier but industrial metals were becoming more profitable. Over the long term in fact, eastern Nevada's copper mines have out-produced and out-lasted the glittering gold and silver mines that made the state famous.

In Reno, a well-established business center and railroad hub, commerce was flourishing thanks to the new mining activity to the south.

Early in the decade, Reno gave birth to an industry that would soon symbolize the city and even the state.

While many other states had passed stringent divorce laws in the late 18th century, Nevada had not followed that trend.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
And Nevada is not going to pay very much attention to that because as I say it's sort of out of the mainstream, it's not in step with what is going on in the broader society in the late 19th century. So come 1899, 1900 Nevada still has this very open divorce law on its books that some lawyers in New York are going to pick up upon and say 'this is where you can get a divorce'. People can travel there. An English lord did so in 1899, the head of the U.S. Steel Corporation would do so in 1905, William Corey will do this in 1905... this gives a great deal of publicity to the liberal divorce that exists in Nevada. And what I'm saying is that that liberal divorce law probably would not have existed if Nevada been more prosperous in these 20 years and more in step with the national currents that were trying to reduce the divorce activity.

NARRATOR:
Over time, Nevada shortened its residency requirements from 6 months to three months, then to six weeks to encourage the business. Reno began a metamorphosis from a small commercial center to 'the divorce capital of the world', a reputation that lasted long after the industry did.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
The divorce business in Reno by 1910 has turned itself into almost an industry with the development of the divorce colony and the divorce ranches that will develop for people to stay for 6 months while they get their residency in Nevada. Fine shops will be seen in downtown Reno to cater to this divorce crowd.

NARRATOR:
Reno became a cosmopolitan city, still small in size but with the rich and famous filling its hotels, dude ranches, restaurants, and nightclubs.

From this the state's leaders learned how profitable it can be to entice people to Nevada for things that other states don't provide. Nevada built its future on this concept.

NARRATOR:
A new city appeared in 1903 when the Central Pacific railroad turned some ranchland east of Reno into a company town. It was named for governor John Sparks and incorporated in 1905. Its population nearly tripled in 15 years and unlike railroad towns that wither with the decline of rail traffic, Sparks became a large and prosperous city.

In 1900, Churchill County was one of the least populated and poorest counties in Nevada. A scattering of small ranches spread out from the tiny town of Stillwater, the county seat. Then the Newlands project poured nearly 10-million federal dollars into the area.

Ultimately, a thousand farms and ranches were using of tens of thousands of irrigated acres around the new towns of Fallon and Fernely.

Churchill County had a new, lasting economy.

Among the many towns and mining camps that appeared during the first decade of the century was an isolated railroad station with few prospects.

MICHAEL GREEN:
Las Vegas looked pretty barren around 1900. There were a couple of dozen people here. Las Vegas around 1900 is largely a one-person operation, and the one person, was a woman: Helen J. Stewart who owned over 800 acres of land including the Las Vegas ranch which had originally been the Mormon mission.

NARRATOR:
Helen Stewart had come to the Las Vegas Ranch with her husband Archibald in 1882. When he was killed in a mysterious shooting 2 years later, she was left with 4 children and an isolated, desert ranch. She made the best of it, making the ranch a roadside stop and message center.

Remote, hot, lacking any rich mineral deposits... there was little reason for this ranch and roadside reststop to become much more than it already was - except that the railroad was coming.

Stewart sold most of the property to Senator William Clark of Montana, a copper baron, who would then build a line between Salt Lake and Los Angeles going through southern Nevada.

In 1905 the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad auctioned off 1200 lots establishing the new town of Las Vegas.

Helen Stewart became an institution, a social and cultural leader for more than two decades. Eventually she was dubbed the "First Lady of Las Vegas."

MICHAEL GREEN:
Las Vegas in 1906-07 would have been 1 or 2 years old. And I think like most infants of age 1 or 2 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 did not 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 5th which is now Las Vegas Blvd, until the mid-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'd be called the gateway to the dam, gateway to Boulder Dam or Hoover Dam depending on who you were asking at the time. So, that ties in with the fact that early Las Vegas was a bridge to somewhere else. It was a gateway. Eventually it became the way.

There's a lot of irony in Las Vegas now being the resort mecca that it is, because it has always catered to travelers. In the old days though it was catering to travelers going somewhere else.

GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE
NARRATOR:
Railroad construction boomed in the first decade of the century. By 1909, sixteen new railroads, plus extensions to some older lines had been built. At times, more workers were employed building tracks than mining ore.

Short lines quickly cropped up wherever mines needed to be served, mostly in southern Nevada. Some lasted only as long as the ore did.

Besides creating new towns such as Caliente, Sparks and Las Vegas, the railroads linked Nevada to the rest of the nation. Additionally, by 1907 northern and southern Nevada were connected by rail. That may have been a prime opportunity to head off Nevada's north/south split personality.

MICHAEL GREEN:
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 you think about how George Wingfield for example, makes his millions in Goldfield and to some extent in Tonopah and moves on to Reno and there are then those connections between Reno and central Nevada while Las Vegas has its connections to central Nevada. It's almost as if the two ships almost met. And instead the two ships end up passing in the night.

NARRATOR:
A couple of years later, the trains would be taking people away from the boomtowns to Reno. Inevitably, the mines were giving out.

The vibrancy couldn't last forever. Tonopah and Goldfield, like most boom towns, flared, then flickered out. By 1909 Reno, not Goldfield, was the state's largest city.

Many of the new leaders from the southern camps were relocating to Reno and it was there that they took on the question: What now for Nevada?

WHAT NOW FOR NEVADA?
WILLIAM ROWLEY:
And so Nevada is really faced with a very difficult economic problem. In other words, its resource, its natural resource economy had failed it. And so if you have a state in which its natural resource economy has failed it, I oftentimes say that it has to turn elsewhere and where else can it turn but to human resources for a new economy of some type in the 20th century.

Well, it made that choice in terms of I guess you would say in term of exploiting the foibles of human society, the human make-up, human nature if you will. And some would say the vices of human nature are going to be seized upon by this essentially resource-less state as it starts to move into the 20th century.

NARRATOR:
Nevada began to market activities that other states frowned upon: gambling, easy divorce, prizefighting, prostitution.

Meanwhile, reform-minded factions and progressive politicians such as Francis Newlands were trying to halt their spread. Governor Tasker Oddie supported tougher divorce legislation and a prohibition on open gambling.

JAMES HULSE:
In 1909 the Nevada legislature was persuaded to make gambling illegal. And this was a crusade led by some women's groups in Reno, by President Stubbs of the University of Nevada. And I think President Stubbs thought the university could never prosper while Reno had a reputation for prostitution or gambling and so on. And so the legislature did outlaw gambling and it ceased or at least it went underground in 1910 only to be restored as a legal possibility in 1931.

NARRATOR:
Joseph Stubbs made the University a moral voice. It took an activist role and tried to influence the state's future.

JAMES HULSE:
He was one of the remarkable men in the early, the state's early history. He was president of the university for 20 years, 1894 till 1914. He was a voice of conscience and of reason. I think he helped Nevadans to believe that they could indeed have a university and a society with some sort of moral standards that were higher than those that the old frontier, the old mining and railroad frontier had left us.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
He was intent upon building ah the university and creating a moral atmosphere, as he often emphasized, in which the university could flourish. And he was constantly complaining about the existence of the immorality in Reno, and particularly the existence of legalized prostitution in downtown Reno, constantly telling the male students to stay away from these sorts of dens of iniquity and to lead moral and upright lives.

These were people of great hope, of good hope, but it's not going to work. The particular kinds of reforms and visions in many respects are not going to work at least on the surface in this society.

NARRATOR:
Their efforts couldn't match the pull of economic opportunity. Reformers like Stubbs and Newlands couldn't over power George Wingfield and the other proponents of a wide-open state.

WILLIAM ROWLEY:
Newlands is very much opposed to the kind of society that some of his opponents were supporting. And of course George Wingfield is going to emerge rather subtly, well not too subtly either, as an opponent of Newlands' ideals for the future of Nevada. Newlands is going to see this morality situation, the addressing of morality as very important for the state of Nevada. But Wingfield supported what I guess we can call the 'saloon crowd' and the saloon crowds' kind of view of what society should be. In other words government should stay out of these kinds of questions. If people wanted to have the open saloon, fine, if they wanted to have legalized and open prostitution in the society, fine, liberalized divorce, just fine too. But Newlands could not go along with that kind of view as what he would see as the future and ideal society in this state.

NARRATOR:
The boom town spirit prevailed.

SALLY ZANJANI:
I think that you can still see the shape of today's Nevada in many ways back there 1900, because adventuring and 'seeing the elephant ' was such a large element of the mining booms and drew so many people to those camps. I think that it was in many ways the forerunner of today's tourist economy. Ah, the saloons did an enormous business in the mining camps. Their payrolls were very close to those of the mines, and that was tourism in many ways. Moreover the general attitudes of the mining camp, tolerance, gambling was okay, a lot of other things were okay that weren't okay in the views that prevailed in small town America. That's still around of course and that's Nevada's image in the nation, the place where anything goes. And it had a bigger effect in Nevada than perhaps in other states where there was mining because mining was so dominant here that the mining mindset prevailed in a way that it didn't in California or Colorado or some of those other states.

JEROME EDWARDS:
It's an aberration among states. I think it always has been. In the 19th century it was terribly dependent on one industry, mining. Very without really the economic wherewithal to make it. Always boom and bust and always last in population. In the 20th century, the state sort of re-invents itself or re-creates itself. But again it becomes even more of an aberration because it tries to - some of this is studied policy and some of it just occurs by accident - but you legalize things, or re-legalize things, many of them part of your pioneer heritage, that are illegal elsewhere or very difficult to obtain elsewhere. And in the long run the re-packaging is overwhelmingly successful. Not all components of it are but certainly gambling is overwhelmingly successful. It's a remarkable state.

JAMES HULSE:
In a way a there's a spirit of independence shall we say, almost militant independence in much of Nevada in many of the places that flows from and descends from that attitude. The mining business, much of the cattleman's business, much of the attitude that the state has toward gambling and toward what relaxed social policies are in effect the descendents of that whole attitude. So I would say much of the philosophy, if that term isn't too pretentious, much of the public attitude is in a way derived from the frontier days that were still very much with us 100 years ago.

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