Nevada wired its whole constitution to Washington to become a state in time
With a presidential election days away and its mailed constitution lost, Nevada sent the entire document by telegraph in October 1864, at a cost of $4,303.27, the priciest single telegram on record then. It became the 36th state on October 31 with only about 40,000 residents, well below the usual threshold.
Spanish explorers named the region for its snowy mountains, and those ranges help make Nevada one of the highest states by average altitude. It is also the driest, sitting in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada, and covers most of the Great Basin and a large slice of the Mojave Desert. In 2020, 80.1% of its land was managed by the federal government. Before Europeans arrived, the Goshute, Southern Paiute, Mohave and Washoe peoples lived there, and the region passed from New Spain to Mexico in 1821 and to the United States in 1848.
Silver made the state. The Comstock Lode under Virginia City, found in 1859, was the first major American silver strike, and the rush led Congress to carve Nevada Territory out of Utah Territory on March 2, 1861. Statehood was hurried to help secure Abraham Lincoln's re-election and Republican strength in Congress, though Lincoln won comfortably without Nevada's votes. The Battle Born nickname recalls that Civil War birth. Unusually, Nevada grew after joining the Union, taking more of Utah in 1866 and, in January 1867, the land south of the 37th parallel that now holds Las Vegas.
Mining faded late in the nineteenth century, then boomed again after a big silver strike at Tonopah in 1900. The Great Depression brought the decisive turn. Gambling, banned in 1909, was legalised again on March 19, 1931, alongside the most permissive divorce laws in the country, just eight days after the federal government awarded the construction contract for Boulder Dam, later renamed Hoover Dam.
The results are hard to overstate. In 1940 Nevada had just over 110,000 people, less than half the population of Wyoming, the next smallest state. Tourism is now its biggest employer, nearly three-quarters of residents live in Clark County around Las Vegas, and the state ranks fourth in the world for gold production. Locals insist the middle syllable rhymes with apple; a legislator once proposed recognising the other pronunciation, but his bill never got a vote.
Source: Nevada
