Nevada

Narrative

Nevada has been a land of boom and bust from its very beginnings as a territory. The evidence of the latest boom is apparent as your plane descends for a landing at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport. You see a pyramid rising from the desert; just across the street from the Sphinx-like lion are New York City-style skyscrapers. Nearby are a fair-sized Eiffel Tower, the gondolas of Venice, the mansard roofs of Paris, and a flaming pirate ship. But get around town and you see signs of bust-giant hotels and condominiums with no lights on at night, retail space up for rent, subdivisions where half the houses are unoccupied. All this is set in one of North America's most forbidding landscapes, a bowl-shaped desert valley rimmed by barren peaks. "Geologically, Nevada is a gigantic, post-oceanic ditch between the Rockies and the Sierras, filled with rough, secondary mountain ranges that stack and twine across the naked landscape like ranks of FEMA house trailers in a storage lot," writes Las Vegas art critic Dave Hickey.

A similar description, minus the reference to government-issued trailers, might have been made by the prospectors who first came to mine silver and gold in Virginia City, on a mountain 6,700 feet above sea level, or by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, who documented the heyday of the Comstock Lode, discovered in 1859, which produced $500 million worth of silver in the next 20 years. President Abraham Lincoln's Republicans made Nevada a state in 1864, even though it did not meet the population requirement, in order to win three more electoral votes. But that boom went bust, and by 1900, Nevada had only 42,000 residents, down 68% from its 1880 peak. It seemed questionable whether this was a viable state. In the early 1930s, when there were still only 91,000 Nevadans, the state government was about to go bankrupt. So Nevada decided to roll the dice. It reduced its residency requirement for divorce to six weeks and legalized gambling. Catering to what most Americans considered sin-casinos, pawnshops, divorce mills, quick-wedding chapels, and even legal brothels-turned out to be good business. The 6.75% gambling receipts tax generated enough revenue to make it unnecessary for Nevada to impose income, corporate, or inheritance taxes.