Chapter VI
6 entries · 1 corrected · 0 contested
The only people who tried to settle Nevada on purpose in this period had fled the United States to do it — and the United States arrived around them within a year.
Executive Order 44, 27 October 1838; Carthage 27 June 1844
Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri ordered that the Mormons be “exterminated or driven from the state.” They rebuilt at Nauvoo, Illinois — briefly one of the largest cities in the state, swollen by heavy convert emigration from England. In 1844 a mob killed Joseph Smith in the jail at Carthage. The exodus west began in February 1846.
why it is Nevada’s This is why the settlement of the Great Basin was undertaken by people looking for somewhere outside American jurisdiction. It sets up the irony in the next row.
Executive Order 44 as issued; the British Mission emigration from 1837 onward is well documented.
24 July 1847
Brigham Young’s advance company entered the valley in July 1847 and began laying out a city.
why it is Nevada’s They left the United States to get there. Six months later the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo put the border back around them. The country they fled caught up with them in under a year without moving a soldier.
Arrival 24 July 1847; treaty signed 2 February 1848. The sequence is the point, and it is not disputed.
Deseret proposed 1849; the Compromise 9 September 1850
The settlers proposed an enormous State of Deseret in 1849. Congress refused it. Instead the Compromise of 1850 cut the Mexican Cession into two territories — Utah in the north, New Mexico in the south — admitted California as a free state, and left the slavery question in both territories to popular sovereignty.
why it is Nevada’s Everything that is now Nevada was placed under a government in Salt Lake City, three hundred miles east over a mountain range. Nevada’s first American government was a Mormon one, and it existed because of a bargain over slavery.
Compromise of 1850; Utah Territory organic act, 9 September 1850.
1850
Mormon emigrants bound for the California fields, held up in the Carson Valley waiting for the Sierra snow to clear, panned colour out of a wash running down off Sun Mountain. The camp at its mouth became Dayton.
why it is Nevada’s The first gold found in Nevada, nine years before the Comstock — and found by people who were only waiting for a pass to open. The placers were thin and the diggings stayed small, but they kept a few hundred prospectors in that canyon for a decade. They are the ones who were standing there in 1859.
the note said “in Tahoe, a small gold find in Dayton”
Gold Canyon runs into the Carson River at Dayton, on the east side of the Sierra — not at Lake Tahoe, which is over the crest and drains the other way.
Genoa 1851; Las Vegas 1855
John and Enoch Reese, Salt Lake merchants, established a trading post in the Carson Valley in 1851 — Mormon Station, provisioning emigrants coming off the desert before the last climb. In 1854 the Utah legislature organised Carson County around it and Orson Hyde renamed the place Genoa. In 1855 thirty-two missionaries built an adobe fort at the Las Vegas springs, on the Old Spanish Trail, to hold the southern road and work among the Southern Paiute.
why it is Nevada’s Genoa is Nevada’s first permanent non-Native settlement; the Las Vegas fort is its oldest standing building. Both sat on a trail rather than on land anyone wanted — they are waystations, not colonies, and that is why they were so easy to give up.
Both foundations documented; Carson County organised 1854, renamed Genoa by Orson Hyde as probate judge.
1857–58
Washington declared Utah in rebellion and sent an army. The Nauvoo Legion blocked the canyons and burned the supply trains rather than give battle, and no set-piece engagement was ever fought. In the same panicked autumn a Mormon militia and Paiute allies massacred an emigrant train at Mountain Meadows. Brigham Young recalled the outlying settlers to defend the core — Genoa and Las Vegas were both emptied. Buchanan pardoned the territory in 1858; Young was replaced as governor by Alfred Cumming, and the army camped at Camp Floyd.
why it is Nevada’s Nevada’s one intentional colonization was called off by its own founders, for reasons that had nothing to do with Nevada. Within two years of the recall, silver was found forty miles from the abandoned post at Genoa.
The war produced no pitched battle — it is in no battle atlas for that reason. Pardon 1858; Cumming installed as governor.