The second boom, and the land nobody claimed

1900

Jim Butler found silver in central Nevada, in country the Comstock rush had ridden straight past. The strike reversed thirty years of decline inside a decade.

why it is Nevada’s The population had fallen every census since 1880. Tonopah stopped it. Nevada’s statehood had been openly discussed as a mistake worth undoing; the second boom is what made that conversation stop.

1900 discovery; the census turns back upward at 1910.

1902; peak about 1906–08

Gold thirty miles south of Tonopah produced the largest boomtown in Nevada’s history — around twenty thousand people, a stock exchange, and in 1907 a labour war serious enough that federal troops were sent. Wyatt Earp had run a saloon at Tonopah in 1902. Virgil Earp came to Goldfield as a deputy sheriff and died there of pneumonia in October 1905.

why it is Nevada’s The Earps are the tell. The men who made Tombstone famous ended their working lives in Nevada mining camps twenty years later, because that is where the frontier had gone. Goldfield is the last true boomtown in the American West, and today it holds a few hundred people.

Virgil Earp died at Goldfield, October 1905; Wyatt’s Tonopah saloon is well attested. Goldfield’s peak population, like every camp figure on this page, is a contemporary estimate rather than a count. The governor who called for the troops in 1907 was John Sparks — a Texas-born cattleman who had run enormous herds in Elko County and came to the office straight out of the range economy of Chapter VIII. He died in office in 1908, and the city next to Reno carries his name.

23 February 1911

A fire started in the small hours at the 1,166-foot level of the Tonopah-Belmont. Seventeen men died of smoke. Big Bill Murphy made two successful rescue trips and did not come back from the third; the town put up a monument to him and held one of the largest funerals in state history. The response afterwards is the part that matters: senior officials attempted to conceal the extent of the death toll, anger in the town ran high enough that violence was feared, and an official inquest interviewed some seventy people. No charges were ever filed. Four years earlier, four hundred yards away, the Mizpah had opened — five storeys, two hundred thousand dollars, the tallest building in Nevada for the next twenty-five years.

why it is Nevada’s The Mizpah today sells the Lady in Red: a prostitute murdered on the fifth floor by a jealous lover, ranked by USA Today as America’s most haunted hotel. Look at what that story has done. Tonopah’s real horror is dated, located, and has an office responsible for it — and the ghost replaces an industrial mass death with a nameless woman killed by a boyfriend in a luxury hotel. An event with a culpable party becomes an event with no culpable party, and the version with no culpable party is the one you can attach a room rate to. That is close to a general rule in American haunting: the death gets relocated from the workplace to the bedroom, from an employer’s decision to romantic violence. Nobody runs a ghost tour about a mine superintendent. And the exception proves it — the hotel does sit over the tunnel network joining the shafts, so the miners-in-the-basement piece is the one part of the legend that points at the actual dead, and it is the piece nobody builds the marketing around.

Fire 23 February 1911 at the 1,166-ft level; seventeen dead; Murphy’s two successful trips and his death on the third; concealment of the toll, an inquest of about seventy witnesses, no charges. ⚠ Corrections to the brief that raised this: the fire was at 1,166 feet, not five hundred; the superintendent is named in the record as T. F. M. Fitzgerald but the specific claim that he ordered men to work into a known fire is NOT confirmed by the sources reached here — what is documented is “a series of miscalculations and mistakes by senior officials.” Do not assert the order. The death toll is also given as fourteen in some tellings; pin it to the coroner’s record before quoting. On the ghost: no documented death underlies the Lady in Red — the method, floor and rooms all vary between tellings and no body, inquest or newspaper has been tied to her, which is the signature of folklore rather than of a killing. The hotel’s Wyatt Earp bar names a man who was in Tonopah around 1902 and never in a building that opened in 1907.

usually told as 1902; the mortality record points to 1905

The Old Tonopah Cemetery holds roughly three hundred graves and closed in April 1911 because it was full. A large share are attributed to an outbreak in the camp’s early years, usually called the 1902 plague and left mysterious.

why it is Nevada’s The number and the date both move depending on who is telling it, and the drift runs in a consistent direction — earlier, larger and more mysterious. That is the same machinery as the Lady in Red operating on a real event rather than an invented one: a documented sanitation failure in a boomtown becomes a plague of unknown origin, because the second version is the one worth retelling.

⚠ Genuinely unresolved and carried here as a warning, not a fact. The ~300 figure is the cemetery’s total interments, not the outbreak’s toll — those are routinely conflated. And the State Board of Health record points to 56 deaths between January and April 1905 from pneumonia, attributed to poor sanitation near the slaughterhouses, rather than to a mysterious 1902 event. Cemetery closed April 1911. Resolve against the Board of Health returns before using any figure.

troops ordered 4 December 1907; the act approved 29 January 1908; troops out 7 March 1908

During the Goldfield labour war, Governor Sparks asked Washington for troops, representing that destruction of life and property was probable and that the state had no militia and would be powerless. Roosevelt sent three hundred men under Funston in December 1907. His own commission then went and looked, and reported the town quiet — that the conditions had not warranted the appeal at all. Roosevelt still would not pull the soldiers straight out, and instead made their continued presence conditional: Nevada was to raise a police force of its own, immediately. The legislature was called into special session and the Nevada State Police was created by an act approved 29 January 1908. The last federal troops left on 7 March.

why it is Nevada’s Nevada’s state police force exists because a governor who came out of the cattle business raised a false alarm on the mine owners’ behalf, and the President made a permanent armed institution the price of the troops he had already sent. It is the cleanest example on this page of the pattern the whole state runs on — an outside power arrives, and what it leaves behind outlasts the reason it came. The dam left water. Goldfield left a police force.

Troops ordered 4 December 1907 to Gen. Funston on Sparks’s appeal; the presidential commission found the appeal unwarranted; the act creating the state police was approved in special session 29 January 1908; federal withdrawal completed 7 March 1908. Verified independently of the brief that raised it.

1906 onward

Eastern Nevada turned out to hold low-grade copper in enormous volume — worthless to a prospector with a pan, viable to a corporation with a railroad and an open pit. Ely became a company operation, not a camp.

why it is Nevada’s The change in kind matters more than the change in metal. Gold and silver made towns of individuals; copper made a payroll. Nevada’s third boom was the first one that produced employees instead of prospectors, and it is the one that lasted longest.

Nevada Consolidated Copper operations at Ely from 1906; open-pit extraction dependent on rail access.

named 1868; the arch 1926; Harolds Club 1935, Harrah’s 1937

Charles Crocker named the townsite for Jesse Lee Reno, a Union general killed at South Mountain in 1862 who never set foot in Nevada. The university moved down from Elko in 1885. Reno built the divorce trade first, put up its arch in 1926 and took the slogan from a contest three years later, and then built the modern casino business: Harolds Club in 1935, Bill Harrah from 1937 — marketing, credit, carpet, women encouraged onto the floor. Reno taught Las Vegas how to run a casino.

why it is Nevada’s For sixty years Reno was the gambling city and Las Vegas was a railroad stop, and the reversal around 1960 is the largest single shift in Nevada’s internal balance. Reno is also the state’s one true civic town — capital-adjacent, with the university, the courts and the old money — which is exactly why the newer, louder thing grew up three hundred miles away where none of that was watching.

Named 1868 for Gen. Jesse Lee Reno; university relocated from Elko 1885; the Reno Arch erected 1926, the slogan adopted from a 1929 contest; Harolds Club 1935, Harrah’s 1937.

Act signed 1902; Derby Dam and the canal complete 1905

Nevada’s Francis Newlands — then a member of the HOUSE, not yet a senator — wrote and carried the Reclamation Act of 1902, and the Truckee–Carson Project — later renamed for him — was among the very first authorised under it. Derby Dam went in on the Truckee twenty miles below Reno, and a thirty-one-mile canal carried the water south-east into the Lahontan Valley. It irrigates about 57,000 acres around Fallon and the benches at Fernley. Fallon grew alfalfa, dairy and the cantaloupes it is still known for.

why it is Nevada’s The only chapter in Nevada’s history where anyone made the desert farm, and it took an act of Congress and a diverted river to do it. But look where the water came from. The Truckee feeds Pyramid Lake — the lake in the 1860 war, the lake the Northern Paiute lived on. Derby Dam took roughly half that river before it arrived. The same water runs through Chapter I, Chapter VII and this row: first it fed them, then they fought for it, then the federal government diverted it to grow melons.

✅ CORRECTED: this row previously called him Senator Newlands in 1902. He sat in the House from 1893 and entered the Senate on 4 March 1903 — after the Reclamation Act was signed on 17 June 1902. The act that carries his name was carried by a congressman. Reclamation Act 1902; project authorised 14 March 1903; Derby Dam begun October 1903 and completed 20 May 1905; canal ~31 miles; about 57,000 acres served. ⚠ The Newlands Project is very often called the first federal reclamation project and the sources split — some say first authorised, others place it among the original five. Say “one of the first,” or name the specific claim you mean.

Reno from 1888; Congress 1893; Senate 1903–1917

Francis Newlands came into Comstock money by marriage — his first wife was the daughter of William Sharon, the Bank of California’s Comstock magnate. She died in 1882, he was made trustee of the Sharon estate and its Nevada property, and he moved to Reno in 1888 to manage it. He went to Congress in 1893 for the Silver Party and to the Senate in 1903. He wrote the Newlands Resolution that annexed Hawaii in 1898, drove the Reclamation Act of 1902 that created the Bureau of Reclamation, and backed the National Park Service in 1916. He was also the senator Sparks enlisted to keep Roosevelt’s troops at Goldfield.

why it is Nevada’s Trace the money. Comstock silver became a Sharon fortune, the fortune became a trusteeship, the trusteeship put a man in Reno, Reno sent him to Washington on the Silver Party ticket, and from there he annexed Hawaii and rewrote the water law of the American West. Nevada’s ore is finished by 1900 and its consequences are still moving — the state exports its silver money as federal policy long after the silver has gone.

Sharon estate trusteeship from 1882; Reno from 1888; House 1893, Senate 1903 until his death 24 December 1917. Newlands Resolution 1898; Reclamation Act 1902.

1909 article; 1912 Democratic National Convention

At the 1912 Democratic convention Newlands proposed a “White Plank” for the party platform: repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, and immigration restricted to whites. In a 1909 article in the Annals of the American Academy he argued for returning Black Americans to Africa, describing them as a race of children. He told the New York Times in 1912 that the country should be a white man’s country and should say so plainly. He developed Chevy Chase outside Washington and worked to keep non-white residents out of it.

why it is Nevada’s And here is the pair. He founded Chevy Chase with William M. Stewart — the other Nevada senator, and the man who drafted the Fifteenth Amendment. One Nevada senator wrote it; his business partner, the other Nevada senator, moved to repeal it. Both fortunes came off the Comstock. Read this against Chapter XI: the segregation Las Vegas practised in the 1940s had already been proposed as national policy, thirty years earlier, by the senator whose name is on the state’s water.

1912 Democratic National Convention “White Plank”; Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1909; New York Times, 1912. Renaming campaigns are live at Chevy Chase Circle and at Newlands Park in Reno.

computed from the NDWR Newlands water-righted areas layer, August 2026

The state publishes every water-righted parcel in the Newlands Project. Counted: 1,082 parcels carrying 28,889 acres. Split by permit type, 711 Contract parcels hold 16,768 acres, 322 Permit parcels hold 1,937, and just 49 Pre-Contract parcels — the oldest rights — hold 10,184 acres. Median parcel size is 7.5 acres, and 600 of the parcels, fifty-five per cent, are ten acres or less.

why it is Nevada’s Two things, and the first is prior appropriation made visible. The oldest rights are 4.5 per cent of the parcels and 35 per cent of the acreage. Seniority concentrates. In a shortage those 49 holdings stay whole while six hundred small ones go dry entirely, because prior appropriation has no proportional sharing — and that is the mechanism that killed Metropolis stated as a distribution rather than as an anecdote. The second is that a median parcel of seven and a half acres is not a farm. It is what happens when irrigated ground gets subdivided as a town grows onto it: Fernley and Fallon have been suburbanising onto project land, so the water rights that justified the project in 1902 are increasingly attached to house lots. Which is exactly why the compensation for the 2008 canal breach could be financed by selling water to the Reno-Sparks municipal supply — agriculture-to-city transfer is already the direction of travel, parcel by parcel.

Computed from the published NDWR layer: 1,082 parcels, 28,889 acres. ⚠ THE ACREAGE DOES NOT RECONCILE with the ~57,000 acres the Newlands Project is usually said to serve, and the honest position is that I do not know why. The layer may cover one division rather than both, or one class of right rather than all. Do not report this as “the project halved” — resolve what the layer actually covers against Reclamation's own project figures first. That discrepancy is the most useful thing in this row, because it is checkable.

breach 5 January 2008; settlement approved 2016; the lining fight ongoing

Fernley was settled around 1904 by people drawn out by the Newlands Project’s advertising — free land and cheap water. It has no other reason to be there. At about four in the morning on 5 January 2008 a section of the Truckee Canal’s earthen embankment gave way: roughly 590 homes flooded, water eight feet deep in places, more than a dozen people lifted off roofs, about 3,500 evacuated in 26-degree weather. Nobody was killed. The cause was heavy winter rain on a full system and an embankment weakened by decades of burrowing muskrats, beavers and gophers, with holes as deep as twenty-five feet. A rupture nearby had flooded about sixty homes in 1996. The class action settled at $18.1 million, approved in 2016 — and to finance it, the irrigation district’s members voted to sell water rights to the Truckee Meadows Water Authority.

why it is Nevada’s Two things, and both are this volume’s mechanisms in the present tense. First, the compensation for a canal failure was funded by moving water from agriculture to the Reno-Sparks municipal supply. That is the modern transfer running in plain sight — legal, priced, willingly signed, and still a reallocation. Second, and better: Reclamation moved to line the canal in concrete so it cannot breach again, and Fernley objected. The canal has leaked for a hundred and twenty years and that leakage recharges the aquifer the town’s wells draw from, so sealing it fixes the flood while removing the water supply for around twenty thousand people. The government’s position is that the water belongs to the taxpayers and Fernley is claiming a right that does not exist. It has been through federal court, the Ninth Circuit and the Nevada Supreme Court. A century ago the federal government took water from people who had a right to it; now a town claims a right to water the government is losing by accident, and the government says an accident is not a right. Same river, same canal, same agency, argument inverted.

Breach 5 January 2008, ~590 homes, ~3,500 evacuated; prior 1996 rupture; rodent burrowing to ~25 ft; $18.1m class settlement approved 2016 covering about 1,200 people, financed by a TCID members’ vote to sell water rights to TMWA; the canal-lining litigation through the Ninth Circuit and the Nevada Supreme Court. ⚠ The lining case is live and its posture moves — verify status before citing an outcome. Fernley incorporated 2001, is around 20,000 people, has had an Amazon fulfilment centre since the late 1990s, and its Victory Logistics District drew a Microsoft land purchase reported at $70.5m in 2025: a town founded on irrigated alfalfa now running on warehouses and data centres, still depending legally and physically on a dirt ditch dug in 1905.

Walker River decree 1930s; Orr Ditch 1944; Alpine 1980

Nevada water runs on prior appropriation, not riparian right: first in time, first in right. A right is a date, a volume, a place of use and a purpose — and in a shortage the junior rights go dry entirely while the senior ones stay whole. There is no proportional sharing. Three federal decrees still govern the three northern rivers: the Walker River decree from the 1930s, Orr Ditch on the Truckee in 1944, and Alpine on the Carson in 1980. The State Engineer administers the rest, and many basins are formally designated because the paper rights exceed what the ground actually yields.

why it is Nevada’s This is the rule that killed Metropolis, and it explains that town better than jackrabbits do. Its rights were junior to Lovelock’s, so when the water was short it did not get less — it got none. The town died of seniority. And notice what prior appropriation does to everything else on this page: it converts water into a queue position fixed at the moment of filing, which means the people who arrived first hold permanently, and the people the water was taken from arrived thousands of years too early to be in the queue at all. A system that ranks by date of claim cannot see a people who never filed one. That is the whole of Orr Ditch in one sentence, and it is why the remedy in 1990 had to be a statute rather than a water right.

Prior appropriation as Nevada’s governing doctrine; three standing federal decrees — Walker River (1930s), Orr Ditch (1944), Alpine (1980); designated basins where paper rights exceed yield.

filed 1913; decree 8 September 1944; affirmed by the Supreme Court 1983

The taking was statutory before it was ever judicial: section 26 of the Indian appropriation act of 21 April 1904 provided for disposal of the part of the Pyramid Lake Reservation that fell inside the Newlands project, and Congress was still amending it in 1926. Nine years after that, in 1913, the United States sued to quiet title to the whole Truckee, naming virtually every water user in Nevada. It represented two interests in the same action: the Newlands Project, which needed the appropriation, and the Pyramid Lake Reservation, which held a federally reserved right in the same water. The Orr Ditch Decree was entered on 8 September 1944, thirty-one years later, and nobody appealed. In 1973 the United States sued again, this time for the Tribe, seeking a right sufficient to sustain the fishery; the Tribe intervened in 1974. The claim was held barred by the 1944 decree, and the Supreme Court affirmed in 1983.

why it is Nevada’s The Tribe was bound by a judgment its own trustee had negotiated while simultaneously acting for the party taking its water — and the bar held. This is why the Newlands story is not a water-policy story. Nothing here was drought or engineering failure: the loss was executed through a properly constituted federal court by the government that held the duty to prevent it, and then made permanent by the doctrine that you only get one go. The cui-ui — endemic to that lake, and the fish the Pyramid Lake Paiute are named for — went onto the endangered list in 1967. Redress came only by statute, in the 1990 settlement act; the lake has recovered roughly twenty feet since.

United States v. Orr Water Ditch Co. (D. Nev.), filed 1913, decree 8 September 1944. Nevada v. United States, 463 U.S. 110 (1983) held the decree preclusive — confirming that the United States had acted for both Reservation and Project in the same suit. Cui-ui listed endangered 1967, with the Newlands diversion named as cause. Truckee–Carson–Pyramid Lake Water Rights Settlement Act 1990. ⚠ The lake’s decline is variously given as about 26 metres, 80 feet, or 87 feet below its 1905 level, and an “87 feet” figure also circulates as Winnemucca Lake’s former depth — the two are easy to conflate. Say “roughly eighty feet” and name which lake.

townsite auction 15 May 1905

Archibald Stewart was killed at the Las Vegas Rancho in 1884, and his widow Helen J. Stewart ran the ranch alone for eighteen years — postmistress, rancher and effectively the only permanent authority in southern Nevada. In 1902 she sold it to the railroad. The San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake — later absorbed into the Union Pacific — needed water and a division point on the run from southern California to Salt Lake City. It laid a grid beside the tracks and auctioned the lots over two days in May 1905.

why it is Nevada’s The same springs. Armijo’s caravan watered there in 1830 because it was the only water on the southern trail; the Mormons built their fort on it in 1855 and gave it up; the railroad bought it in 1905 for exactly the reason the caravans had used it. Las Vegas is a railroad water stop that was sold at auction — and it is now the largest city in the state, in a corner that was in Arizona until 1866.

Townsite auction 15 May 1905 by the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. The continuity of the site from the Old Spanish Trail through the Mormon mission to the railroad is a matter of geography — one set of springs.

1914–18 boom; 1920 census

The First World War drove demand for copper, tungsten and manganese, and Nevada’s mines ran hard for four years. The demand ended with the war. Tonopah and Goldfield were already failing, and the 1920 census recorded a state smaller than it had been in 1910.

why it is Nevada’s Nevada was the only state in the union to lose population between 1910 and 1920. Twice in fifty years the state had been built by a metal and then abandoned by the market for it, and by 1920 the pattern was impossible to mistake for bad luck. That recognition is what produced the deliberate change of business in 1931.

Federal census: 81,875 (1910), 77,407 (1920) — the only state to decline over that decade.

March 1931

Governor Fred Balzar signed two bills in the same month: one re-legalising wide-open casino gambling, the other cutting the residency required for a divorce to six weeks. Work on the dam on the Colorado began the same year.

why it is Nevada’s Reno had been selling divorces since the residency fell to three months in 1927, and its hotels, boarding houses and dude ranches existed to hold a person for exactly the length of the wait. Six weeks made that trade national. This is the founding of Nevada’s hospitality industry, and it is worth being clear about what it was: an economy built on legally holding somebody in a room for a fixed period, in a state that had proved it could not sell anything it dug up. Nevada chose to sell what other states had outlawed — and it chose it in the third year of the Depression, out of an economy that had failed twice.

Assembly Bill 98, signed 19 March 1931; the six-week residency act the same session; dam construction begins 1931. Residency had already been reduced to three months in 1927.

authorised 1928; construction 1931–36; Boulder City founded 1931

The Boulder Canyon Project Act was signed in 1928 and construction ran from 1931 to 1936. Thousands of men came for the work in the worst years of the Depression, and the government built Boulder City to house them — a company town where gambling and liquor were banned outright, thirty miles from a city that had just legalised both.

why it is Nevada’s Water and power, in a state that had never had either in quantity. Everything Las Vegas becomes after 1940 runs on that reservoir and that generator. The dam is the last time an outside power arrived in Nevada, took what it came for and left something behind — and it is the only time the thing left behind was worth more than the thing taken.

the note said construction began in Boulder Canyon

The project was authorised as the Boulder Canyon Project and the dam is still often called Boulder Dam, but the site chosen was Black Canyon, downstream. The name is from the legislation, not the geology. On the concrete: the Bureau of Reclamation’s own comparison is that the 4½ million cubic yards would build a two-lane road from Seattle to Miami, or a four-foot sidewalk around the earth at the equator. ⚠ The tonnage cited moves between roughly 3.25 and 4.5 million cubic yards depending on whether the appurtenant works are counted with the dam — use Reclamation’s figure and say which it is.

filled 1935–37; reading below dated July 2026

The reservoir behind the dam is the largest in the United States by design capacity — about 34.9 cubic kilometres, ahead of Lake Powell’s 30.9 — and it backs up more than a hundred miles into two states. Seventeen main generators in the powerhouse turn roughly two thousand megawatts.

why it is Nevada’s This is what converted Las Vegas from a dusty railroad division point into a city: water, power, and several thousand men with wages in the middle of the Depression. Everything the southern half of the state has been since 1940 sits on that reservoir.

⚠ “Largest reservoir in the United States” is true of its CAPACITY and badly misleading about its CONTENTS. As of July 2026 Lake Mead was about 25% full and had fallen to its lowest level since it was first filled in 1937; Lake Powell was near 22%. Never state the superlative without the date and the fill — the headline is a design specification, not a measurement, and on this page the distinction is the whole method.

Taylor Grazing Act, 28 June 1934

Congress closed the public domain to unregulated grazing. Ranchers now needed permits, issued through grazing districts and tied to owned base property. A man with a band of sheep and no land could no longer run them, and the itinerant herder was legislated out of existence.

why it is Nevada’s And here is where the whole page arrives. Because nobody could ever homestead Nevada — 160 acres will not carry stock here, and 640 will not either — the land was never taken up, and so the federal government still holds roughly 80% of the state, the highest share in the union. Nevada is mostly federal land today for exactly the reason it was crossed rather than settled for eighty years: it would not support anyone who stopped.

Taylor Grazing Act 1934. ✅ CLOSED — the federal share was previously carried here as a vague 80-to-85 per cent. The Congressional Research Service report R42346, Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data, puts Nevada at 80.1%, the highest of any state, with the BLM alone holding 47.3 million acres — 84.1% of all federal land in Nevada. The 85% figure in wide circulation appears to conflate those two percentages. Cite 80.1% and name the CRS report.