For many years Carson City was America’s smallest capital city. Far from lamenting the situation, civic boosters boasted about the town’s status as the population hovered around 1,500 in the 1920s and 1930s.
Such was not always Carson City’s lot in life. When optimistic pioneer Abraham Curry was laying out streets for his new town in 1858 he set aside ten acres specifically for a capitol - and Nevada wasn’t even a territory yet. But the next year the richest silver strike in the history of the country was made in the nearby Comstock and Carson City took on the importance of its namesake - frontier legend Christopher “Kit” Carson.
The town became a transportation hub and processor of the timber needed to build the Comstock mines. When the Nevada Territory was formed out of the Utah Territory in 1861 Carson City was designated as the capital city and when Abraham Lincoln created the 36th state in the Union on October 31, 1864 Carson City continued as the state capital. The population soared over 5,000 and as many as 36 trains a day rumbled through town.
By the 1880s the silver had played out in the Comstock and the Southern Pacific Railroad had built its line north of town. The population dwindled and would not reach its boom 1860s boom town levels for almost 100 years. In 1969 Ormsby County was dissolved and Carson City assumed control of 146 square miles of land and its people making Carson City is one of America’s largest seats of government physically. Today the city has more people than nine other capitals.
Few state capitals have retained as human a scale as Carson City. The original statehouse is still in use, shrouded in trees planted at the time of its construction, and most of the surrounding streets are residential. A 1991 ordinance specifies that no building within 500 feet can be built taller than its octagonal dome so there will be plenty of sky above when we begin our walking tour in the capitol’s shadow...
When gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1931 there were no paved streets and not a single traffic light. Today there are 122 licensed casinos open for play in town. Most of the gaming houses were originally built along Fremont Street (the street that got that first stop light and the initial thin layer of macadam). You can still play in the casino that received the first Las Vegas gaming license - the Northern Club that operates today as La Bayou. Other landmark casinos on Fremont Street include the Golden Nugget and Binion’s Horseshoe where the World Series of Poker was born.
In 1941 casinos began drifting out of town onto Highway 91 in an unincorporated community called Paradise. In time the road would become Las Vegas Boulevard and known around the world as The Strip. Most of the pioneering casinos on The Strip have been imploded but you can still gamble in heritage properties like the Tropicana and the Riviera. The Flamingo, the brainchild of mobster Bugsy Siegel, was the third casino to open on The Strip in 1946 and is the oldest resort still in operation on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Caesar’s Palace opened in 1960s as the first grand casino to break out of the motel-style casino mold and it reigned as the face of the Las Vegas Strip for decades. Evel Knievel jumped over fountains in the parking lot, Grand Prix drivers raced around the grounds and world championship boxing titles were decided at Caesar’s.
In 1989 Steve Wynn upped the ante with The Mirage that took Vegas upscale and the resorts grew bigger and more extravagant. Today nine of the ten largest hotels in America are in Las Vegas, and 25 of the country’s 32 biggest are in the city. The biggest of the big is the MGM Grand with nearly 8,000 rooms.
Today there are 29 casinos on The Strip. We will see them all and then take the monorail back to where we started. And like it does for everyone coming into Vegas by air we will see first...
For many years Carson City was America’s smallest capital city. Far from lamenting the situation, civic boosters boasted about the town’s status as the population hovered around 1,500 in the 1920s and 1930s.
From its very beginning as a toll crossing of the Truckee River in 1859, Reno was a place to stop on the way to somewhere else. The Pony Express rode through here, the Donner Party lingered a fatal few hours too long in Truckee Meadows, cattle drives crossed the river here and the railroads laid track through here. It was Charles Crocker who was one of the Big Four guiding the Central Pacific Railroad to link up with the Union Pacific Railroad in creating the Transcontinental Railroad who named the town in honor of General Jesse Lee Reno of West Virginia who was killed a few years earlier in the Civil War at the Battle of South Mountain. And the town was officially incorporated on May 9, 1868 when the railroad auctioned off some of its land for building lots.
Nothing symbolized the migratory nature of Reno more than its days as the Divorce Capital of the World. In the early 1900s an escape from an unhappy marriage only required six months of residency in Nevada and as the state’s largest city, Reno gained notoriety as the place to drop anchor for an unhappy spouse. The first “celebrity divorce” came in 1906 when Laura Corey, wife of the head of U.S. Steel, William Corey, came west from Pennsylvania to get “Reno-Vated.” And while most states would only grant a divorce for infidelity, Nevada issued divorce decrees for the asking. When other states attempted to muscle in on this source of cash infusion, Nevada dropped the residency requirement to three months and, in 1927, to only six weeks. In the decade that followed more than 30,000 marriages were dissolved in Reno.
If the divorce industry wasn’t unsavory enough to give Reno the tag of “Sin City,” there was its abundance of brothels (banned during World War II at the request of the United States Army) and the legalization of gambling in 1931. The modern casino, with its mix of entertainment and dining and hospitality, was birthed in Reno. So even though the town’s economy was historically grounded in transportation and mining, today Reno is a city of government and casino workers.
Our walking tour of the Biggest Little City in the World will visit Reno’s landmark casinos, past and present, but first we will begin where the town began with a half dug-out, half log shelter on the south bank of the Truckee River...
Tradition holds that Virginia City, one of the oldest established communities in Nevada, took its name from James Finney who was known as “Old Virginy.” Finney wasn’t even his name - he supposedly changed it from Fennimore after killing a man in his home state of Virginia. Virginia City sprang up virtually overnight after the discovery of the Comstock Lode, the first major silver strike in the United States, was revealed in 1859.
The silver had been unearthed accidentally a couple of years earlier by gold miners who were frustrated by heavy blue-black material that was clogging their gold-mining apparatus. Henry Tompkins Paige Comstock was left in charge of the prospecting cabin while the miners set out for San Francisco with samples to raise investors. They never made it over the Sierra Nevada mountains and Comstock claimed the cabin and land. But being an uneducated man he never really knew what he had. He eventually sold his mining shares for $11,000 and lost the money in business. In 1870 while prospecting in Montana Comstock put a revolver to his head and killed himself.
There were far more losers than winners in the rush to the Comstock but the winners won very big at “the richest place on earth.” There was somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 residents during the height of the boomtown, who could keep count, and Virginia City was the most important town in the West between Denver and San Francisco. But it was all over almost as soon as it began. The Comstock Lode was playing out by the end of the 1870s and the mines were closed before the dawn of the 20th century.
Disappearing silver was not the only calamity to befall Virginia City in the 1870s. There had been four destructive fires since the town was built in 1859 but a fifth, that began early on the morning of October 26, 1875 when a coal oil lamp was knocked over in a boarding house on A Street, dwarfed them all. When strong winds finished whipping the flames around town 33 blocks of structures were leveled, including most of the town’s business district.
The population dipped into the hundreds and the town slumbered for the better part of 70 years but never quite vanished from the map. It was, of all things, television that jolted Virginia City back to life with the popularity of the western Bonanza in the 1960s. Although the Cartwrights were ranchers and not miners curious viewers began showing up to see that town near the Ponderosa Ranch where Little Joe was always getting in trouble in - Virginia City.
Many of the old buildings and an authentic Wild West flavor were still there to greet the visitors. Today most of the development centers on C Street with plenty of historic saloons sprinkled in among the souvenir purveyors. The steep hills on either side of C Street deflect many explorations but our walking tour will go above and below C Street before we are through. And if that isn’t a hardy enough route, we will begin outside of the town center, down south aways, where the most tangible evidence of Virginia City’s reign as the “richest place on earth” still stands...