KVIG Informative

A Nevada governor once asked the president of the United States to send soldiers into a mining boomtown, then asked his own Legislature to build a force big enough to replace them. Nevada voters, not lawmakers, had the final say on whether that force would exist.

Local unions chartered by the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World organized Goldfield’s mines in 1904 and 1905, according to the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Goldfield Historic District, filed with the National Park Service. Mine operators in the boomtown answered in March 1907 by forming their own group, the Goldfield Businessmen’s and Mine Operator’s Association, the same nomination states.

That association pushed Nevada Gov. John Sparks into asking President Theodore Roosevelt to send federal troops into Goldfield, and Roosevelt did, according to the nomination’s account of the dispute. The plan behind the request, the nomination states, included cutting miners’ wages and reopening the mines only to workers willing to sign a card renouncing union membership.

Roosevelt did not stop at troops. In December 1907, he told Sparks to call the Nevada Legislature into special session specifically to pass a state-police law, according to the same federal nomination document. Sparks complied: the Legislature convened at Carson City on Jan. 14, 1908, according to the session’s own published statutes.

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Fifteen days later, on Jan. 29, 1908, Sparks signed Chapter 4 of that special session into law, creating the Nevada State Police, according to the statute’s text as published by the Nevada Legislature. The law set the force at one superintendent, one inspector, four sergeants and 25 subordinate officers, backed by as many as 250 reserves, all appointed by the superintendent subject to the governor’s approval. Lawmakers appropriated $150,000 from the state’s general fund to pay for it.

The new force could make arrests, suppress riots and serve criminal process anywhere in Nevada, the statute states, though it was barred from serving civil process. If the governor declared martial law or an insurrection, the law gave the state police full authority to act on his behalf — the same kind of emergency power Sparks had just used federal troops to approximate in Goldfield.

The law didn’t stay a matter for lawmakers alone. Nevada voters took it up themselves as a referendum at the November 1908 general election, and they upheld it, according to a table of Nevada ballot measures compiled by the Nevada Legislature’s own Research Division. The force survived the vote intact.

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The Legislature kept funding it afterward. The 1909 session set aside another $50,000 to support the Nevada State Police, according to that year’s published statutes. By spring 1908, Goldfield’s mines were already running at full scale again under the terms the operators’ association had set, according to the National Register nomination — with the state’s newest police agency now standing behind that outcome.

Nevada answered a mining strike by standing up its own armed police agency with martial-law authority, funding it in two consecutive legislative sessions, and letting voters ratify it at the ballot box rather than repeal it. The precedent that set — that a state can build its own force to settle a labor dispute and have the public bless the result after the fact — outlasted Goldfield’s gold.