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… Continue reading Nevada Created the Nevada State Police in January 1908 to Help Break a Miners’ Strike. Voters Upheld the Law That November.

Nevada cannot draw more water from the Colorado River than the law promised it in 1928. For nearly a quarter-century, the state has worked around that ceiling by paying a neighboring state to hold water for it underground. The arrangement traces to July 3, 2001, when the Colorado River Commission of Nevada and the Southern… Continue reading Nevada Started Banking Its Colorado River Water in Arizona in 2001. The Credit Has Topped 600,000 Acre-Feet as the Basin Runs Short.

Southern Nevada is still arguing over who gets to build what in the desert and how much water it’s allowed to use doing it. One of the region’s biggest bets on both questions at once was a 320-acre lake dammed into existence in the Las Vegas Wash, financed on debt that eventually buried the project… Continue reading Lake Las Vegas Began as a 1988 Texas-Financed Bet on a Desert Lake. It Spent 2008 to 2010 in Federal Bankruptcy Court.

Every major resort on the Las Vegas Strip today answers to shareholders, a board and quarterly earnings calls, not to a single owner or a silent partner skimming the count. That wasn’t inevitable. It took specific public corporations deciding, one at a time, that Nevada gaming was worth letting regulators see their books. One of… Continue reading Kirk Kerkorian Sold the Flamingo and the International Hotel to Hilton in 1970. It Was the First Time a Publicly Traded Company Had Bought a Casino.

Las Vegas’s hospitality industry runs on entry-level workers who need a specific set of kitchen, bar and housekeeping skills before a major resort will hire them. For more than three decades, the same labor-management partnership has been the door most of them walk through first — and it started in a budget motel on Fremont… Continue reading Two Las Vegas Unions and Dozens of Hotel Employers Opened a Job-Training School Inside a Fremont Street Days Inn in 1993. It Has Trained More Than 65,000 Workers Since.

For nearly three decades, two blocks of a dirt road Las Vegans called “Jackson Street” were the only place in the city where Black residents could sit down for a meal, get a haircut, or catch a late show without walking past a sign that barred them elsewhere. The same civil rights victory that ended… Continue reading Las Vegas’s Westside Opened a Commercial District on Jackson Street in July 1942 Because the City Was Segregated. The Integration It Helped Win Emptied It by 1969.