Ulysses S. Grant carved a reservation out of southeastern Nevada in 1873, built entirely around one river. A hundred and fifty-one years later, in 2024, a Nevada Supreme Court ruling over that same river’s groundwater settled how much control the state exercises over everyone who depends on it. President Ulysses S. Grant signed an executive… Continue reading President Grant Set Aside the Moapa River Reservation in 1873. Nevada’s Supreme Court Just Ruled on Who Controls the Water Beneath It.

Ruby Duncan turned a welfare cut into a march down the Las Vegas Strip in 1971, forcing a federal court to restore money the state had taken from poor mothers. She died April 26 at 93, the same year Clark County wrote her fight into its commemoration of the United States’ 250th anniversary. Duncan was… Continue reading A Las Vegas Welfare-Rights March Shut Down Caesars Palace on March 6, 1971. Ruby Duncan, Who Led It, Died This April.

Nevada’s Office of the State Engineer designated the Las Vegas Valley an underground artesian water basin on Jan. 10, 1941, giving the state its first legal hold on water most Southern Nevadans never saw flowing beneath their feet. Eighty-five years and one uncertain new federal Colorado River framework later, that same basin — closed to… Continue reading Nevada’s State Engineer Designated the Las Vegas Valley an Underground Water Basin on Jan. 10, 1941. It’s Been Closed to New Rights Since 1992.

Nevada’s Tax Commission was already screening casino owners for fitness by the time Benny Binion applied for a Las Vegas gaming license in 1951. Regulators approved a license for his casino in other men’s names, and Binion ran the place without one of his own for the rest of his life — the same suitability-finding… Continue reading Nevada Licensed the Horseshoe Club to Three Other Men on Dec. 1, 1951. Benny Binion Ran It Unlicensed for the Next Four Decades.

Las Vegas wrote its own uniformed enforcement authority into city law within three years of incorporating in 1911, well before the county ever had a police force of its own. More than a century later, the city still employs its own Deputy City Marshals under that same authority — patrolling Fremont Street and clearing homeless… Continue reading Las Vegas Incorporated With Its Own Police Power on March 16, 1911. Its Deputy City Marshals Still Patrol Alongside LVMPD in 2026.

The federal government finalized a $94 million land sale to the City of Las Vegas on Sept. 10, 2026 — land that was on the market at all only because of a boundary Congress drew around the valley in 1998. Twenty-eight years later, that boundary is still deciding where Las Vegas can grow, and how… Continue reading Congress Created a Federal Land-Sale Boundary Around Las Vegas on Oct. 19, 1998. The City Just Bought 940 Acres Inside It for 6,000 Homes.

Bally’s Corporation imploded the Tropicana on Oct. 9, 2024, clearing 917,400 square feet of Strip casino floor for a Major League Baseball stadium and a new resort. The same demolition method cleared a different aging resort on the same Strip 31 years earlier, and Las Vegas has been financing its next generation of casinos by… Continue reading The Dunes Opened on the Strip in 1955. Its 1993 Implosion Became Las Vegas’s Blueprint for Starting Over.

Nevada’s slice of the Colorado River is already shrinking under federal shortage declarations, and starting Jan. 1, 2027, state law will bar many Las Vegas Valley properties from using any of that water on grass that nobody walks on, sits on or plays on. The Southern Nevada Water Authority launched its Water Smart Landscapes rebate… Continue reading Nevada Began Paying to Remove Grass in 1999. Starting in 2027, State Law Will Require It on Non-Residential Land.

Del Webb Corporation became Nevada’s first publicly traded casino operator six years before state law made room for companies like it. In 2026, MGM Resorts International’s largest shareholder wants to take the company private again.

A 1962-63 dig at Tule Springs settled a decades-old scientific question and then went quiet for years. Congress protected the site in 2014 using land law that still fuels growth across the rest of the valley.