Two homeless men–one awake, one not–use an open fire to keep warm along a public street on a 39-degree morning near the New To Las Vegas world headquarters, November 21, 2024
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Old Spanish Trail (via National Park Service)
Las Vegas likes to play up a Western history it really doesn’t have. The place is simply too new. The city was only created in 1905, hundreds of years after Boston, New York and Philadelphia. At the turn of the century five years earlier, the U.S. Census reported the population of all of the Las Vegas area was all of 18. Cowboys, Indians, cattle and other trappings of the traditional Old West were in short supply.
It took Las Vegas 30 years to even start Helldorado Days, an annual celebration of its supposed Wild West culture. When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, enterprising casino operators latched onto Western imagery as a tourist draw. This still persists, helped by such annual events as the National Finals Rodeo, the nation’s largest, and the occasional cowboy sign illuminated in neon.
Las Vegas’s latest effort to claim historic frontier honors opened on Friday at the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas. It’s an exhibition entitled “The Old Spanish Trail: Connecting a Network of Paths.” The show focuses on the OST, a meandering 19th Century trade route running 2,700 miles over several routings from Santa Fe., N.M., to Los Angeles that went through the future Las Vegas. In posted signage, the museum asserts the OST was “a conduit for revolutionary change throughout the vast, arid expanse we call the American Southwest” that “has earned its historic legacy.”
Over the weekend I toured the exhibit, which is to run for six months. I saw no evidence of that “revolutionary change” or “historic legacy.” What I did see was mainly–nothing. Continue reading
Nevada ballot, 2024
It didn’t do Kamala Harris a lick of good. But for the second straight biennial election, Nevada’s unique, half-century-old law giving voters the explicit option to defiantly choose “None of These Candidates” has saved the bacon of a Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent.
Five days after the November 5 election, they’re still counting votes in the thinly populated Silver State. Still, nearly complete returns compiled by the Nevada Secretary of state’s Office show that despite Donald J. Trump’s solid presidential victory in Nevada (and the country), Democrat Jacky Rosen is winning her second six-year term in the Senate by 21,202 votes (out of 1,419,550 counted) over Republican challenger Sam Brown. But “None of These Candidates” is polling 41,638–nearly double Rosen’s margin.
It is widely believed by political experts that Nevada’s NOTC line overwhelming draws Republican voters rather than Democratic voters in partisan races. The GOP certainly believes that, which is why the party some years back challenged NOTC in court (unsuccessfully). Indeed, attracting unhappy Republicans was the somewhat-hidden intention of Democratic lawmakers who in 1975 enacted the measure into law. Helping give NOTC additional force: another Nevada law prohibiting write-in candidates. Continue reading
Teri Anne Bell, a 58-year-old bookkeeper who worked for a gunmaker in northwest Montana, is about to start serving some hard time in federal prison after pleading guilty to stealing $159,000 from her former employer. If you are a regular visitor to this space, you probably know already where this post is heading.
Yes, she took some of the stolen loot and spent it in Las Vegas, that great, big bug light for folks with a few extra dollars to blow in ill-gotten gains.
That makes her a candidate for my long-running list, It Didn’t Stay Here. The criterion is simple: people who got in trouble elsewhere for something that happened in Las Vegas (in this case the local spending of ill-gotten loot). It’s a tongue-in-cheek rebuttal of that famous former Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority marketing slogan, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”
You can see the list nearby. Bell is not the first on the roster who stole money and hot-footed it to Sin City. Since becoming New To Las Vegas, I have been amazed at how often this town is the lure for people with such proclivities.
Continue reading
Abraham Lincoln in 1863
As the tighter-than-a-hangman’s-noose presidential race approaches its denouncement, Donald J. Trump and some of his fellow Republicans, despite the absence of evidence, are still complaining nationally about voter fraud in the 2020 race and predicting the same on November 5. This is especially true here in Nevada, where Republicans have especially groused about supposed future and past voting by non-citizens and non-residents. The GOP apparently thinks that most of these folks are in the tank for Democrat Kamala Harris, even though Trump’s name graces the top of the state’s tallest non-casino building just off the Las Vegas Strip.
As it happens, tomorrow is Nevada Day, the start of a three-day holiday weekend in Nevada. Government offices and schools are closed. Celebrated on the last Friday of October, it commemorates Nevada’s admission to the union in 1864 as the 36th state.
Why do I bring this up? Because Nevada actually became a state to help rig the 1864 re-election of Trump’s fellow Republican, Abraham Lincoln. Putting aside the party it favored, that sort of makes today’s claims of voter fraud pale by comparison. But there are some interesting parallels. Continue reading
See update at end of story
On Friday, October 25, the University of Southern California football team will host Rutgers under the lights at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The game will be the first gridiron match ever between the two, as well as the first ever for Rutgers in the City of Angels.
Both the Trojans and the Scarlet Knights are now members of the Big Ten (which for $ome broadca$t rea$on now ha$ 18 team$). Since becoming New To Las Vegas, I have learned that USC has a big following hereabouts. As for Rutgers, from which I have two degrees, I sometimes have to tell local folks what and where it is. For the record: New Jersey’s state university, the country’s eight oldest college, never a member of the Ivy League, located in the distant New York City suburb of New Brunswick, N.J.
Rutgers was founded in 1766 as a tiny church-related institution named Queens College with a charter signed by Ben Franklin’s illegitimate son. The institution is nearly twice as old as USC, co-founded in 1890 by a family harboring racist thoughts. (But to be fair, I should note that Henry Rutgers, for whom the school was renamed in 1824 after making a big gift, was a slave owner.) Both schools have grown into major academic institutions.
However, I digress. Whenever Rutgers plays a new team in football, the scribes covering the opposition like to play up the role of Rutgers in what has been called the first college football game, against Princeton in New Brunswick on November 6, 1869. This is especially likely this week since the game otherwise is shaping up rankings-wise as a real yawner. Rutgers is 1-3 in the Big Ten (but 4-3 overall), while USC is 1-4 in the conference (and 3-4 overall). Both team are coming off losses this past weekend, but–since I am in Las Vegas–the early betting line has home-team USC as a 13.5 point favorite.
Still, using today’s political vocabulary, this ancient football history is simply fake news. I’m here to tell you that first contest way back when was not a football game as the term is now understood in the U.S. It was a soccer match.