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