Nevada's Lost Stories

Nevada's Lost Stories Welcome to Nevada’s Lost Stories, uncovering the forgotten history, hidden places, ghost towns, legends, and untold stories that shaped the Silver State.

From desert mysteries to frontier history, we bring Nevada’s past back to life, one story at a time

On October 8, 1942, the federal government ordered an entire American industry to stop working. 🔒The instrument was a Wa...
08/27/2026

On October 8, 1942, the federal government ordered an entire American industry to stop working. 🔒

The instrument was a War Production Board limitation order, and it gave gold mines that did not also turn out metals the war needed sixty days to shut down. The deadline fell on December 8, 1942. The reasoning was not that gold had lost its value. It was that gold had lost its use. The war wanted copper and lead and zinc and tungsten, and just as badly it wanted the miners, the hoists, the compressors and the drill steel that were tied up chasing a metal you could not build anything out of. It is often described as the only time Washington has ordered a whole American industry to stop.

In Nevada that landed on towns, not just on companies. A gold camp is a town for exactly as long as the mine runs. Payrolls ended, crews scattered to defense work, and the workings themselves started going backward almost at once. Stop the pumps and a shaft fills with water in a season. Pull the crew and the timbering rots. A mine is not something you can set down and pick back up later.

The order was revoked on June 30, 1945, and a good many of those mines never reopened. The gold was still in the ground. The men, the money and the workings were not. Owners sued, arguing that the government had effectively taken their mines and owed them for it, and the fight went all the way up. In 1958 the Supreme Court ruled that the order had been a regulation rather than a taking, and that nothing was owed.

Thirteen years after the order was lifted, the answer came back. No. By then the towns were long gone.

Image is an illustration, not a historical photograph.

08/27/2026

Wells Fargo could not stop him, and a Nevada jail could not hold him.

What finally ended his run was a great deal simpler than either of those things.

Visuals are AI illustrations, not historical footage.

By 1932 the bootleggers of Las Vegas had mostly stopped worrying about the federal government. They had started worrying...
08/26/2026

By 1932 the bootleggers of Las Vegas had mostly stopped worrying about the federal government. They had started worrying about each other. 🥃

Nevada went dry ahead of the rest of the country and then thought better of it. The legislature repealed the state prohibition law in 1923, four years after passing it, which left local police with no state statute to enforce and no duty to enforce the federal one. Las Vegas saloons ran in the open. The town never developed much of a speakeasy culture because there was not much point in hiding. A city fine or a federal conviction got treated as an operating cost.

That left enforcement to federal agents working out of Los Angeles and San Francisco, who arrived in waves and then went home again. By 1930 a national magazine that polled on the question reported Nevada had the highest rate of opposition to prohibition anywhere in the country. Nobody was confused about where the town stood.

Then in 1932 the trouble came from the inside. Las Vegas police spent part of that year on what the papers called a rum war between rival bootleggers. Two people were killed. A bundle of three sticks of dynamite went off behind a building near Block Sixteen that was being fitted out as the newest saloon in town. Federal agents were working Boulder City at the same time.

The record of it is thin, a few lines in the local paper and not much more, and then the whole argument stopped mattering. The trade those men were killing each other over was a little more than a year away from being legal.

Image is an illustration, not a historical photograph.

08/26/2026

Las Vegas spent its first years on the wrong side of a state line.

Arizona drew the county, Congress moved it, and Arizona spent years refusing to admit it was gone.

Visuals are AI illustrations, not historical footage.

There is a kind of reservation that exists almost nowhere but Nevada, and most of them are smaller than a city park. 🌾Th...
08/26/2026

There is a kind of reservation that exists almost nowhere but Nevada, and most of them are smaller than a city park. 🌾

They are called colonies. Not a wide block of land set aside out in open country, but a small parcel bought inside a town or right up against its edge. Twenty acres at Reno. Sixty acres at Winnemucca. Seventy acres at Fallon. Ground you can walk across in a few minutes.

The reason they look like that is not sentimental. By the early 1900s the Great Basin had been pulled apart as a place to live off. Cattle and sheep took the seed grasses, water went to farms and mines, and the pinyon groves that had fed families for generations were cut for mine timber and charcoal. Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe families moved to the edges of Nevada towns because that was where the work was, and they built camps there on ground that belonged to someone else. The federal paperwork of the day called them scattered, or homeless.

In 1917 that began to change, in the smallest possible way. Some parcels were bought outright and some were set aside by executive order, but the pattern was the same everywhere. A little land, in town, next to the jobs. Reno and Winnemucca and Fallon and Battle Mountain in 1917, Elko in 1918. What makes the Reno-Sparks Colony unusual even now is that Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe people share it, three distinct peoples on one small piece of ground, which is not how any of this was normally drawn up.

Small as those parcels were, they held. The towns grew up around them.

Image is an illustration, not a historical photograph.

08/26/2026

For eleven years the richest silver mines in Nevada answered to a bank in San Francisco.

In August 1875 that bank locked its doors, and the man who built it did not survive the week.

Visuals are AI illustrations, not historical footage.

Nevada stockmen were glad to see the snow come early in December 1889. ❄️The country had been through a long dry spell a...
08/26/2026

Nevada stockmen were glad to see the snow come early in December 1889. ❄️

The country had been through a long dry spell and the ranges needed the water, so a heavy December looked like good news. It kept falling. By the middle of January 1890 train service across Nevada had stopped, the Sierra crossing was blocked, and mail was moving first by sleigh and then on snowshoes. Cattle and sheep that had wintered on open ground for a generation had nowhere to drift to and nothing to reach, and they starved and froze where they stood.

How cold it actually got is one of those things the accounts will not agree on. Reported readings out of that January run anywhere from around twenty below to seventy below depending on which paper and which valley you take, so it is not worth picking a number. What is not in dispute is what the thaw uncovered. Outfits that had run stock for thirty years came out the other side broke, and dead animals lay across the range for miles. 🐄

The ranchers who survived it changed the way they worked. They cut herds down to what they could actually feed, strung wire around ground that had never been fenced, and started putting up hay every summer whether they thought they would need it or not. The open range in Nevada did not end with a law or a court ruling. It ended with one winter, and afterward a cowhand spent more of the year on a hayfield than on a horse.

Image is an illustration, not a historical photograph.

08/26/2026

In 1849 thousands of gold seekers left a working road in northern Nevada for one they had been told was faster.

The route they chose ran about two hundred miles longer than the one they left.

Visuals are AI illustrations, not historical footage.

The man who broke the transatlantic telegraph monopoly paid for it with Comstock silver. 🌊John Mackay came off the Comst...
08/25/2026

The man who broke the transatlantic telegraph monopoly paid for it with Comstock silver. 🌊

John Mackay came off the Comstock as one of the four partners the newspapers called the Bonanza Kings, and he was the one who stayed closest to Nevada and said the least about himself. In 1883 he put up a reported seventy percent of the money for a new venture with the newspaperman James Gordon Bennett Jr. Their target was Jay Gould, who controlled the cables running under the Atlantic and charged what he liked to send a word across them. The Commercial Cable Company laid two cables in 1884, from Waterville in Ireland to Canso in Nova Scotia, and the rate war that followed drove the price of a transatlantic word down to twenty five cents. ⚡

Gould answered by refusing the new company the use of Western Union's lines inside the United States, which would have left two Atlantic cables connected to nothing. Mackay bought up a string of small telegraph companies instead and stitched them together into the Postal Telegraph Company. Gould gave up after about two years of it.

One of the ships built to lay and repair that cable carried both partners' names. In April 1912 she was chartered out of Halifax and sent to the wreck site of the Titanic, and she brought back most of the bodies that were ever recovered from that water. The money that put her in the water came out of a hole in the ground above Virginia City.

Image is an illustration, not a historical photograph.

Nevada had tungsten in the ground for forty years before anybody bothered to pick it up. ⛏️Geologists knew it was there ...
08/25/2026

Nevada had tungsten in the ground for forty years before anybody bothered to pick it up. ⛏️

Geologists knew it was there by the mid 1860s. The trouble was that nobody had a use for it, so the ore was worth nothing and prospectors walked straight past it looking for silver. What changed was steel. Alloy makers found that a little tungsten let a cutting tool hold its edge at heat that would ruin ordinary steel, and suddenly the worthless rock had a price. By 1918 Nevada was producing about a third of the country's tungsten, most of it out of the Eugene Mountains, in country that would be carved off Humboldt County and named Pershing the following year. 💡

Then the war ended and the price collapsed. Demand came back in the 1930s as Europe started arming again, and this time one outfit owned nearly all of it. The Nevada-Massachusetts Company had consolidated the district by 1925, and by 1927 it was the principal tungsten producer in the United States, a position it held into the 1950s. The company town was simply called Tungsten, and it was the second largest community in Pershing County: a post office, a general store, a boarding house for the single men, an elementary school, a community hall, a library, a service station and more than one hundred ten family houses.

The last major tungsten mine in the state shut down in 1958. The Reno Gazette-Journal later called Tungsten the youngest ghost town in Nevada. When the ground was worked again in 1981 the town did not come back with it. The people who took those jobs lived in Imlay or drove in from Winnemucca, and the place built entirely around a metal nobody had wanted stayed empty.

Image is an illustration, not a historical photograph.

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