Nearby, the Nevada State Museum Las Vegas tells the story of a state that most of the world knows primarily through its most famous city, but whose history extends far beyond casino floors. Nevada achieved statehood on October 31, 1864 — Abraham Lincoln pushed for its admission before the presidential election, needing the electoral votes and the Senate seats to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery — and it entered the union as a mining state built on the Comstock Lode's silver and gold.
The Nevada of the nineteenth century was a Wild West of mining camps, railroad towns, and ranching families who scratched a living from the Great Basin's unforgiving terrain. The state's population fluctuated wildly with mineral booms and busts, falling so low in the early twentieth century that Nevada came close to losing its statehood. The legalization of gambling in 1931 was in part a desperate economic measure by a state that had run out of other options.
The museum's collections include mammoth fossils from the Ice Age fauna that once inhabited the Great Basin, geological specimens from Nevada's extraordinary mining history, and artifacts from the indigenous peoples who occupied the region for thousands of years before European contact. It is a reminder that Las Vegas did not spring fully formed from the desert in 1946, but is the latest chapter in a much longer story of human adaptation to an extraordinarily difficult landscape.