NVNevada Famous People

On 3 February 1863 a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City signed a dispatch Mark Twain for the first time. Samuel Clemens had come out to Nevada Territory in 1861 with his brother Orion, who had been appointed territorial secretary, failed at silver prospecting in the Esmeralda district, and taken a newspaper job to eat. He left in 1864 after a duel challenge got out of hand, and told the whole story in Roughing It in 1872. America's most recognisable pen name was invented in a Nevada mining camp, which is a fair summary of how the state has worked ever since: people arrive, become something else, and move on.

Sarah Winnemucca and Wovoka

The two Nevadans with the longest reach in American history were both Northern Paiute. Sarah Winnemucca, born around 1844 near Humboldt Lake and named Thocmetony, worked as an interpreter and army scout, lectured across the eastern states in the 1880s, and published Life Among the Piutes in 1883, the first book written in English by a Native American woman. She ran a school for Paiute children near Lovelock that taught in their own language until federal policy shut it. Since 2005 her statue has represented Nevada in the National Statuary Hall Collection.

Wovoka, known to settlers as Jack Wilson, was born in Smith Valley around 1856. During the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889 he had a vision, and the dance he taught afterwards spread from Mason Valley across the Plains within two years as the Ghost Dance. Federal alarm at its arrival among the Lakota led directly to the killings at Wounded Knee in December 1890. Wovoka spent the rest of his life in Nevada and died there in 1932.

The state has never produced a president

Nevada had fewer than forty thousand residents when Lincoln admitted it in October 1864, a number small enough that the point of statehood was plainly the electoral votes and a Senate seat for the Thirteenth Amendment. No president has been born or raised here since. The closest connection runs through a miner's cottage in Ely, where Thelma Catherine Ryan was born on 16 March 1912. Her father called her Pat because she arrived the day before St Patrick's Day. The family left for California while she was a toddler, and she was First Lady as Pat Nixon from 1969 to 1974.

Senators who left their names on the map

Pat McCarran, born on a sheep ranch outside Reno in 1876, sat in the Senate from 1933 until his death in 1954 and wrote two laws that carried his name over Truman's vetoes: the Internal Security Act of 1950 and the McCarran-Walter immigration act of 1952. Las Vegas named its airport after him, and renamed it in 2021 for Harry Reid.

Reid was born in Searchlight in 1939, a mining settlement of a few hundred people with no high school. His father drilled hard rock and killed himself; his mother took in laundry from the brothels. Reid boarded in Henderson to finish school, where his history teacher and boxing coach, Mike O'Callaghan, later became governor of Nevada and hired him as lieutenant governor. He led the Senate from 2007 to 2015. Paul Laxalt, born in Reno in 1922 to Basque immigrants, was governor and then senator and was close enough to Ronald Reagan to be called the First Friend. His brother Robert Laxalt wrote Sweet Promised Land in 1957 about taking their father, a Basque sheepherder who had spent his life in the Nevada mountains, back to the Pyrenees.

Las Vegas raised its own athletes

Andre Agassi was born in Las Vegas in 1970 to an Iranian-born father who had boxed for Iran at two Olympics and who built a court in the backyard and a ball machine to go with it. Agassi won eight major titles and Olympic gold in 1996, and opened a college preparatory charter school in west Las Vegas in 2001. Greg Maddux moved to Las Vegas as a teenager, pitched at Valley High School, and won four consecutive Cy Young awards from 1992; his brother Mike pitched in the majors for fifteen years. Bryce Harper was born in Las Vegas in 1992 and left high school two years early to face college pitching. Kurt and Kyle Busch grew up racing at the Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and both went on to NASCAR Cup championships. Jimmy Kimmel moved to Las Vegas at nine and went to Clark High School.

Bands out of the subdivisions

Three of the more successful American rock bands of the last twenty-five years formed within a few miles of each other in suburban Las Vegas. The Killers came together in 2001 after Brandon Flowers, raised partly in Henderson and partly in Nephi, Utah, answered a classified ad; Hot Fuss followed in 2004. Panic! at the Disco started in Summerlin in 2004 with a group of schoolfriends, Brendon Urie among them. Imagine Dragons formed in 2008 around Dan Reynolds, who was born in Las Vegas in 1987. Before any of them, Wayne Newton was working Fremont Street lounges as a teenager from 1959 and stayed long enough to be called Mr. Las Vegas.

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