We received this question on Friday, February 27, four years (and one week) after Hunter S. Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on February 20, 2005, at the age of 67.
Thompson was the pre-eminent practitioner of "gonzo journalism" who wrote, among many other books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the famous account of the trip by Thompson and his 300-pound Samoan attorney to cover the Mint 400 Desert Race for Sports Illustrated. Among our favorite quotes from the eminently quotable Thompson are, "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me"; and "Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect"; and "In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the final sin is stupidity."
Anyway, we ran the history of the Mint last summer and its Desert 400 race in May 2006, but in honor of HST, here they are again.
The Mint opened in 1957 on Fremont Street between First and Second next to Binion's Horseshoe. A 26-story 296-room hotel tower was added in 1965 at a cost of $6 million.
The hotel-casino was bought in 1989 by the Binions for $36.5 million, at which time the Mint became the Horseshoe West. All the Binions had to do was cut out a through passage in the shared casino wall to incorporate the Mint into the Horseshoe. For a long time, the two casinos were a contrast in '50s and '60s design and decor, but today -- nearly 20 years later -- the old Mint is pretty much forgotten (aside from its clock), now just a part of Binion's.
The Mint 400 race, whose official name was the Del Webb Mint 400 Desert Rally, was first run in 1968. It was dreamed up by Norm Johnson, the PR director for the Mint Hotel at the time. Johnson was a man about Las Vegas who'd worked as a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun and had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Watts riots for the Copley News Service in 1965.
It was a 400-mile course that started in front of the Mint Hotel-Casino in downtown Las Vegas (now the west wing of Binion's), headed northwest through the desert up to Beatty, Nev., then circled back to Vegas. Like most off-road races contested by all manner of motorcycles, dune buggies, cars, and trucks, it was an utter free-for-all. A hundred and one vehicles of all stripes started the race that year; how many finished is lost in the dustbins of history.
The 1969 race attracted 188 entries. Celebrities flocked to the race in droves; 1969 participants included Indy 500 champions Bobby and Al Unser, actors James Garner and Lee Majors, even local comedian Shecky Greene. Also participating was Mickey Thompson, who went on to found SCORE, the international off-road racing organization that today promotes many off-road events.
The late Hunter S. Thompson was dispatched by Sports Illustrated magazine to "cover the race" in 1971. Actually, his assignment was to write a total of 250 words for photo captions. In the freelance tradition of double-duty, he was also assigned to cover a law-enforcement conference by Rolling Stone magazine.
Thompson got a bit sidetracked by a few, shall we say, minor details, such as a trunk full of pot, coke, mescaline, amyl nitrate, LSD, alcohol, and his personal-favorite ether, ripping up Circus Circus hotel rooms (and scaring housekeepers half to death), and infiltrating the District Attorneys' national convention. The fictitious account of the whole gonzo trip first ran as a book-length feature in the November 1971 issue of Rolling Stone and was later published in book form as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
Thompson's book put the Mint 400 on the map, big time.
In 1975, the race attracted 354 cars and 51 bikes, competing for a piece of the $100,000 guaranteed purse. It was the first off-road race ever to guarantee a prize fund and was, at one time, the richest guaranteed race in the world.
For the first few years of the event, Jim Beam produced commemorative decanters (selling on eBay these days for $25 or so). Also, to add a little sex appeal to the gritty event, every year the racing committee named a revolving contingent of "Mint 400 Girls," Lynda Carter (of "Wonder Woman" fame) and Vanna White among them. A parade of race cars closed Fremont Street.
Along the way, the Mint itself was bought out by Binion's Horseshoe, which took on the race. It was renamed the Nissan 400 in 1987 and ran through 1992, but the thrill of the thing was gone for Binion's, which stopped promoting it, which killed it.
Then, SCORE decided to start up a race similar to the Mint 400, and it launched the Terrible 250. This race has evolved over the years and is now the Terrible 400. The cars gather in downtown Henderson and the 80-plus-mile race takes place in Eldorado Valley and the McCullough Mountains between Henderson and Boulder City. It's sponsored by the Henderson Convention & Visitors Bureau, Herbst Gaming, and the city of Boulder City.
Other off-road races in Nevada today include the Laughlin Desert Challenge, the Las Vegas Terrible's Cup II, and the Primm 300.
