Question of the Day - 19 December 2013

• Las Vegas: In 1826, Antonio Armijo, a Mexican trader, set out from Santa Fe in New Mexico on the Old Spanish Trail for southern California. An experienced scout in Armijo’s party, Rafael Rivera (himself commemorated here with a park and a road), discovered a shortcut along the route by way of what's now called Big Springs, where fresh water bubbled up to the surface from artesian aquifers that underlay the valley. A creek flowed from the pool at the top of the spring, bordered by lush grasslands and thickets of mesquite and inhabited by birds and small game.

  Southern Paiute had been camping at the springs for upwards of 700 years by then, and archaeological evidence has shown that the springs received human visitors starting around 6000 BC. But when Armijo stopped at Big Springs in 1826, he became the first known person to give it a name, and that name was Las Vegas, "the Meadows" in Spanish. The name stuck and when John C. Fremont passed through Las Vegas Valley in 1844 on a cartography expedition, he put Las Vegas on the map, literally, for good.

• Reno: Born on April 20, 1823 in Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), Jesse Lee Reno was the third-oldest of eight children born to Lewis and Rebecca Reno. The spelling of the family name was an anglicized version of the French surname "Reynaud," borne by Jesse's ancestors who arrived from France and settled in the U.S. in 1770.

  When Jesse was seven years old, the family moved to Pennsylvania, where the young Reno would later secure entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point. While there, he became friends with George B. McClellan, George E. Pickett, George Stoneman, Darius Couch, and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and graduated eighth in his class of 59 on July 1, 1846.

  A career United States Army officer with a reputation for being a "soldier's soldier," Reno served in the Mexican-American War, the Utah War, on the western frontier, and as a Union General during the American Civil War. He was killed, at the age of 39, while commanding a corps at Fox's Gap during the Battle of South Mountain and, for his heroism, he's commemorated in the naming of Reno County, Kansas; El Reno, Oklahoma; Fort Reno in Washington, D.C.; and Reno, Nevada.

• Carson City: In 1858, Abraham V. Curry was a 43-year-old businessman who, born near Ithaca, N.Y., had worked on the docks in Cleveland, the hills of San Francisco, and the mining boomtowns of the California gold rush. He then saw potential in the prime real estate at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada, through which emigrants had to travel to get to California.

  Curry traveled to Genoa, one of the two earliest settlements in what, in just a few years, would come to be called Nevada. He found that the price of land in Genoa (pronounced juh-NO-a) was already both outrageous and non-negotiable. So he continued north to Eagle Valley and bought 885-acre Eagle Ranch for $1,000. Though the discovery of the Comstock Lode in the Virginia Range, which hemmed in Eagle Valley on the east, was still more than a year in the future and the "ranch" was little more than sand and sage, Curry had found the spot where he’d live out his destiny. Or maybe the spot found him.

  The ambitious New Yorker knew he’d never be content with a mere ranch and he immediately began promoting the desolate (though watered and scenic) valley as the eventual site of the state capital, which he named Carson City after famed western explorer Kit Carson, who was himself hired as a guide by John C. Fremont (of "Fremont Street" fame); it's the latter's accounts of their expeditions that also helped to immortalize Carson, who would later become the hero of many dime novels, in addition to the honor of having a state capital named for him.

So, there you have it. Next!