In the Illusion State Part 2, I introduced the Sazerac Lying Club, a fictitious group of barroom storytellers in the tradition of taproom raconteurs everywhere for all time — in this case in 1870s’ Austin, Nevada. The whole thing was a flight of fancy from the dying boomtown’s newspaper editor who needed some text to […]
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Greater Vegas—The Illusion State 2
In my last blog, I described Greater Vegas as an illusion, built on a foundation of falsehood and fantasy. This isn’t my own idea; it’s an outgrowth (indirect as it might be) from a long tradition of journalism in the American west, which incorporated elements of exaggeration, satire, ribaldry, and just plain fiction to fill […]
Greater Vegas—The Illusion State
I’ve been a Nevada resident for 30 years, written numerous books about the Silver State, and am more at home here than in the other six places on two continents where I’ve lived, so I feel I’m qualified to say that no other state in this (currently dubious) union is built on more of a […]
Greater Vegas—Bristlecone Pines
Excavations and carbon dating of artifacts discovered in a number of caves around Nevada, including Tule Springs and Gypsum Cave near Las Vegas, have supplied evidence that aboriginals occupied the region as early as 11,000 B.C. In northern Nevada live a prehistoric species of sucker fish known as cui-ui (pronounced kwee-wee) that teemed in the […]
Greater Vegas’ Oldest Restaurant
Nearly 100 years ago in 1920, native Italians John and Elvira Casale met in Reno, married, acquired a little piece of property from the dairy farm where John worked, and opened Casale’s Market, a produce stand. Elvira also sold fresh raviolis, which became so popular that the Casales built a small seating area where she […]
Greater Vegas — Pahranagat National Wildlife Re...
The vast majority of Vegas visitors who travel on Interstate 15 do so between Sin City and southern California, often in heavy traffic inbound on Friday and outbound on Sunday. The few who head northeast out of Las Vegas are going to Valley of Fire State Park or Mesquite, St. George, Utah, and points beyond. […]
Greater Vegas — Water in the Desert
Southern Nevada’s earliest Mexican and American traders, explorers, adventurers, and settlers encountered nomadic bands of Natives who called themselves Tudinu, or Desert People, and have come to be known as Paiute. The Paiute comprise three closely related indigenous people of the Great Basin (northern) and Mojave (southern) Nevada deserts; the Southern Paiute are also native […]
Greater Vegas — Basque
Of all the quality, quantity, and variety of food that Las Vegas offers its 40-plus-million visitors and two million residents, one type of cuisine isn’t available and never has been: Basque. For Basque restaurants, you need to go out into Greater Vegas. The Basque people, who inhabit the Pyrenees between Spain and France, are the […]
Greater Vegas–Wheel of Fortune
Life is change, the sages tell us. Heraclitus of Ephesus was a Greek philosopher remembered for his “Doctrine of Change,” in which “everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” For a couple thousand years, Fortuna, the Roman goddess of chance and luck, has been represented as holding a wheel, symbolizing the incalculably transitory nature of […]
Greater Vegas—Space and Time
When I introduced Greater Vegas in my first blog, I explained that the idea was to extend Las Vegas out to state lines Nevada shares with California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon, at the same time that Nevada infiltrated the seemingly self-contained and autonomous Las Vegas city-state. However, Greater Vegas exists as much in vertical […]
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