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 […]
Posts in category Greater Vegas
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 […]
Grateful Vegas—The Dead Change Everything
Though it liked to call itself the Entertainment Capital of the World, when it came to concerts by touring acts, Las Vegas was decades behind cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, and Miami. In fact, as late as the mid-1980s, Vegas had all of two venues for concerts: the […]
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 […]
Greater Vegas—George Whittell and the Thunderbi...
George Whittell Jr. was born in San Francisco in 1881 into one of the wealthiest families in California. When George was 40 in 1921, he inherited $29 million. A gambler to his core, he invested it in the stock market and for the next eight years, he watched it nearly double. But also seeing his edge […]
Greater Vegas—East Lake Tahoe
Lake Tahoe is the crown jewel of western Nevada. High in the northern Sierra, 91 miles around, with its cutthroat trout, black bears, pristine beaches, and dense pine and fir forest, the lake is about as far from Las Vegas, figuratively, if not exactly geographically, as it’s possible to be and still be in the […]
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