By McAvoy Layne…Thirty years ago or so, I read a Nevada history textbook for the sight-impaired. That book surfaced the other day, so I sat down to read it for my enjoyment. This excellent book, by Don Lynch and David Thompson, is called Battle Born Nevada, and embraces our people, history and stories. Here’s a bit of what I learned…
“Nevada, in the early days, had no government, so trappers, explorers and early emigrants were on their own. This created a culture of stark individualism.”
Yet most of what I have learned about Nevada has come from other Nevadans…
“I’ll keep my nose out of your business if you’ll keep your nose out of mine.” This aphorism holds true all across Nevada today, with the possible exception of Virginia City, where everybody knows everybody else’s business and nobody cares, ‘cuz they’ve got nothin’ to hide…
Divorce? “If you’re going to get married, come do it here in Nevada, and do it early in the morning. That way, if it doesn’t work out, it won’t ruin your whole day.”
“You can still do pretty much whatever you want to do in Nevada, ‘long as nobody gets hurt, and you don’t frighten the horses.”
While riding an elevator of a Reno casino one New Year’s Eve, I asked another passenger, “Any Luck?”
He was attired in rodeo clothes and carried a wise twinkle in his eye.
“Luck!?” he shouted. And he hooked his little finger into my buttonhole. I could smell whiskey on his breath. “Son, do you have any idea but a child’s, what LUCK is?!”
“I guess I meant to ask, have you won any money?” I answered weakly.
“Boy, come with me.” He buttonholed me again, and led me to the bar around the corner, where he began dusting me off, like I had been in storage…
He then fortified himself with a restorative and launched into Nevada history…
“In 1897, St. Patrick’s Day,” he began, “Carson City hosted the heavyweight championship of the world. That fight, son, between Gentleman Jim Corbett, our champ, and Fightin’ Bobby Fitzsimmons, England’s champ, would save Nevada’s statehood. You see, mining had played itself out, our population had dwindled to 40,000 citizens, and there was a movement in Congress to revoke our statehood.
Well, four thousand people crossed the High Sierra to see that fight, which Fitzsimmons won with what some say was a low blow to the solar plexus, but then Corbett always hiked his trunks up so high, who could tell…
Anyways, when everybody had gone back to California and we counted up all the money that was left behind, our legislators asked, ‘If four thousand people will cross the mountains to see one fight, how many more will come to spin the French Wheel, get married, get divorced, visit a brothel?’
“So you see, son, Nevada’s romance with disrespectability began with the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. We preserved our statehood and became the state of attractions on St. Patrick’s Day, 1897.
My boy, everything you see around us today, from that crap table there, to all of Las Vegas, and back to Moonlight Ranch, is a result of that fight.
Luck!? There ain’t no luck about it, it’s called, NEVADA. The words LUCK and NEVADA are two different words for the same thing.”
And with that he gave me a slap on the shoulder that crossed my eyes. So I guess the moral of this story is, read good books, and don’t talk to strangers in elevators…
Audio: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Fhv4PrH1UuwlhbnTT23zO
— For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”