Battle Born, Nevada Rushes to Statehood, October Thirty-First, Eighteen Sixty-Four

On October twenty-sixth, eighteen sixty-four, a telegraph operator in Carson City began transmitting. He sent the entire Nevada state constitution, one hundred seventy-five handwritten pages, over the wire to Washington, at a cost of four thousand three hundred three dollars and twenty-seven cents. It was the longest single telegram in the history of the medium to that point.

Nobody wanted to wait for the train. The reason for the urgency was simple: Abraham Lincoln was five days away from re-election, and the Union needed Nevada's electoral votes. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was also moving through Congress, and every ratifying state mattered.

Nevada had enough people to qualify for a territory, but not nearly enough for a state. The population was somewhere around thirty thousand, well below the standard threshold. None of that stopped anyone.

President Lincoln signed the proclamation on October thirty-first, eighteen sixty-four, on Halloween, making Nevada the thirty-sixth state, and the only state admitted to the union during the Civil War alongside West Virginia. The phrase that went onto the state flag captures the whole transaction without embarrassment: Battle Born. Nevada sent twelve hundred men to fight for the Union.

More importantly in practical terms, its silver had been financing the war. The Comstock's output had helped back Union greenbacks and fund the machinery of the federal government at a moment when the Treasury was under severe strain. Silver was ammunition by another name.

The state's constitution was ratified in a rush, its borders drawn in a hurry, its government assembled in weeks. Nevada has always been a place people built fast for reasons that had little to do with the land itself. That pattern, rapid construction for external purposes, boom when it serves someone and bust when it does not, has defined Nevada more than any canyon or mountain range.

The state flag still says it plainly: Battle Born.