The compilers of Nevada: A Guide to the Silver State set out to do two things at once — to tell the story of Nevada and its people, past and present, and to describe, mile by mile, the natural wonders and points of interest scattered across the most sparsely settled state in the Union. The staff, wrote state supervisor Sheila Rast in her 1940 preface, had been given the warm cooperation of people and agencies across Nevada, so that the finished book might fairly be regarded as the product of all Nevadans.
Rast was candid about the difficulty of the task. Much of Nevada’s history, she acknowledged, was still unwritten, and many events remained subjects of controversy because the records were either missing or contradictory. No book covering so much ground could be wholly accurate on every point, and the editors asked that anyone who found errors report them for correction in later editions — a standing invitation that the Federal Writers’ Project extended in volume after volume.
Behind the guide stood Dr. Jeanne Elizabeth Wier, secretary of the Nevada State Historical Society and head of history and political science at the University of Nevada, whose long labor to interest Nevadans in their own past had, Rast noted, stirred many of the book’s contributors years before the project began. Credit was also due the late T. D. Vandervort, the first supervisor of the Nevada Writers’ Project, and his successor David E. W. Williamson, who carried much of the early work. Final editorial shaping came with the cooperation of Katharine A. Kellock of the national Writers’ Program.
The volume’s structure mirrors the federal pattern while keeping a distinctly Nevadan flavor. Part One, Nevada’s Background, gathers essays on the Silver State, its natural setting, plant and animal life, the first Nevadans, and the long passage from wilderness to modern state — followed by chapters on mining, ranching, and stock growing that come complete with glossaries of mining and stock jargon, the working vocabulary of the desert and the range. Press, church, and school, the arts, and sport and recreation round out the background.
Part Two, Touring the State, is the guide’s spine: eight main tours with their lettered branches, tracing the great east-west highways across the basin-and-range country and dropping south toward Las Vegas, Boulder Dam, and the California line. The names along the way — Wells, Elko, Winnemucca, Tonopah, Virginia City, Carson City — read like a register of boom, bust, and stubborn survival. A chronology, a supplementary reading list, and an index close the book. What gives it lasting value is the moment it preserves: Nevada in 1940, after the silver had largely played out and before the postwar transformation, recorded by writers who knew the state was changing under their feet.