A native Nevadan who bridged the old and new in the state's history, Ruthe Deskin was an influential Las Vegas journalist for almost half a century. She was born in Yerington (which she insisted on calling by its original name, Pizen Switch) to Jim Goldsworthy, a mining engineer, and Viola West, of a Mason Valley pioneer family.

Born in New York in 1832, Rollin Daggett moved to Ohio when he was five and eventually worked there as a printer. At seventeen, Daggett became a '49er following the dream of California gold. Failing to become rich, he joined J. Macdonough Foard in 1852 to found The Golden Era. The famed San Francisco literary weekly featured many young writers on their way to prominence, including Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, William Wright, and Samuel Clemens.

While fur trappers and government scouts were the first Americans to traverse the Great Basin, its early white settlers were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormons, as they were called, arrived in the late 1840s seeking isolation.

For more than half of the twentieth century, Reno was Nevada's sin city and the divorce capital of the world. Journalists and gossip columnists called it the "Great Divide," a destination for divorce seekers who wanted to take "the cure," get "Reno-vated," and according to legend, throw their wedding rings into the Truckee River from the Virginia Street "Bridge of Sighs." A 1934 article on Nevada's divorce law in Fortune Magazine offered this description of the town: "Reno lies in Nevada's western corner, ten miles from California.