Word: nevadas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Garden on the Moon. The greater part of Nevada (sixth largest state in the Union) is as bleak and uninhabited as the craters of the moon. The Federal Government owns 87% of the whole place, rocks, rattlesnakes, Gila monsters and all, and its total population comes to 167,000 souls, only a few more than Bridgeport, Conn. It has only three industries-ranching, mining and the care and feeding of tourists. But arid Nevada has bloomed like a garden for Norman Biltz...
Because he collects ranches much as other rich men collect securities or old masters, Norman Biltz is one of Nevada's biggest land owners. He has 43,000 acres in the fertile Humboldt River country and federal grazing rights on a million acres more. He owns 11,000 subsidiary acres in California. His 14,000 cattle make him one of the state's biggest stockmen. His S-Bar-B, Quilici-Biltz and Nevada Nile ranches make him one of its biggest crop producers. And restless Entrepreneur Biltz keeps his fingers in dozens of other likely financial enterprises, from...
...especially sinister, but he quietly exercises a kind of all-embracing, behind-the-scenes influence which has largely vanished from more-complicated areas of the country. Though Biltz is a Republican, crusty old Democratic Senator Pat Mc-Carran communes with him from Washington almost daily by long-distance telephone. Nevada's bumbling G.O.P. Senator Malone is beholden to him. And Biltz hand-picked Nevada's Governor Charles Russell. As a result, Nevada's big gamblers (who are also big campaign contributors) listen when Biltz whispers, for the gover nor appoints the tax commission, and the tax commission...
...seemed destined to run in the jostling and confident pack of those who always see but never seize the glittering tumbleweed of fortune. But after toiling as a steamboat wiper, a strikebreaker, a manufacturer's agent and a bond salesman, he switched to real estate and finally reached Nevada with a grandiose scheme, later carried out at a profit of almost half a million dollars, to peddle practically the whole eastern shore of Lake Tahoe. Nevada, at the moment, was in bad shape. Its big ranches were almost all in the hands of the banks, the cattle market...
Transplanted Millionaires. He knew just what to do. He went to the legislature, and after long months of lobbying, talked it into prohibiting both inheritance and income taxes in Nevada. Then, well armed with the names and idiosyncrasies of wealthy prospects, he set out to sell bankrupt ranches as tax havens, and was soon transplanting millionaires to Nevada's soil-e.g., Bing Crosby, Max Fleischmann, Bronx Politico Ed Flynn, Automobile Magnate Errett Lobban Cord, Stock Broker Dean Witter...