Random Thoughts: Bullfrog County, Nevada – Part 2

 

January 3, 2020



In 1987 the Nevada state government enacted a law creating Bullfrog County. Nevada’s 17th county contained 144 square miles of land and no people.

Nevada is, of course, a state with much desert land. In the late 19th century, the United States government gave away millions of acres of land in the American West through the Homestead Act and several other laws.

The Homestead Act was designed to give land to people who wanted to farm it. While the government gave away vast amounts of land, few people wanted Nevada acreage. Other western areas were more conducive to agriculture.

Eventually, the federal government stopped giving away public land and, instead, turned it over to agencies (like the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service) to administer it for the benefit of the general public.

Nevada has a greater percentage of land within its borders owned by the federal government than any other state. Almost 85 percent of Nevada’s territory (nearly 57 million acres) belongs to the U.S. government!

Conflicts between Nevada residents and the federal government were, apparently inevitable. They certainly have occurred over the years, and many Nevadans have an anti-government bias. One manifestation of this federal-state hostility was the creation of Bullfrog County.

In the late 1980s the U.S. government announced plans to create a nuclear waste disposal site in a remote unpopulated area of Nye County, Nevada. The money the government would pay for the inconvenience this might cause would go to the county.

In addition to fighting the disposal site in other ways, the Nevada state government created Bullfrog County out of Nye and required that any money due it would go to the state since there were no people in the new county. As we noted previously, the county seat was Carson City, the state capital.

Nice try, Nevada, but it didn’t work! In 1988 the Nevada supreme court ruled the state’s legislative action to be unconstitutional. In 1989 Bullfrog’s land was returned to Nye County and Bullfrog County ceased to exist.

 

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