Clark County was once Confederate-claimed
But South never deployed forces to control territory
“Battle-born” Nevada famously won statehood in 1864 to help preserve the Union, but it was the Confederacy that initially claimed the land now known as Clark County.
Just don’t expect to find any monuments commemorating Southern Nevada’s brief annexation by the South. None was ever built, so there’s nothing to tear down.
“They might have claimed this territory, but they certainly didn’t maintain any control over it,” said Mark Hall-patton, historian and museums administrator for Clark County. “There was never any Confederate presence here.”
When Nevada became a U.S. territory in 1861 and a state three years later, its southern boundary was the 37th parallel, an east-west line running about 10 miles north of present-day Beatty and Mesquite. What is now the southern tip of the Silver State remained part of the New Mexico Territory until 1863, when it became part the newly formed Arizona Territory.
Early in the Civil War, the Confederacy laid claim to Arizona but never sent troops to the harsh, largely unsettled desert west of the Colorado River, Hall-patton said.
While controversy swirls around Civil War legacies and monuments in other states, Southern Nevada’s brief affiliation with the Confederate States of America is more a quirk of history that left no mark on its psyche.
“It wasn’t a Confederate territory,” Hall-patton said. “It was not like the Confederates had this outpost in the West.”
Miner disagreements
It’s unlikely the few people that lived in the area at the time even knew about the secessionists’ claim. Hall-patton said only a few hundred settlers lived in the future Clark
County. Some were army deserters who chose to hide out from the war in the gold mines of Eldorado Canyon, about 50 miles southeast of
present-day Las Vegas.
But Hall-patton said the miners soon formed separate camps based on their sympathies: “Buster Falls”