How Nevada Got Its Name (and Dodged Washoe and Bullion)

Nevada could have ended up as Washoe, Humboldt, Esmeralda, or even Bullion, but it kept a Spanish word that means snowy. Nevada means “snow-clad” or “snowy,” and it came from the mountains on the state’s western edge, the Sierra Nevada. How the name got trimmed down to just “Nevada” is something even the 1890 history of the state couldn’t fully explain.

Snowy, from the mountains

If you’re wondering where the snow comes in, look west. Henry Gannett, writing about the origin of U.S. place names in 1905, says nevada is “a Spanish word meaning ‘snow-clad,’ ‘snowy land,’” and that it was “originally applied to the snow-capped mountains,” the Sierra Nevada.

H. H. Bancroft, in his 1890 History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming, puts it plainly: how the territory “came to be called simply Nevada, snowy, is not altogether clear.”

From Sierra Nevada to Nevada

Here’s what he could piece together. In February 1858, Delegate Crane wrote home from Washington that a territorial government was about to be set up “under the name of Sierra Nevada.” On May 12, 1859, a bill was introduced in the House to organize “the territory of Nevada.” That December, an assembly that met at Genoa was reported as the first legislature of the “territory of Nevada,” before Congress had made any such territory.

Congress finally carved the territory out of western Utah on March 2, 1861, and by then the “Sierra” was gone.

Washoe, Humboldt, Esmeralda, or Bullion

The name still wasn’t safe. Later, when Nevada was applying to become a state, delegates at the convention made motions to change it to Washoe, Humboldt, or Esmeralda. Somebody brought up Sierra Plata, “silver mountains,” as a nod to the mines. That ran into competition from Oro Plata, gold and silver, and even from plain old Bullion.

None of them won. As Bancroft put it, “Having escaped all these perils of nomenclature, it remains simply snowy-white Nevada.” So all that talk of silver and gold came to nothing, and you never had to hear about the state of Bullion.

Sources & further reading

• H. H. Bancroft, History of Nevada, Colorado, and Wyoming (1890), pp. 150–151, 157. “Not altogether clear”; the territory organized out of western Utah on March 2, 1861; Delegate Crane’s letter of February 1858 and “Sierra Nevada”; the House bill of May 12, 1859; the Genoa assembly of December 1859; the motions for Washoe, Humboldt, and Esmeralda and the mention of Sierra Plata (p. 150); Oro Plata, Bullion, and “Having escaped all these perils of nomenclature, it remains simply snowy-white Nevada” (p. 151); the bill for the territory passing the House and being approved on March 2, 1861 (p. 157, note).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 222. Lists Nevada the state and the “mountains of the western coast,” and calls the name “a Spanish word meaning ‘snow-clad,’ ‘snowy land,’ originally applied to the snow-capped mountains.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Nevada’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779793).