The Unusual Nevada County That Came and Went

 

Yucca Mountain

   The year was 1987 and the federal government’s efforts to locate a national nuclear waste facility at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain were intensifying.

   For years, federal officials had entertained proposals to build such a facility in various places around the country, including the Hanford Site in Washington, rural Texas, and at Yucca Mountain, located in Nye County, about 80 miles north of Las Vegas.

   State officials in all three jurisdictions fought the project in spite of lucrative financial offers from the federal government.

   In 1987, veteran Nevada Assemblyman Paul May of North Las Vegas introduced legislation that would declare a 144-square-mile hunk around Yucca Mountain (completely encompassing the proposed nuclear waste site) to be a new county that would be named Bullfrog County.

   The name was said to have been derived from the region’s distinctive gold ore, which was said to resemble the color of a bullfrog.

   The idea behind creating the county was to capture any federal payments that might go to the county hosting the waste site and have them go directly to the state. The proposal, naturally, drew the ire of Nye County officials, who resented the state’s attempt to prevent them from receiving any of that funding.

   In creating the new county, the state could also set as high a tax burden as it wanted on the federal government should it go ahead with the waste facility project. In this way, Nevada hoped to make it prohibitively expensive for the federal government to build its nuclear dump.

   According to news accounts of the 1987 legislative session, the bill was passed at 3:45 a.m. at the very end of the session (June 30). It was promptly signed by Governor Richard Bryan, who opposed the waste facility.

   The legislation creating the new county was unique: its county commissioners, sheriff, and other county officers were not to be elected, but would be appointed by the governor (at a salary of $1 per year). Because the bill had been prepared quickly, the enabling legislation made no provisions for a court system or other legal officers. The county seat was in Carson City (the state capital), making it the only county in Nevada where the seat was not located inside the county (it was 270 miles away).

   Despite its relatively large size, the county had no population, with more than three-quarters of its land closed to the public and the remaining acreage owned by the Bureau of Land Management. It contained no paved roads or buildings.

   Immediately after its creation, the new county came under attack from Nye County residents, supporters of the waste project, and others who felt it was an embarrassing gimmick or at least an unconstitutional creation.

   In February 1988, after Bullfrog County had only been in existence for slightly less than two years, retired Supreme Court of Nevada Justice David Zenoff held a special hearing and found the county’s creation was unconstitutional. In the following legislative session (1989), the legislature abolished the county and returned the land to Nye County.

   It was an ignominious end to a controversial idea.

Reno's Pioneering Female Journalist: The Incomparable Peggy Trego

Peggy Trego's Unionville

   There’s a house at the top of Buena Vista Canyon, in the near-ghost town of Unionville, that is still known as the Trego House.

   Built in the 1950s, it was the home of Bob and Peggy Trego, a pair of once-prominent Reno journalists, who visited the area and decided to retire there. In fact, Bob, who died in 1983, is buried in the Unionville cemetery.

   While Bob is interesting in his own right—he was the longtime city editor of the Nevada State Journal—Peggy was the true trailblazer.

   Born in Baltimore in 1918, she met her first husband, Frederick Daiger III, while working at an international broadcast station, KGEI, that operated in the San Francisco region.

   With the advent of World War II, both Peggy and her husband volunteered to help the war effort with both becoming pilots. Sometime during the war, Peggy and Frederick divorced, and she took a job at the Nevada State Journal.

   Her first byline appeared in August 1945, beneath the headline, “Ten Japanese Balloons Found in Nevada in Last Six Months.” The feature informed readers about several Japanese balloons, some bearing bombs, had been found in Smith Valley and other parts of Nevada.

   Shortly after, Trego was assigned to cover the “Society and Clubs” pages while the regular social editor, Leola McDonald, was on vacation. This section was filled with news about upcoming weddings, fashion shows, women’s club meetings, and other news aimed at female readers.

   However, by the next year, Trego was writing stories not typically handled by female reporters. She was assigned to the police and courts beat—the first woman to do so—and covered everything from murders to bar fights to police shoot-outs.

   Near the end of the 1940s, she also decided to take another try at marriage and tied the knot with one of her co-workers, Bob Trego.

   Starting in 1950, Trego continued to cover crime stories but also started writing regular historical features. She began contributing long articles on such subjects as the last run of the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, the destruction of Reno’s Chinatown district in the early 20th century, and Reno’s last public hanging.

   One of the biggest robberies that crossed Trego’s path was the theft of $2.5 million in cash, securities, and jewelry from eccentric Reno millionaire LaVere Redfield. Born poor in Utah, Redfield made a fortune investing in stocks and from buying property at tax sales during the Depression. Distrustful of banks because he had seen so many fail, Redfield kept a substantial amount of his wealth in a safe in his home and, as was later discovered, inside his basement walls.

   Interestingly, a big reason why Trego became such a gifted crime reporter was because of something she offered to do that no male reporter would have thought to do, according to one of her contemporaries, wire service reporter Edward A. Olsen—she offered to type up the police officers’ notes for them.

   Olsen said that while all the other reporters were scrambling to get any information about the Redfield robbery, Trego already had the inside track on all the details.

   In January 1957, during a staff downsizing, Trego resigned from the Journal, with Bob following shortly after. It was then that they built their retirement home in Buena Vista Canyon, located about halfway between Lovelock and Winnemucca.

   For the next decade and a half, both of the Tregos continued to write, with Bob contributing a monthly column for the Nevada Engineering and Mining Journal, while Peggy, who enjoyed writing about Nevada history, was a regular contributor to the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, True West magazine, the Sacramento Bee, and Desert magazine.

   Following Bob’s death, Peggy continued to live in their home for another decade and remained an active freelance writer. In the early 1990s, as she entered her seventh decade, she sold the Unionville home and moved to Paso Robles, California, where her younger brother, Donald C. Frames, lived. She died in March 1998 at the age of 79.