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Probably the first white explorer to enter the state was the Spanish priest Francisco Garces, who apparently penetrated extreme southern Nevada in 1776. The year 1826 saw Peter Skene Ogden of the British Hudson's Bay Company enter the northeast in a prelude to his later exploration of the Humboldt River; the rival American trapper Jedediah Smith traversed the state in 1826 –27. During 1843–44, John C. Frémont led the first of his several expeditions into Nevada.Nevada's first permanent white
settlement, Mormon Station (later Genoa), was founded in
1850 in what is now western Nevada, a region that became
part of Utah Territory the same year. (The southeastern tip
of Nevada was assigned to the Territory of New Mexico.) Soon
other Mormon settlements were started there and in Las Vegas
Valley. The Las Vegas mission failed, but the farming
communities to the northwest succeeded, even though friction
between Mormons and placer miners in that area caused
political unrest. Most of the Mormons in western Nevada
departed in 1857, when Salt Lake City was threatened by an
invasion of federal troops. A separate Nevada Territory was established in 1861; only three years later, on 31 October 1864, Nevada achieved statehood, although the present boundaries were not established until 18 January 1867. Two factors accelerated the creation of Nevada: the secession of the southern states, whose congressmen had been blocking the creation of new free states, and the discovery, in 1859, of the Comstock Lode, an immense concentration of silver and gold which attracted thousands of fortune seekers and established the region as a thriving mining center. Read more: http://www.city-data.com/states/Nevada-History.html
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