Description
The Great Depression of the 1930s had a devastating impact on sparsely populated Nevada and its two major industries, mining and agriculture. Thanks to Nevada’s powerful senate delegation, Roosevelt’s New Deal funding flowed abundantly into the state. Among the programs thus supported was the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program intended to provide jobs for unemployed young men and a pool of labor for essential public lands rehabilitation projects.

In all, nearly 31,000 young men were employed in fifty-nine CCC camps throughout Nevada, most of them from outside the state. These “boys,” as they were called, went to work improving the state’s forests, parks, wildlife habitats, roads, fences, irrigation systems, flood-control systems, and rangelands. Rural communities near CCC camps reaped additional benefits when local men were hired as foremen and when the camps purchased supplies from local merchants.

This is the first comprehensive history of the Nevada CCC, a program designed to help the nation get back on its feet, and of the “boys” who did so much to restore Nevada’s lands and resources—and who in the process became men. Foreword by Richard O. Davies.

Reviews
"...highly readable, thoroughly researched, and provides the reader with a first-time look at the men that comprised the CCC in Nevada during a time in our history that offered little hope to millions of citizens…. Highly recommended.”
—The Oklahoma Observer

"Their demographic and archeological research will be invaluable to future studies. The inclusion of well-chosen photographs and extended primary source quotations provide an almost museum-like experience in textual form...This work is not only the most comprehensive study of the CCC in Nevada, but the most comprehensive of any CCC state study."
—Oral History Review