Samuel Platt, distinguished lawyer and public servant in early twentieth-century Nevada, was born in Carson City in 1874 of Jewish Prussian-Polish parents. He attended the local public schools, winning honors in oratory and art. Platt taught school in Carson City and Gardnerville before matriculating to Stanford University in 1893 for two years. He passed the Nevada bar exam in 1896 and then proceeded to Columbian (later George Washington University) Law School in Washington, D.C., where he earned a bachelor of letters degree.

Milton Benjamin Badt (1884-1966) considered himself a Nevadan although he was born in San Francisco and received most of his formal education in California. He established a law practice in Elko and became District Judge before his appointment to the Nevada Supreme Court in 1947. Paul Leonard, editor of the Elko Daily Free Press and the Nevada State Journal, characterized Badt "as brilliant a man as there'd ever been in the state of Nevada."

Betting on races, fights and cards was a part of life in early Nevada. Jews were participants in these pastimes, and those who owned saloons were party to the practice. After the legalization of gambling in 1931, Jews were prominent in Reno gambling. Those who had plied their trade elsewhere and illegally often came under investigation.

When Nevada's ore production dropped precipitously after 1877, the population steadily declined and public officials searched for ways to attract new citizens and bolster the tax base. Eventually, the Hebrew Agricultural Society of the United States unveiled a plan to triple Nevada's population with thousands of eastern European Jews. In 1897, Governor Reinhold Sadler commissioned Jewish entrepreneurs Morris Cohn and Theodore Hofer to take out an option on a 5,500 acre spread in Wellington, forty-five miles south of Carson City.