Nye County, Nevada, the largest (by area) county in the state and third-largest in the Lower 48, is only the sixth-largest county in terms of population in the state*. In addition to the county seat of Tonopah and the Las Vegas bedroom community of Pahrump, the other major towns include Beatty ("Gateway to Death Valley!"), Amargosa Springs, and Round Mountain. 92% of the land in Nye County is owned by the Federal government or various Paiute & Shoshone Indian bands, including the Nevada National Security Site, the Nevada Test & Training Range (part of Nellis AFB), the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, and sundry chunks of land administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

The county was established in 1864 and named for James Nye, the Nevada Territory's first governor and later one of the state's first senators. Its history is full of mining boom and bust cycles, which have left the county littered with all manner of ghost towns and over fifty entries in the National Register of Historic Places.

As part of protests against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site, which would have been located in southern Nye County, the state of Nevada created Bullfrog County in 1987, whose sole purpose was to make the creation and operation of the site heinously expensive - and, not coincidentally, screw Nye County out of the Federal payments in lieu of taxes it would have received, since under the law creating Bullfrog County, such payments would go directly to the state. The legislators and Governor Bryan hadn't thought through the consequences of their bill, however. Since the county was uninhabited, it would be impossible to try anyone who committed a crime there, since a jury could not be impaneled. For this and other reasons, Nye County sued the state, and a judge ruled in 1988 that the creation of Bullfrog County was unconstitutional. The state government abolished Bullfrog County in 1989.

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