A portrait of Frank Rathbun, a surveyor for L. A. Water & Power.

Thalia Dondero is most famous for being the first woman elected to the Clark County Commission. She ran her first successful campaign in 1974 and held office for twenty years. While on the commission, Dondero helped to create Red Rock Canyon and Valley of Fire state parks, to modernize McCarran International Airport and University Medical Center, and served on the Water Authority Board. She served as a member of the Board of Regents for the Nevada System of Higher Education for twelve years after retiring from the County Commission in 1994. Dondero died September 4, 2016 from complications from congestive heart failure. Thalia Marie Dondero was born January 23, 1920. Her father, Doyle Sperry, was a taxidermist and her mother, Sylvia Peck, was a violinist and worked in a laundry. She lived in both Colorado and Wyoming before her family settled in Bakersfield, California. Dondero moved to Las Vegas in 1943 when her employer took a job with Basic Magnesium, Inc. and requested that she follow him. On June 21, 1946 she married Harvey Dondero who taught English and journalism for local high schools,. The couple had two daughters and three sons together. Dondero was very active in her community. While her children were in school, she volunteered for the Parent Teacher Association and even served as the organization’s president. She was also very active with local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts troops in Las Vegas. She served as executive director of the girl scouts and was instrumental in creating the Foxtail Girl Scout Camp at Mount Charleston. Throughout her life, Dondero volunteered with a number of Las Vegas organizations, including the Junior League, the International Women’s Foundation, and the Gilcrease Foundation.

An artist's depiction of Julia Bulette's theft and murder by John Millain. The caption on the front of the card reads: "Julia Bulette; Murdered for her Jewels by John Millain, 1887. J. M hung in 1868." A lengthy description printed on the back of the card reads: "Julia Bulette came to Virginia City while it was still a raw camp, and was soon among its best known figures. Reputedly a French Creole from New Orleans, tall, dark, lithe and witty, she was no ordinary lady of the line. Her secret charities were innumerable, her public services many, and her entertainments memorable for both cuisine and conversation. During the deadly black-water plague of 1861, she made her house into a hospital, nursed the stricken miners, and pawned her belongings to help their families. She was chosen an honorary member of Engine Company Number 1, but, not content with honorary status, attended the fires, worked a stirrup pump, and served refreshments to the Company afterwards. She was not one to seek obscurity or tolerate condescension. In the flush years of the first boom, she paraded C Street daily in a coach with four aces fanned upon the door, and sat nightly in her own box at the opera house, with a sable cape across her shoulders. When the ladies of the upper city sought to confine her activities, she retaliated by crashing their parties and making them her own. As a result, her violent death during the night of January 20, 1867, precipitated a cold war of the sexes. When her funeral procession, long, entirely masculine, and led by a band playing a dead-march, moved out B Street toward Old Flowery Cemetery, the wives in the hill mansions sat behind closed doors and drawn shutters, though even those could not defend them from the sprightly, returning strains of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." And conversely, when John Millain was arrested, some months later, after selling articles recognized as Julie's, his trial by the men was something less than impartial, but he was constantly visited in prison by women who showered him with gifts and tears. That his hanging, in April of 1868, drew the largest crowd in Virginia's history to the hollow north of town where the gallows was erected, the women to the ringside seats and the men to the slopes behind them, was less a tribute to Millain himself than a result of the fact that he was dying as the murderer of Julie Bulette, more nearly a Queen of the Comstock than any of her wealthy "betters" who vied for the title. "Sazarac" Virginia City, Nevada."