Corbett-Fitzsimmon Flight

On March 17, 1897, Carson City staged the first legal world heavyweight championship fight in Nevada, and the sport was never quite the same. The state, broke after the Comstock's decline, had just legalized prizefighting when reformers elsewhere still called it a disgrace; promoter Dan Stuart brought the bout here anyway. Before thousands, "Gentleman Jim" Corbett fell in the fourteenth round to Bob Fitzsimmons and his famous solar-plexus punch. Three cameras filmed it, producing what many consider the first feature-length film. Other states soon legalized the sport, and Nevada's long run as a fight capital began.

What the plaque says

On March 17, 1897, at an arena located on this site, Carson City played host to Nevada’s first World Championship prizefight, a fourteen-round thriller in which the reigning heavyweight titlist, James J. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, was dethroned by Robert Fitzsimmons. The Nevada Legislature had only recently legalized prizefighting and the match became the object of scathing criticism from the press and pulpit of other states, but fight fans arrived by the thousands. Promoter Dan Stuart put on a clean show and demonstrated that boxing need not be brutal or crooked. Other states were soon to liberalize their own prizefight laws and the sport began to assume a degree of respectability it had not enjoyed in the past. In later years, Nevada was to be the scene of several other World Championship fights.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson City — 0.4 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since
• Stewart Indian School — 3.2 mi
  The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices
• The Flume Trail & Marlette Lake — 7.6 mi
  The other thing the Comstock took off Lake Tahoe—not its trees but its water, hauled over a mountain range through the highest-pressure pipeline on earth, on a flume grade that is now one of the country's great mountain-bike rides
• Sand Harbor — 9.4 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Charles W. Friend House, Observatory & Weather Station — 0.2 mi
• State Printing Building — 0.3 mi
• Nevada’s Capital — 0.4 mi
• Carson City — 0.4 mi