Las Vegas: A Centennial History

1: Before the City

1 BEFORE THE CITY L A S V E G A S C E L E B R AT E S I T S C E N T E N N I A L in 2005 as a typical city—and a totally unique one. No otherAmerican city founded in the twentieth century has grown into an urban area of more than one million by the twenty-first century. Although outside the city limits, the Strip—Las Vegas Boulevard South—is one of the world’s most famous and recognizable streets, with the neon that continues into the city’s downtown Glitter Gulch area visible from outer space. The city and its cash cow, gaming, have evolved from a “green felt jungle” and “sin city” into a respected industry run by executives with national and international corporations. Each year, millions of tourists visit the city, including the downtown and Summerlin areas. They also frequent surrounding locales like the Strip, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, Red Rock Canyon, and theValley of Fire, to name only a few.Tourism obviously aΩects the economy greatly, but the city also depends upon such typical industries as construction , municipal services, and health care. Politically, Las Vegas leans toward the Democratic Party, due partly to the presence of powerful unions, yet it tends to be fiscally conservative and slow to deal with social problems. The area increasingly resembles the sprawl, smog, and rushhour tra≈c of southern California. Culturally, Las Vegas oΩers much of what residents of comparatively sized cities might find, yet it still lags behind them in its oΩerings of museums and music, and in the support they receive. Growth has been and will continue to be an all-important issue: how to deal with more tra≈c, more use of water, more students attending more schools, and, always, more growth. Las Vegans of 2005 are familiar with these issues, but not always with their history. It turns out that what they find today in their desert oasis is L A S V E G A S 2 similar to what has come before: encounters with travelers, connections to southern California, and the combination of a typical community merged with guilty pleasures. Las Vegans do not live in the past—but the past remains very much alive. Long before today’s large population of residents and tourists arrived, people lived in the LasVegasValley.Archaeologists have found evidence of Native Americans living in southern Nevada more than ten thousand years ago from baskets, petroglyphs, pictographs, and other materials in locations as diverse as Gypsum Cave to the east and Tule Springs to the northwest. Perhaps as early as a.d. 700, Paiutes moved into southern Nevada, spending summers in the nearby mountains and winters in the valley, often by the Big Springs. They survived mainly by gathering plants and berries, occasionally farming on small plots of land, and hunting for small animals such as desert tortoises, rabbits, snakes, and lizards. The Las Vegas Paiutes probably encountered Spanish traders in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but no conclusive evidence exists to prove this. At the end of 1829, Rafael Rivera apparently became the first non–Native American known to have set foot in the Las Vegas Valley. A scout for New Mexico merchant Antonio Armijo, Rivera diverted from the group, then rejoined the traders when they camped in Las Vegas that January 7 before going on to California. Armijo and Rivera established Las Vegas as the northern branch of the Old Spanish Trail, which travelers between New Mexico and southern California used for the next two decades. Even then, though, Las Vegas had competition and a reputation. George Yount and William Wolfskill laid out a branch of the Old Spanish Trail to the south, through what is now Needles, California. Many travelers preferred Needles because of the abundant water and grass in the Las Vegas Valley. That might seem to make no sense, but the water and grass also attracted horse thieves and traders in Indian slaves. Indeed, in 1840, mountain man Bill Williams and Ute chief Wakara led a raid on California ranches that netted perhaps one thousand horses that galloped through Las Vegas. Americans soon learned about the Las Vegas Valley’s attractions through the work of federal explorers. On May 3, 1844, Captain John C. Frémont and his fellow mapmakers from the U.S. Army Topographical Corps arrived at the Big Springs, part of today’s Las...