Las Vegas: A Centennial History

Preface

L A S V E G A S I S M A N Y T H I N G S T O M A N Y P E O P L E . During the past half century, Las Vegas has become an icon of gambling and leisure. It attracts more than 35 million visitors annually, more than Orlando, more even than Mecca in SaudiArabia.To most of these visitors, it is “Sin City,” the “City without Clocks,” where “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” But to the people who live here, the better word to describe LasVegas is “home.” To these people—over 1.7 million of them according to the 2000 census, and more arriving every day—the metropolitan Las Vegas area is where they work, raise families, go to school, play ball or go jogging, and dream the same dreams and live the same lives as their fellowAmericans all over the country. That the city’s major industry involves a sometimes forbidden activity—gambling—and an attitude unappreciated by puritans of all stripes—the pursuit of pleasure in all its forms—does not contradict the fact that the majority of Las Vegans earn their living in ordinary workplaces like o≈ces, shops, and construction sites, and in the same vast range of occupations and professions that other Americans pursue. Las Vegas began its existence as a rest stop for travelers on the Old Spanish Trail (the city draws its name from a group of springs that once oΩered a welcome oasis in the blazing Mojave Desert). Less than a century ago, the town was little more than a sleepy whistle-stop servicing a railroad . Many consider Las Vegas’s date of birth May 15, 1905, the day when representatives of Senator William A. Clark of Montana and the Union Pacific Railroad auctioned oΩ blocks and lots of dusty desert land on an unseasonably hot day. But a town plat does not ensure the growth of a city—by 1910, fewer than 1,000 people lived in the town and its environs. This book describes how, in this most unlikely of settings, the world’s leading tourist center was born and grew. It commemorates the centenP R E FA C E P R E F A C E xiv nial of that auction—and of the establishment of Las Vegas—by chronicling , analyzing, and celebrating the city in all its diversity and paradox, and by describing how the city’s residents eΩected this dramatic transformation in less than a century. We shall be looking at far more than the Strip, which is a much more recent phenomenon—its first hotel, the El Rancho Vegas, only opened on April 3, 1941—and technically is not even in the City of Las Vegas, which stops at Sahara Avenue, where the Strip begins. Nor is our purview limited to the o≈cial Las Vegas city limits. When commentators point out that nearly 2 million people reside in Las Vegas, they mean in the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, which incorporates not just the city of Las Vegas but the neighboring cities of North LasVegas, Henderson, and Boulder City, the unincorporated townships of Paradise, Winchester, and Spring Valley, and county land. The population of the City of Las Vegas actually accounts for no more than one-third of the metropolitan population. Las Vegas’s destiny was never assured. The little town limped along untilWorldWar I sparked a brief boom in the transshipment of local minerals , food, and horses. Then, in the 1920s, a slowdown in commerce and a bitter strike against the Union Pacific Railroad cost Las Vegas its valuable railroad repair shops, left the place in limbo, and prompted residents to take steps to attract tourists. Federal intervention in the 1930s, along with the happy combination of geology, geography, and technology, made Las Vegas the national gateway to Boulder Dam. This project, with its infusion of federal money, supplies, and workers from all over the country, plus the interest the project created, began to shift the little town’s economy slowly toward tourism—helped by Nevada’s legalization of wide-open gambling in 1931. World War II completed the process. Federal spending was again crucial to the city. The construction of a giant magnesium plant and the instant suburb of Henderson, the establishment of an army gunnery school near what later became North Las Vegas, and the creation of numerous military bases and defense plants in neighboring California...