The Little Village of Las Vegas

Wide open spaces downtown, 1910.

(Library of Congress)

For most of us Las Vegas means huge casinos, cutting-edge glitz, and moral indiscretion. It’s an unreal and almost mythical place. But when it all began—and a key turning point was 101 years ago today—almost nobody expected the tiny settlement to become much more than a remote rest stop on the way to California.

The first known visitor to what would become Las Vegas was a lost Mexican scout named Rafael Rivera. Traveling through the West in 1829, he became separated from his party and, wandering, stumbled on the Las Vegas valley, which he found surprisingly hospitable, with the kind of water supply that was all too rare in the Nevada desert. Others followed behind him, including the explorer John C. Frémont, who traveled through in 1844. Just over a decade after Frémont’s visit, Mormon settlers arrived at the Las Vegas springs, which were on the route between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. They built a fort there, but they too eventually moved on. Las Vegas remained without more than a small handful of residents.

Only at the dawn of the twentieth century did it started developing into a city. In 1902 a man named William Clark started buying real estate in the area, purchasing the one large ranch that dominated the sparsely inhabited landscape. Clark was no idle speculator. A United States senator from Montana, he was one of the richest men in America, having made a fortune in extractive industries and owning silver mines in Montana and Arizona’s United Verde Copper mine. But Las Vegas’s few residents could have little idea of the impact he would have—or that he was to be but the first in a long line of tycoons who would take an interest in their town.

Clark’s plans for Las Vegas hinged on a technology that had already transformed the West, the railroad. The town, with its springs, was a convenient stopping point for people headed for California; he intended to make it into a stopping point in a much larger system of transportation. He was building a new rail line between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, and he saw this midpoint settlement as a perfect place to perform maintenance on trains.

The town could provide much more than just a well-situated service depot, though. Clark figured that Las Vegas would experience the same big growth as other Western towns suddenly linked up with national transportation, and he planned to auction off much of his property after the rail line was completed. The auction took place 101 years ago today, on May 15, 1905. Clark was joined in the auction by another developer, J. T. McWilliams, who had been advertising his holdings in Los Angeles newspapers. By the end of the day, 176 lots had been sold, valued in all at just under $80,000.

In the century since Clark’s auction, Las Vegas has traveled an immense distance. It started out as a railroad town in a state that outlawed casinos, and it struggled through the first few decades of its official existence as a city, especially after labor disputes in the 1920s led the railroad to cut jobs. But when the Great Depression hit, Vegas started to grow. Federal money poured into the region as the building of the Boulder Dam got underway in 1931. Employment opportunities and tourism expanded. Then with the beginning of World War II, more money arrived as an air base opened nearby and the Basic Magnesium company started a major factory.

The Las Vegas we know came into being after the end of the war. Nevada had loosened restrictions on gambling earlier, but not until the 1940s and ’50s did the casinos come to town. Hotels like the Flamingo and the Sands sprang up. Celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Elvis Presley played there, and movies like Ocean’s Eleven and Viva Las Vegas! spread the word. Of course, as many Americans know, much of this fame was built on questionable business transactions. As developers sought to finance construction, some of them turned to organized crime for money. When Las Vegas’s economic fortunes rose, so did those of shady figures like Bugsy Siegel.

Las Vegas came a long way from a very sleepy start. Not all that long ago it was a very small but vital stop on the way to the Pacific Coast; a young town, poor but promising;and the focus of William Clark’s characteristically grand ambitions.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.