Yesterday, we covered the period in which Spanish explorers, Mormon missionaries, and American homesteaders discovered, tamed, and settled Las Vegas. Today, we start up with the arrival of the railroad.
It took 35 years and a total of six different companies to complete the railroad track that connected Salt lake City to Los Angeles, built along the old Mormon Trail. In 1902, Las Vegas, thanks to its strategic location and plentiful water, was designated by the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad as a division point for crew changes, a service stop for through trains, and an eventual site for repair shops.
By 1902, Helen Stewart, the first First Lady of Las Vegas and owner of the Las Vegas Ranch, had amassed 1,800 acres of the valley. That year, she accepted an offer of $55,000 for the land from the SP, LA & SL Railroad. (She continued to live in Las Vegas and promote the Paiute cause till she died in 1926.)
In the fall of 1904, railroad track had been laid across Las Vegas Valley and in January 1905, the track from Los Angeles met up with the track from Salt Lake City. The golden spike was driven into a tie near modern-day Jean, 23 miles southwest of what would soon be the town of Las Vegas.
In April 1905, with the start of regular train service through Las Vegas Valley, the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad organized the subsidiary Las Vegas Land & Water Co. The company plotted its own town site, bulldozed all the desert scrub from a 40-block area, and scheduled the auctioning of lots for May 15, 1905. (Thursday marks Las Vegas’ 103rd birthday.)
Each block, a regulation 300 by 400 feet, consisted of 32 lots, each 25 by 140 feet, fronted by an 80-foot-wide street and bisected by a 20-foot-wide alley. Block 20, between Second and Third streets and Bridger and Carson streets (behind today's Four Queens) was reserved as a public square, while the sale of liquor was restricted to blocks 17 and 16.
The auction was conducted at the corner of what would soon be Fremont and Main, site of today’s Plaza Hotel-Casino. In the heat of the moment, choice corner lots listed at $150 to $750 sold for up to $1,750; well-located inside lots sold for double their listed value. In all, more than 700 lots were purchased, netting the railroad company $265,000, an almost 500% profit over what it’d paid Helen Stewart for the whole ranch three years earlier.
And Las Vegas was on the map, one of the last railroad boomtowns on one of the last major lines across the United States.
The initial excitement lasted all of a month, after which the early euphoria gave way to the dismal demands of domesticating a desert. The service policies of the railroad vis a vis the town and residents were conservative, bureaucratic, and inattentive. Conflicts, fires, flash floods, and growing pains of a new company town dampened local optimism.
Still, Las Vegas did grow, and soon it boasted frame houses, hotels, saloons, restaurants, general stores, a school, and a two-story bank. Water mains, pipes, and hydrants were installed. After-hours revelry of the alcoholic and carnal sorts was available at Block 16. The new Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad into central Nevada furthered Las Vegas’ ambitions as a crossroads. To further its ambitions as an administrative seat, in 1909 Clark County was sliced off vast Lincoln County; when Las Vegas incorporated two years later as the Clark County seat, the population was 1,500.
Ten years later, the town had barely grown, to 2,300 residents. Though many urban improvements had been implemented, in the early 1920s, Las Vegas remained isolated and desolate. The Salt Lake-Los Angeles Railroad was sold to Union Pacific, headquartered in New York. Decisions and instructions from corporate HQ -- even those concerning urgent situations, such as large leaks in water mains - often took weeks to be made and dispatched. To travel to the state capital at Carson City or its urban center at Reno, Las Vegans had to connect by train via Los Angeles and San Francisco or Salt Lake City.
The key to the town’s future, however, flowed just 25 miles away. In 1924, the federal Bureau of Reclamation narrowed the list of potential sites for a dam on the Colorado River to two locations due east of Las Vegas. Anticipation alone began to fuel a noticeable spurt in growth. During the latter half of the 1920s, laws were passed, interstate details were negotiated, and money was allocated for Boulder (now Hoover) Dam. And so Las Vegas began to revitalize. By the end of the decade, the town had long-distance phone service, a federal highway from Salt Lake to Los Angeles, regularly scheduled airmail and air-passenger services, more than 5,000 residents, and one of the world’s most colossal engineering projects about to get under way just over the next rise.
Tune in tomorrow for the dam, legalized gambling, and the founding of the Las Vegas Strip.
