Jean, Nevada, is a small casino settlement (only a handful of people live there, so you can't really call it a town) 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas and 12 miles northeast of the California state line. It hugs both sides of I-15, with the Gold Strike Hotel-Casino on the eastbound side, the Jean Conservation Camp (a minimum-security prison for women) on the westbound.
The first recorded activity around what would become Jean took place in 1904, when crews laid track through the area for the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. Eastbound and westbound crews hooked up the railroad a few miles west of Jean, driving a golden spike and completing the railroad in December of that year.
Once the railroad was operational, ore from the lead and zinc mines in the area was hauled seven miles by wagon train from the refinery at the newly founded town of Goodsprings to the nearest point on the track, where it was loaded into waiting train cars. The loading point was named Jean by George Fayle, the most prominent businessman in Goodsprings, after his wife.
Goodsprings declined within 10 years (George Fayle was a victim of the 1918 flu pandemic and it went quickly downhill from there) and Jean went to seed; for more than 50 years, the only settlements in the neighborhood were a few scattered ranches.
One of southern Nevada’s pioneers, Peter "Pop" Simon, arrived in Las Vegas in the 1920s. In one of his many deals, he bought a 360-acre parcel eight miles north of town, originally leasing it to Western Air Express, an early local airline. Western Air sunk a well for water and built a dirt runway and a small operations shack; this was Las Vegas’ first municipal airport. In 1940, the U.S. government bought out Simon and the other landowners in the area to establish the Las Vegas Army Air Field and open the Las Vegas Army Air Corps Gunnery School; this expanded into Nellis Air Force Base.
Pop Simon used the proceeds from that sale in part to buy a seven-stool lunch counter and gas station in Jean; over the next few years, he expanded it into a motel. For a view of the operation, click on the thumbnail image below of the couple of hotel postcards that were the only visual representation of the operation that we could find.
In those days, it was quite a trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and these little rest stops were coming along Highway 91; in Nevada, though, gambling was part of the attraction. At Pop's, so was the car that Bonnie and Clyde Barrow were driving when they were shot. By 1947, Pop's little motel, diner, and gas station had grown into Pop's Oasis Casino, reportedly as large as the Flamingo on the incipient Las Vegas Strip.
The women's prison opened in Jean 1987. Pop's Oasis closed in 1988, when Pop and his partners began building Nevada Landing, which opened in 1989 on the westbound side of the freeway and the Gold Strike on the east side a year later.
Circus Circus bought both hotel-casinos for $725 million in 1995 and they were later absorbed into MGM Mirage when it bought out Mandalay Resorts Group.
In March 2007, MGM Mirage announced its intention to build a master-planned residential community on 166 acres it owns in Jean. No timeline or costs were announced for the project, but MGM announced that Nevada Landing would close on April 18, 2007, and the Gold Strike would close "eventually." Nevada Landing closed a month early on March 20 and was subsequently demolished, but the master-planned community never materialized.
In November 2008, MGM stated that it was actively exploring the sale of 116 acres on the Nevada Landing side of I-15, but that’s the last we heard of the property. The Gold Strike, which was renovated and expanded, in 2007, continues to operate on the eastbound side.
