Question of the Day - 23 August 2019

The artesian aquifer that bubbled to the surface in the valley that came to be known as Las Vegas was called Big Springs. The original oasis in the fierce eastern Mojave Desert supported indigenous people for thousands of years, inspired the Spanish name Las Vegas ("the Meadows"), and attracted settlers to the big valley that surrounded it. It was the primary water source for early explorers, Latter-day Saints who established a short-lived mission nearby in the mid-1850s, ranchers who followed the Mormons to settle the valley, and the Salt Lake-Los Angeles railroad that founded Las Vegas as a service stop for its steam-powered locomotives.

After the city was established in 1905, Big Springs was used as a well field from which a pipeline delivered water to downtown. But with more and more residents and businesses tapping into the ground water, the aquifer that fed the springs was depleted; it basically disappeared in the 1930s and Big Springs was essentially forgotten. Luckily, by then, Hoover Dam had been completed and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of water was available from Lake Mead. Today, 80 or so years later, we know differently.

Anyway, Claude Warren, a local archaeologist, got interested in the area and excavated it in 1972. Thanks, in part, to his discovery of pottery, arrowheads, and milling stones dating back 8,000 years, Big Springs was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

In 2007, the Springs Preserve was established. This attraction cost $250 million and consists of 180 acres, 176,000 square feet of museum space, an 1,800-seat outdoor amphitheater, a desert botanical garden with 30,000 plants, and two-and-a-half miles of hiking trails surrounded by wetlands.

The Springs Preserve is located on Meadows Lane off of Valley View Blvd. near Meadows Mall, very close to the site of the original Big Springs.