Las Vegas turns
luck into fortune

Like many American cities, Las Vegas began as an accident of nature — a watering hole rest stop on the parched Spanish Trail, the trade route linking Santa Fe, N.M. with Los Angeles in the first half of the 19^th century. But in the 100 years since its official founding, the city’s economic vitality has been entirely man-made, fueled by a series of colorful entrepreneurs with big egos who were as quick to tear up the city’s business plan and start over as its developers today now tear down old resorts to make room for new ones.

The city's name comes from the Spanish “The Meadows”  — a fertile valley with a plentiful water supply in the middle of the desert that had provided a rest stop for travelers for as long ago as 1000 years.  But it wasn’t until the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad (later bought out by the Union Pacific) came through in 1905 that the town took off.

The completion of the main railway, linking Southern California with Salt Lake established Las Vegas as a railroad town. But this was more than a whistle stop to take on water: The town was chosen as the site of a maintenance yard, according to Hal Rothman, a history professor at University of Nevada Las Vegas, and author of "Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century."

“That’s what made the land auction worth having,” he said. “Businesses knew there would be 1,200 to 2,000 people who would buy things on a regular basis. They knew there would be an economy that would come through here.”

On May 15, 1905, the town held its first land auction. Within two days, all 110 acres had been sold. The rail link brought merchants from Los Angeles who set up shop to supply the growing city, which by 1930 had grown to more than 5,000. But the town fathers made a fateful gamble in the 1920s by backing a railroad workers strike, said Rothman, and in 1930, the railroad had pulled out, leaving the town looking for another way to make a living.

As luck would have it, the city’s economic salvation came in the form one of the biggest works public projects of the Great Depression: the building of the Hoover Dam. Thousands of workers flocked to the area looking for constructions jobs. Thousands more who couldn’t find work stayed on and collected welfare payments. Both provided a significant shot of cash to the city’s economy.

The project also left a lot of bored workers looking for something to do with that cash. Though gambling had been as common in Las Vegas during Prohibition as any other American city, it was officially legalized in Nevada on March 19, 1931. Combined with liberalized divorce laws — a "quickie" divorce could be had with just six weeks of residency — visitors looking to get unhitched stayed at "dude ranch" resorts that pre-dated the sprawling Strip hotels that would be built in the coming decades.

With the Hoover Dam completed in 1936, the flow of public dollars began to dry up. Once again, Mother Nature played a hand in the city’s fortunes. The largely uninhabited surrounding land made southern Nevada an ideal location for a military base. On Jan. 25, 1941, the U.S. Army Air Corps set up a gunnery school for aviators. Nellis Air Force Base and its restricted ranges now cover more than 5,000 square miles — an area bigger than Connecticut. The Cold War also brought with it the creation of the nearby Nevada Test Site (about the size of Rhode Island) where nearly 1,000 atomic bombs would be detonated over the next four decades. Those defense dollars helped tide the city over through what might have been something of a cold streak. But the end of World War II meant the city would have to adapt to a peacetime economy.

“Then in 1945, down the road comes a little red sports car with a beat-up looking mug in a checked sports jacket and really hard eyes,” said Rothman. “And if you called him Bugsy, you might not live. People who knew him well called him Ben.”

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