Las Vegas: Progress on its Way

As the focus for betting during World War II, the downtown district Las Vegas had ushered in another era of American gambling.

There, full-blown casinos emerged anew, not as exceptions to the rule or temporary expedients, but as a dominant context for gambling in the twentieth-century United States.

Decorated in a fashion that reiterated old Western themes, the downtown casino was a new form in the national culture of gambling that commemorated the affinity between gaming and frontiers.

It provided a uniquely single-minded environment that enriched the betting experience and, at the same time, it illustrated the continuing influence of Californians on American forms of gambling.

In one way or another, Las Vegas has long been on the road to Southern California. During the nineteenth century, the springs and streams of shallow Las Vegas made it an ideal way station.

The site served as an oasis on the Old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles, in the 1830s and 1840s, earning praise as 'The Diamond of the Desert' for its 'capital water'.

Around mid-century, Mormons incorporated the camp into their projected corridor connecting Salt Lake City with the California coast.

The Latter-day Saints even built a mission there in 1855, consisting of a 'little mud fort' and a farm where local Indians received instruction in religion and agriculture, but they abandoned the site less than two years later.

Over the next fifty years, as in so many other sports in Nevada, small-scale mining, ranching, and farming characterized economic life in the vicinity, yielding enough income to support a town.

In 1905, however, the oasis regained importance as way station on the route to Southern California when it became a division point along the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad.

For the following three decades, the railway dominated the development of Las Vegas in virtually every regard.

The community became the entrepot for the mines of southern Nevada, the nearest train station to Hoover Dam, and a company town.

The railroad brought people and prosperity to Las Vegas. The population grew from 945 to 1910 to 5,165 in 1930.

Up to 1930, Las Vegas had but slowly acquired the amenities of a small but permanent division point. The presence of the Union pacific line, however, soon unleashed the forces of expansion by making the community an ideal center of transshipment for the Boulder Canyon Project.

With the building of the Hoover Dam in the early 1930s, the pace of growth quickened.

The influx of men and money, slowly gaining during the 1920s in anticipation of the project, gave Las Vegas their first taste of a boom.

Residents readily staked the future of the community on the construction and tourist appeal of the dam and newly created Lake Mead.

Although the state legislature legalized gambling in 1931, they viewed that activity as only a second factor in the growth of their city.