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GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Grab a bagel and coffee at a sidewalk cart in lower Manhattan and head out to explore the world in a single day.
âThere is no place like it. It is literally a beacon of civilization. Peering from space at their cloud-speckled blue and blood-rust planet, astronauts make out the lights of Las Vegas before anything else, a first sign of life on earth. The sighting is apt. The cityâs luminance draws a world. More than 50 million people journey to it every year.ââSally Denton and Roger Morris in The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America 1947â2000
Walk under the Brooklyn Bridge and down the street to take an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Invade an Egyptian pyramid to view excavated treasures from King Tutâs tomb. Stroll beside a Venetian canal and hire a gondola, complete with singing gondolier, and relax on the water beneath a blue Italian sky. Or maybe youâre ready for lunch at that outdoor cafĂ© in the Piazza San Marco. Youâd still have time for afternoon visits to a couple of art exhibitsâFrench impressionist paintings or abstract sculptureâand a quick excursion to Red Square, to sip a little Russian vodka before dinner.
A Las Vegas fantasy? You bet it is! But millions of visitors from everywhere build their own fantasies around the lavish movie-set replicas along the Las Vegas Strip. Where else could they sample so many dreams in such a short time? Where else could they take a long walk past King Arthurâs Camelot, the Statue of Liberty, several ornate palaces, and an erupting volcanoâall without leaving the sidewalk? Even local Las Vegans often venture into the crowds.
âWe donât spend much time on the Strip, unless we have visitors,â said Jill Fielden, who called herself âa traditional momâ when we talked at her suburban home. Most of the time, she was busy enough in her role as wife of Dr. Scott Fielden, a Las Vegasâborn anesthesiologist, and as mother of their three pre-teen children. The Fieldens live in Summerlin, a master-planned community in the northwest corner of Las Vegas, annexed to the city in 1987. Their quiet street in the Chardonnay Hills division, with views of rugged mountains in the distance, is just ten miles from the Stripâbut it seems a world away.
Jillâs mother, Reno artist Carol Johnson, loves to travel. So, when Jill planned a family birthday party for Carol, a round-the-world theme seemed ready-made.
âIâll never forget that birthday party,â Carol recalled later. âWe went around the world without any airport security hassles and no packing and unpacking.â Giving a detailed account of the partyâs progress through European resorts and the Big Apple, she marveled at the memory. âAnd we did it all in one day!â
Her daughterâs comment: âWe couldnât have done THAT on the Concorde!â
As she spoke, planeloads of visitors were arriving at McCarran International Airport, just a few blocks away from the neon playground. Vacationers and gamblers, seekers of entertainment and seekers of luck, they still come to explore the pleasure palaces. Scattered among them are some who come to stayâand they keep on coming.
These new Las Vegans keep the city running and growing, not only for the millions of visitors but for their own families and descendants. Their taste for adventure has brought them here for reasons that separate them from the other risk-takers. Theyâre here to build houses, open new businesses, treat hospital patients, teach schoolchildren, or look for jobs in the casinos. They plan to become part of the city . . . maybe for a lifetime. Beyond the glitter of the casinos, these newcomers discover a rich history that goes back to prehistoric times. Perhaps theyâve inherited some of the frontier spirit of the early settlers in the Las Vegas Valley.
As Las Vegas approached its centennial birthday celebrationâMay 15, 2005âthe city remembered the areaâs earlier settlers and explorers. Mayor Oscar Goodman was making plans well ahead of time. In the summer of 2002, he revealed a few details:
Las Vegas in the 1930s: âRelatively little emphasis is placed on the gambling clubs and divorce facilitiesâthough they are attractions to many visitorsâand much effort is being made to build up cultural attractions. No cheap and easily parodied slogans have been adopted to publicize the city, no attempt has been made to introduce pseudo-romantic architectural themes, or to give artificial glamor and gaiety. Las Vegas is itselfânatural and therefore very appealing to people with a very wide variety of interests.ââThe WPA Guide to 1930s Nevada
âWeâre gonna kick it off on May 15, two thousand FOUR,â he said. âWeâll have a full year of ceremonies leading up to the birthday itself, then we hope to have the biggest birthday bash in the history of the world.â The mayor doesnât spare superlatives when talking about his city. âWe have a centennial committee and Iâm the chairman of it,â he explained. âWe have folks from the private sector and public sector and various representatives of special interests in the community, all banding together to make it an unforgettable experience.â
Casinos on the Strip, officially outside the city, were making their own ambitious plans for 2005, but the mayor focused his attention on the actual birthplace of Las Vegas. âThe centerpiece for our celebration will be the new Las Vegas Springs Preserve,â he said. âItâs going to be our Central Park. The Las Vegas Valley Water District has been working on it for yearsâand it will open on the cityâs birthday.â
The Watering Place
Long before it was even a townâa railroad stop established in 1905âthe place was called Las Vegas. Spanish-speaking traders from New Mexico, on their way to California in 1829, strayed from the Old Spanish Trail blazed in 1776 by Spanish missionaries. When they came upon springs of fresh water gushing out of the desert, they gave this unexpected oasis a Spanish name, Las Vegas, âthe meadows,â and added it to their maps. Rafael Rivera, an adventurous young Mexican scout with Antonio Armijoâs trading party, is named by most historians as the first European American to visit the Las Vegas oasis, but he and his companions were not the first people to drink from these springs.
âProbably no other metropolis in the world could boast of a resident populace who can remember when their town was founded.ââStanley W. Paher, Las Vegas: As it beganâAs it grew
Thousands of years before it had a Spanish name, the valley that became Las Vegas attracted thirsty travelers. As early as 11,000 years ago, some archaeologists believe, nomads camped at Tule Springs, just two miles west of modern Fremont Street. Crude stone tools and charred animal bones found in the area have been analyzed in twentieth-century laboratories to provide clues to the origins and survival methods of a forgotten people.
A vivid, imaginative portrait of these âfirst-comersâ and their environment was written more than a half-century ago by archaeologist Mark R. Harrington, leader of several landmark Nevada excavations in the 1920s and 1930s. After he became curator of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, Harrington summarized the findings of twelve years of field work in a popular leaflet published jointly by his museum and Nevadaâs Clark County Historical Society.
âTen or fifteen thousand years ago,â he wrote, âat the close of the Pleistocene or Ice Age, the region we call southern Nevada, now so barren, was green and well-watered. Everlasting snow capped the higher mountains, from which flowed glaciers, living rivers of ice; blue lakes of fresh water dotted the lower valleys; streams were frequent where now only dry washes remain.â
âThe interpretation of ancient rock writings has intrigued many people; and there are wild speculations on the meaning of the symbols. Most of the interpretations, though, are mere romantic conjectures.ââEmory Strong, Stone Age in the Great Basin
Harrington described a lush, wet landscape inhabited by huge animals, now extinct: mammoths, native horses and camels, giant buffalo, and âlumbering, stupid ground sloths, looking like imbecile, long-tailed bears.â He imagined these vegetarian animals grazing along with elk, deer, mountain sheep, and antelope ânot greatly different from those which still survive,â threatened by meat-eating wolves, mountain lions, and saber-toothed tigers.
âSuch was southern Nevada when man first set eyes upon it and found it good. Probably drifting in small bands from the north, where their forebears had crossed to Alaska from Siberia, these copper-hued, black haired discoverers of America hunted the grass-eaters and fought the flesh-eaters where never man had set foot before.â
Like an archaeological jigsaw puzzle, built on scientific details mixed with speculation, Harringtonâs vision of the first Nevadans became more and more specific. He described their weapons and tools, supporting his reconstructed picture with evidence found buried in the desert.
âWhat these early people looked like we cannot say,â he wrote, âfor their bones have not yet been found; but we know they hunted the strange animals of the past and left the charred bones of elephants and camels slain for food in the ashes of their campfires; while in caves, their temporary stopping places, their weapons have been found buried with the remains of the ground-sloth. Traces of their camps, with heavily weathered implements of stone, may still be seen on the former shorelines and headlands of streams and lakes long dry and forgotten, in districts where man cannot live today for lack of water.â
In the Valley of Fire: âThe rocks have been stacked, as though by a blackjack dealer, into huge sheets of carbonate rocks. This is the Overthrust Belt. The pressures from titanic forces have shoved rocks over rocks and stacked them into geologic puzzles.ââBill Fiero, Geology of the Great Basin
When the water dried up, over a period of several thousand years, these nomads moved on, looking for food wherever they could find it. The archaeological trail becomes a little blurred between 9,000 and 4,000 years ago, but thereâs plenty of evidence of early human existence in the Las Vegas area. Archaeologists have named these prehistoric people for the places where their traces were first found: Tule Springs, Lake Mohave, Pinto Basin, Gypsum Cave.
âLas Vegas has had a curious history of exodus. In earliest times, it was peopled by the stone-culture Anasazi Indians. . . . They were agricultural Indians who learned the science of irrigation and raised crops of beans, squash and cotton. They also mined salt and turquoise which were traded with nomadic Southwest Indians. Then must have come a time of war, because the Anasazi abandoned their Pueblo Grande and moved to the protection of the almost inaccessible cliffs that over-look Las Vegas Valley. From there, they simply disappeared, leaving behind them an anthropological mystery of why they had left and where they had gone.ââRobert Laxalt, Nevada, A Bicentennial History
Detectives of Time
Just fifteen miles east of Las Vegas, in the Frenchman Mountains, Gypsum Cave became the focus of worldwide scientific interest in the early 1930s when Mark Harrington and his associates announced their discovery of a skull unlike that of any known animal. A few years earlier, Harrington had visited the cave and noticed a deposit of strange animal dung. He knew it wasnât from a horse. Certainly not a modern horse. So what was it?
Suspecting, hoping, that he might have discovered traces of an extinct animal, Harrington organized an excavation party to begin work in January 1930. Soon after they started exploring, the expedition secretary, Bertha Pallan, found the odd skull in a crevice of the cave. When laboratory zoologists identified it as the skull of a long-extinct ground sloth, Harrington knew he was on the trail of an exciting find. Sloth bones and claws found in the cave confirmed the identification. If the researchers could find evidence of early human presence in the cave at the same time as that of the extinct sloth, they might be able to set an approximate date when these humans visited the cave.
Harringtonâs excitement over the sloth discovery soon attracted financial and scientific support from the California Institute of Technology, the Carnegie Institution, and the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles. While these backers waited for detailed reports, the excavators began their meticulous digging, sifting, and recording. A few feet below the surface, they began to turn up traces of campfires, charred baskets, crystal ornaments, and fragments of tools used by early humansâmaybe as far back as 1,000 B.C.âbut not quite so early as the extinct sloth. The researchers kept on digging.
Finally, after excavating layers and layers of earth, sheep dung, and a rockfall three feet thick, hinting at a past earthquake, the archaeologists found what they were looking for. Eight feet below the original surface, buried underneath a solid layer of sloth dung, they came upon a fireplace and crude tools, convincing them that Ice Age humans had been in the cave about the same time as the extinct sloths. Cautiously, Harrington reported these discoveries as at least 7,500 to 9,500 years old. Years later, radiocarbon dating of Gypsum Cave samples found them much older, a treasury of archaeological evidence preserved in the cave for at least 10,000 years.
Some of the ancient artifacts uncovered by Harrington and his team are still displayed in the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, along with the claws of the prehistoric sloth.
The Basketmakers
Look ahead a few thousand years to about 300 B.C. The climate has changed drastically. Lakes and rivers have dried up, the big animals have long since disappeared, and a hot, rocky desert surrounds the oasis that will become Las Vegas. ...