Las Vegas would have always remained a small town except for the construction in the late 1920s of the largest dam in the United States across Boulder Canyon just southeast of Las Vegas on the Colorado River. Tourism preceded the exploitation of casino gambling as an attraction.
There have been many phases of growth and change in the region since that time. Lodging and provisioning remained its economic base, as in a sense it continues to do so today, along with the spectacular addition of casino gambling. The Las Vegas site owned by Clark and his associates became a rest By the 1900s, when the immense infrastructure project that was the transcontinental railroad came west, an entrepreneur by the name of William Clark established a railroad that linked up with the Union Pacific's main line out of Salt Lake City, Utah, and the tracks at San Pedro, California, outside Los Angeles. Banking on its reliable supply of fresh water, the town was converted into a provisioning place with lodging and a general store that prospered. Gold strikes during the 1860s in the area drew the first horde of "get-rich-quick" schemers to the area only to witness the towns they built go bust a few years later when the easy pickings ran out. Antonio Armijo, a Spanish trader, found the verdant site in 1829 while searching for a direct route to California from New Mexico. Natural springs bubbling water from underground aquifers created an oasis in a hostile climate. Every drop of water, each piece of produce and meat or fish, and all the other "necessities" of life, except for oxygen itself, must be shipped in from places outside the region.ĭespite the desert surroundings, Las Vegas has always been a stopping-off point for travelers its name means "the meadows" in Spanish. This is not at all bad for a place that is located in one of the most forbidding deserts on our planet, with daily summer temperatures well into the hundreds. Gross gambling revenues were more than $6 billion at the turn of the twentieth century, and eager visitors to the area spent an additional $20 billion on hotel, food, entertainment, and other expenses. Always prone to cycles in the nation's economy, tourism was down somewhat after the year 2000, but it remained healthy enough to support the relentless construction of newer and bigger gambling resort-casinos. At the turn of the twentieth century, over 30 million visitors came to the region a year, with about half of them flying into McCarran International Airport, the tenth busiest in the nation. Never mind that these associations work principally through slight-of-hand illusions, Americans have made Las Vegas the premier tourist destination since the 1960s, only to be surpassed recently by Orlando, Florida.
Decades of hype and boosterism have created associations linked to our most deeply embedded American dreams: get-rich-quick schemes, the " Wild West," gangsters, Hollywood glitz, glamorous romance, hot entertainment, and twenty-four/seven action. Las Vegas is so saturated with the aura of myth that it is difficult to separate fantasy from reality, even for people who are frequent visitors.
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