This entry is part 2 of 10 in the series Nevada Theme Month

Sin City

You pulled off something unthinkable. You robbed a casino in Las Vegas and made it out the door. The heat hits you in the face. It’s a dry heat, sure, but it’s still 110 degrees Fahrenheit. As you ponder the getaway plan, which involves walking nonchalantly down the Strip, trying to blend in like a tourist, the heat starts to play with your mind. You achieved an incredible heist, but you’re still in the middle of a desert. You start to wonder, “Why did they build this place in the middle of a desert?”

Las Vegas – commonly known as Sin City – is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Founded in the late date of 1905, Vegas witnessed the biggest population boom of any American metropolis founded in the 20th century.

Yet, it’s in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Not just kind of in the middle of the desert. Look at a satellite view of Las Vegas and you’ll see it sits in a brown valley, surrounded by dry, soaring peaks. The “rivers” there are washes, which are channels that look like rivers on a map but only fill with water during flooding events. The city is only approximately 25 minutes from the Colorado River and Lake Mead, the reservoir constructed in the 1930s to provide water for the region, but this proximity again begs the question: why where it is and not on the Colorado River?

One popular notion about the location of Las Vegas relates to the mafia. What better spot to run illicit rackets than the middle of a desert, away from prying eyes? While the mob did have a heyday in Vegas, this attribution is anachronistic. Gambling did not arrive in Sin City until 1931, decades after its founding.

So, why build in such a dry spot?

The answer is, counterintuitively, water.

As we discovered in our examination of New Mexico, the Spanish had been in some regions of the American Southwest for many centuries before the founding of Las Vegas. New Mexico had been well explored, as had California. As enough infrastructure and commerce slowly populated this region, humans began to develop trade routes. If one wanted to go from Santa Fe to Los Angeles, a trek through the Mojave was in the offing. Needless to say, this excursion would be brutal to the unprepared businessperson. Eventually, the Old Spanish Trail emerged, 700 miles of arid, rugged “path” that hoped to bridge the centers of relative industry.

In 1829, the Paiutes or Utes likely directed a young Mexican named Rafael Rivera to a seemingly magical location. In the unending desert, Rivera, who was a scout for a group on the Old Spanish Trail, encountered an island of grass. Native peoples had likely sojourned to this location for thousands of years, but Rivera was the first non-Native American to visit what he dubbed Las Vegas.

In Spanish, this term translates to “the meadows.” The quintessential desert city’s name means the meadows!

Rivera had ambled up to the Las Vegas Springs, sometimes called Big Springs. Three separate conduits of water bubbled upward from the table below the ground. This oasis would have been heaven to a weary traveler on the Old Spanish Trail. Unsurprisingly, Las Vegas became a mainstay on this trade route.

In 1844, John C. Fremont, on his second excursion to explore and map the West, stayed at the springs. His writings brought further attention to the meadows. In the 1850s, a group of Mormons created a permanent settlement at the water. Though they abandoned the structure by the end of the decade, the Old Mormon Fort continues to stand, by far the oldest infrastructure in Las Vegas. After their departure, a ranch popped up on the site, taking advantage of the one spot in the region that could sustain plants and animals.

The springs produced enough water to sustain two pools. Without visual evidence, this fact seems hard to believe. Incredibly, photographs of the water persist.

As astonishing as these springs are, an aquifer of this size will certainly not power a city of millions. And humans of the early 20th century were not known for their pragmatic conservancy.

In the early 1900s, the railroads arrived in the region, using the water as a stop. In 1902, Senator William Clark of Montana purchased the land surrounding the Mormon settlement and the subsequent ranch, in addition to the rights in the area for – you guessed it – water. Clark envisioned a burgeoning city on a railroad stop, a town he could craft to make him rich. Dole out the land for a profit, yes, but controlling the water meant future earnings, too. Selling lots at auction in 1905, Clark quintupled his purchase price of the land in one day.

Las Vegas, as a city, was off and running. Las Vegas, as the meadows, was in trouble.

Clark piped in water from the springs to hydrate his new city. Slowly, Las Vegas dropped the water table. By 1962, the water at Big Springs no longer reached the ground.

That the springs held out until the JFK administration speaks to the planet’s power, but we must temper our respect a bit. By the 1920s, unadulterated usage of the springs had forced the city to dig wells. In 1931, the construction of Lake Mead began to the east, forming a reservoir on the Colorado River. Today, more than 90% of the water for the residents of Las Vegas comes from this lifeline.

One can visit the birthplace of Las Vegas at Springs Preserve, just west of Fremont Street and Rafael Rivera Park. Though the meadows are gone, the community has finally begun to embrace water conservation. Meadows and grass might please the human eye, but xeriscapes – water-friendly landscaping – have started to march toward hegemony in modern Las Vegas.

It’s certainly ironic that an oasis in the desert named The Meadows today looks like this:

Sin City traded grass for a four-mile Strip of neon and LEDs. Has any other spring blossomed into a pyramid, a massive sphere, an Eiffel Tower replica, a Venetian canal, the Rat Pack, Elvis, and Ocean’s 11?

If you ever manage to rob one of the casinos, you might rue your escape is through a desert, but you’ll know it could have been, one distant day in the past, through a meadow.