Long before Siegfried found Roy, before Sinatra was at the Sands and way before Bugsy Siegel had his Flamingo epiphany, Las Vegas was given its name by Rafael Rivera, a scout for a Mexican trading party heading to Los Angeles. Rivera utilized the abundance of water in the area as a rest stop while heading northwest along the Old Spanish Trail from New Mexico.

It is hard to visualize Las Vegas as an oasis today: a place where water is as scarce as Foxy’s Firehouse Casino chips. But in the 1800s, small parts of the Las Vegas Valley contained artesian wells that supported extensive green areas, hence the name Las Vegas, which is Spanish for “the meadows”.

Subsequently “Las Vegas” remained unremarkable for the next forty years. Eventually establishing the valley as a trade route to Los Angeles did very little to add population growth by way of migration. The area remained unoccupied by Americans, except for occasional travelers and traders. It seemed cursed. Great historical figures that frequented the area such as Jedediah Smith, and later John C. Frémont, failed to bring any prominence to The Meadows. The absolute isolation and continual threat of Indian attacks hindered its economic stimulus. For a time it remained a large depression in the earth where you stopped to water your horses.
The desert tract was gradually reshaped by two wars: the Mexican–American War resulting in the region becoming a United States territory and the Civil War which made Nevada the 36th State admitted to the Union. Not until 1895 did the first large-scale migrations begin in the area. Through wells and arid irrigation, agriculture became the primary industry for the next 20 years.

By the early 20th Century, water from wells was piped into the town, providing both a reliable source of fresh water and the means for additional growth. The increased availability of water in the area allowed Las Vegas to increase its water stop credentials, first for wagon trains and later railroads, on the routes between Los Angeles, California, and points East, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico. Railroads, agriculture and the advent of silver mining seemed to put the future Sin City on the track to prosperity.

With the revenue coming from the rails and mining, the area was quickly growing. On May 15, 1905, Las Vegas officially was founded as a city. 110 acres, in what would later become downtown, were auctioned off to ready buyers, making it the driving force in the creation of Clark County, and in 1911, the city was incorporated.

Irony struck The Meadows at midnight on October 1st, 1911. Shortly after incorporation, Nevada reluctantly became the last western state to outlaw gaming. It occurred when a strict anti-gambling law was passed during an after-hours session, due to a strong Mormon influence in the legislature. It even forbade the western custom of flipping a coin for the price of a drink. Nonetheless, the citizenry was not overly concerned, because it appeared that Las Vegas had a diversified economy, and a stable and prosperous business community, and growth did continue…until 1917.

By 1917, the U.S. had entered into the Great War overseas. Although our involvement eventually brought down Kaiser Wilhelm’s German empire and restored peace in Europe, it inversely became the death knell of the Vegas economy. In that year, a combination of economic influences and the redirection of resources by the Federal government in support of the war effort forced the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to declare bankruptcy. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1922, leaving Las Vegas in a desperate state.

A sense of false hope arrived with the construction of U.S. Route 91 reaching Las Vegas in 1926. Las Vegas was finally connected to California with a road. Unfortunately, even the addition of a modern road did not help to revitalize Las Vegas. Instead, the city became notorious as a place for speakeasies catering to tourists and traveling businessmen. With these illicit saloons, crime figures with connections to the Irish mob, as well as the Italian and Jewish mafias, began arriving in significant numbers. With this seedy reputation, many people in the state voiced the opinion that northern Nevada would have been better off if Las Vegas had seceded from the state.

Out of crisis comes change and out of change can come growth. Growth, real growth finally came to Vegas, and again it was spawned by water. It was 1930 and President Herbert Hoover signed the appropriation bill for the Boulder Dam. Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States. His background was excellent resume enhancement as the founder of Boulder Dam. In addition to his presidential credentials, Hoover was also a professional mining engineer and an author. Before assuming the office of President, he was the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920’s under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

When Herbert Hoover approved the congressional bill authorizing the construction of the dam, it changed Las Vegas’ history forever. Las Vegas’ population would swell from around 5,000 citizens to 25,000 by its completion. The 1930’s, were in a way, the birth of Las Vegas. The city, of course, wasn’t built in the 30’s, but until that time it held no place in the mind’s eye of America or the world abroad. It was just a dusty spot on the map. Las Vegas was mainly known as a major railroad hub in a broad, underdeveloped desert valley between Utah and California.

Las Vegas government and business leaders had known well in advance of plans for the dam project thirty miles southeast of their town. The city fathers expected the dam to attract manufacturing and other industries seeking cheap and abundant vacant land. But they were disappointed. Major businesses, seeing the lack of housing, water, power, higher education, and other infrastructure in Las Vegas, instead settled in other western states.

The city’s disappointment grew even more after Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur inspected the dam site and Las Vegas in 1929. Despite the influx of known crime figures, the local business community tried to cast Las Vegas in a respectable light when Secretary Wilbur visited. However a subordinate was found with alcohol on his breath (this was during the time of Prohibition) after he arrived in town. The government ultimately decided that a federal controlled town would be erected for the dam workers. Wilbur announced that the construction workforce of 5,000 would live in a new town his department would build, closer to the construction site. Originally designated the Boulder Canyon Federal Reservation, it was later renamed Boulder City. The government proclaimed that it hoped to house its workers in “a wholesome American community” of “flowers, schools and playgrounds” instead of Las Vegas, which Ray Lyman Wilbur called “a boisterous frontier town.” The “wholesome” company town outlawed alcohol, gambling, and prostitution.

By 1930, Las Vegas had only about 5,200 residents. Nearly all of its small hotels, stores, and other businesses were concentrated on one main thoroughfare, Fremont Street. The town was infamous for its lax enforcement of liquor laws during Prohibition and its backroom brothels on Block 16 (now the core of downtown Las Vegas).

As any Vegas bibliophile knows, you can’t keep a good Nevada entrepreneur down. Even as the federal government started building Boulder City in 1931, development in Las Vegas was in full swing. Some of this development was inspired by a new infrastructure and increased supplies of water and power. But the real underlying reason is pretty easy to envision. At the time that the dam was being built, gambling had to be re-legalized. The demographic of the workforce consisting of males from across the country with no attachment to the area created a market for large-scale entertainment. A combination of local Las Vegas business owners, Mormon financiers, and Mafia crime lords, helped develop the casinos and showgirl theaters to entertain the largely male construction workers. There were thousands of men, away from their families, with disposable income that they had gotten from their job building this new dam. They had nothing to do at night and they were alone. What better way to spend their time than to cruise the Strip and drop some bucks in the casinos?

Plans were submitted that year for forty buildings in Las Vegas, including offices, warehouses, and many small homes. The city’s population increased to 7,500 in only one year by 1931. By the next year, the Union Pacific Railroad spent $400,000 to improve its Las Vegas rail yard, and Clark County approved an $80,000 expansion of its courthouse to handle the increase in legal cases. Meanwhile, the city struggled to help support hundreds of people who came looking for work at the dam and wound up living in tents outside of town. The city had to seek funds from the U.S. government to feed and house indigent persons into the mid-1930s.
Las Vegas, starting with a small but well-established gaming industry, was poised to begin its rise as the gambling capital of the world. The county issued the first gambling license in 1931 to the Northern Club, and soon other casinos were licensed on Fremont Street, such as the Las Vegas Club and the Apache Hotel. Fremont Street became the first paved street in Las Vegas and received the city’s first traffic light the same year.

In reply, the federal government restricted movement of the dam workers to Las Vegas. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur’s teetotalers were not happy about their men’s evening activities. Smuggling and circuitous routes were then developed by the more farsighted businessmen of Sin City. Hundreds were conveyed from the dam site to the gambling tables under the cover of darkness each evening by a group of privateers operating a fleet of buses.

In 1934, in hopes of improving the Vegas image and to curtail the resulting growth of criminal figures in the gambling industry, the city’s leading figures purged some of the gambling dens and started an effort to stem the flow of workers from the dam. This only emboldened some dam workers who still contrived to visit Las Vegas. A celebration of this era is known even in our new millennia as Helldorado Days.

Although the suppression efforts resulted in declines at gambling venues and resulted in a business downturn, the city was recharged, literally, when the dam was eventually completed in 1935. By 1937, Southern Nevada Power became the first utility to supply power from the dam, and Las Vegas was its first customer. Electricity flowed into Las Vegas, and Fremont Street became known as “Glitter Gulch”, due to the many bright lights powered by electricity from the dam.

The legalization of casino gambling by the Nevada Legislature in March 1931, which enabled Las Vegas to open and operate legal casinos, helped increase the city’s revenues from albeit another source. During construction, the Boulder Dam project quickly became a national tourist attraction. Thousands of these visitors spent money in Las Vegas hotels, casinos, and other businesses. In 1932 alone, 100,000 people visited the dam construction site and 200,000 visited Las Vegas. By 1934, 265,000 people went to the dam site and 300,000 went to Las Vegas. In the 1930s, an estimated seventy-five percent of those visiting the dam also stopped in Las Vegas. Vegas was also earning a significant number of tourists without the dam attraction.

Although the dam worker population disappeared by 1935, Boulder Dam and its reservoir, Lake Mead, turned into tourist attractions on their own and the need for additional higher class hotels became clear. Luckily, the dam played a part in getting people to the area. Coined the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Boulder Dam, brought droves of tourists into the Las Vegas area. They had to stay somewhere, and Las Vegas was more than happy to accommodate them in their hotels.

The first Las Vegas Strip hotel, the El Rancho, opened in 1941. It became famous for its “all-you-can-eat” buffet, and a Las Vegas tradition was born. Five years later, Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel and his mob affiliates opened the Flamingo Resort on the Strip. It was the first Las Vegas resort to combine a luxury hotel, name entertainment and gambling, and was to become the prototype for the lavish Las Vegas casino-resorts to follow.

In 1940, U.S. Route 95 was finally extended south into Las Vegas, giving the city two major access roads. Also in 1940, Las Vegas’ first permanent radio station, KENO, began broadcasting, replacing the niche occupied earlier by transient broadcasters.

During the years of lobbying leading up to the passage of legislation authorizing the dam in 1928, it was generally referred to by the press as “Boulder Dam” or “Boulder Canyon Dam,” notwithstanding the fact that the proposed site had been shifted to Black Canyon. The Boulder Canyon Project Act of 1928 (BCPA) never mentioned a proposed name or title for the dam. The BCPA merely allowed the government to “construct, operate, and maintain a dam and incidental works in the main stream of the Colorado River at Black Canyon or Boulder Canyon.”

When Secretary Wilbur spoke at the ceremony at the start of the building of the railway between Las Vegas and the dam site on September 17, 1930, he named the dam “Hoover Dam,” citing a tradition of naming dams after Presidents, though none had been so honored during their terms of office.

After Herbert Hoover’s election defeat in 1932 and the accession of the Roosevelt administration, Secretary Harold L. Ickes, in a purely partisan move, ordered that the dam should be referred to as “Boulder Dam.” Ickes stated that Wilbur had been imprudent in naming the structure after a sitting president, that Congress had never ratified his choice, and that it had long been referred to as Boulder Dam. Roosevelt also referred to the dam as Boulder Dam and the Republican-leaning Los Angeles Times had run an editorial cartoon showing Ickes ineffectively chipping away at an enormous sign “HOOVER DAM” and reran it a short while later showing Roosevelt reinforcing Ickes.

In the following years, the name “Boulder Dam” failed to fully take hold, with many Americans using the two names interchangeably and mapmakers divided as to what name should be printed. Memories of the Great Depression faded and Hoover, to some extent, rehabilitated himself through his good works during and after World War II. In 1947, during the Truman administration, a bill passed both Houses of Congress, unanimously restoring the name to “Hoover Dam.” Ickes, who was by then a private citizen but as partisan as ever, opposed the change, stating, “I didn’t know Hoover was that small a man to take credit for something he had nothing to do with.”

In the end, history will always shine the light of truth. Hoover Dam’s impact on Las Vegas is indisputable, and it was best described at its groundbreaking ceremony in 1930 by Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, when he said that Herbert Hoover was, “the great engineer whose vision and persistence ... has done so much to make [the dam] possible.” SLV

“The Men Who Made Las Vegas” is a twelve-part series by Byron Craft, chronicling the growth of Sin City and the men who made it possible.

Issue 56 featuring: Inari Vachs, Jana Cova and Lela Star