A desert metropolis whose mainstay is gambling, vice, and other forms of entertainment, Las Vegas has brought millions of visitors and trillions of dollars to southern Nevada in just a century of existence. It is the perfect place to get your National Casino login. The city was founded by ranchers and railway workers who quickly realized that their greatest assets lay in their casinos. Las Vegas epitomized the freedoms of the ‘old west’, which lay in gambling and prostitution. It provided a perfect home for organized crime on the East Coast. From the 1940s onwards, casinos were built and laundered with drug and extortion money. Visitors came to partake in what the casinos offered: cheap luxury and the thrill of fantasies fulfilled.
Las Vegas: Prehistory and foundation
Petroglyphs in canyons prove that people have lived in southern Nevada for more than 10,000 years. Members of the Paiute tribe were in the area as early as 700 AD. The first person of European descent to enter the Las Vegas Valley was Rafael Rivera, who explored the area in 1821 as part of Antonio Armijo’s expedition to open a trade route – the Old Spanish Trail between New Mexico and California. Rivera named the valley Las Vegas, ‘the meadows’, after its spring-watered grasses.
Did you know? Since the early 20th century, Nevada has been known as a place where unhappy couples could get divorced easily. Over the years, however, Las Vegas has taken the route of an even quicker way to get married. The Strip’s first wedding chapel, the Little Church of the West, opened in 1942.
After the transition from Mexican to US rule in 1848, little changed in the valley until Brigham Young sent a group of Mormon settlers to the area in 1855. The settlement was unsuccessful, but their abandoned fort was taken over by Octavius Gass, who named the area ‘Los Vegas Rancho’ – the change in spelling was to avoid confusion with Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Las Vegas: Birth of a city
In 1905, Las Vegas was connected to the important railway network from San Pedro via Los Angeles to Salt Lake. Supporters of the railway company marketed and auctioned off the future city centre, and Las Vegas was incorporated in 1911.
Nevada banned gambling in 1910, but the practice continued in speakeasies and illegal casinos. By the time gambling was legalized again in 1931, organized crime had already taken root in the city.
In 1931, construction also began on the massive Boulder Dam, later renamed Hoover Dam, which drew thousands of workers to a site east of the city. Casinos and showgirl venues opened on Fremont Street, the only paved street in town, to attract workers for the project. When the dam was completed in 1936, cheap hydroelectric power supplied the flashing signs of Fremont’s ‘Glitter Gulch’.