ABOUT THE BOOK Where did Las Vegans get their drinking water before Lake Mead existed? How did they survive the desert summers without air conditioning? Why does Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area have wild burros? And why is it that downtown Las Vegas is laid out on a slant, rather than aligning its streets with true north and south? When Sherman Frederick, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, asked me to write a book about what it was like to live in Las Vegas before it hit the "big time," I found myself asking all these questions and more. A Las Vegas resident since 1985, I had known that the city's origin involved the railroad. In those days, the so-called Spaghetti Bowl interchange of Interstate 15 and U.S. Highway 95 looped around the Union Pacific rail yard, which has since been moved. Drivers passing through the interchange could see parked rail cars below, looking like a crazy quilt of rectangular patches. But I didn't know much more of the history. Frederick figured that at the time of the Las Vegas centennial in 2005, it would be worthwhile to look backwards - to retrace the steps of the city from its birth onward. So I started in 1905 with the railroad's land auction. The new town was but a cluster of tents next to a railroad track that stretched from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. (The "diagonal" route explains the diagonal orientation of the downtown streets. The other opening questions are answered, I believe, in the ensuing chapters.) I close with 1931 because it is a turning point. Modern Las Vegas did not yet exist, but that year laid the groundwork for its unique future. By relaxing in 1931 state laws on gambling and divorce, Nevada created the conditions that allowed Las Vegas to nurture a tourism industry. The federal government primed this pump by drawing to Southern Nevada a large workforce to build Hoover Dam, which was completed in 1935. In their spare hours, those workers fed the infant gaming industry. These two events - the 1905 auction and the 1931 onset of dam construction - serve as bookends for the book. In the middle, I share the clues I have collected as to the character of daily life in Las Vegas in that era. Some accounts suggest Las Vegas has no history at all between 1905 and 1931, local historian Elizabeth Warren once remarked to me wryly. The perception is wrong but widespread. In fact, the period is rich in tales of ordinary people who had high hopes and worked hard. They hung on in the face of an adverse climate, a one-horse rail economy and geographic isolation. With stubbornness and chutzpah, they and the Las Vegans who followed them invented modern Las Vegas. For this project, longtime Las Vegans - who were but children in the 1920s - shared their memories with me. Early settlers, now deceased, talked via lengthy oral histories they gave to scholars before their deaths. Old newspapers and letters yielded more nuggets. "Young Las Vegas" presents no grand theories of history. It is, instead, a web of telling vignettes and personal recollections to recreate the illusion of a particular place in a bygone time. Please enjoy.

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