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EXCERPT: CHAPTER ONE - THE AUCTION In 2005, stubborn people are willing to "camp" in line for hours to snag a scarce concert ticket or a lot in a desirable housing subdivision. A century before, risk-takers traveled cross-country to camp literally for months in the harsh Southern Nevada desert for a shot at buying land in a town so new it existed only on paper. The buyers had to be audacious. They braved dust, hellish heat and isolation to "get in on the ground floor" of the business opportunity the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad was offering. "We landed April 2, 1905," Charles Aplin told an oral historian in 1968. "We camped in tents along the creek with dozens of other people who were doing the same, and we stayed there until after the lots had been auctioned off on May 15." Aplin was 18, from California. The railroad - which had just completed its rail connecting Southern California with Salt Lake City in January 1905 - needed manpower to live at the southern end of Nevada in order to ice down eastbound cargoes of fresh California produce; water and feed the westbound livestock; and service the trains, too. This was halfway between its rail operations in San Bernardino, California, and Salt Lake City. The railroad planned to build a town from scratch in the godforsaken spot, which Mormon missionaries had abandoned in 1858 as too troublesome to inhabit and develop, although it had served for centuries as a watering spot for travelers. The railroad paid $55,000 for water rights and 1,800 acres - including a fort that had been built as part of the Mormons' travel corridor - from rancher Helen Stewart, whose family had worked the land since 1881. The humble railroad town has, against odds, grown into the hot spot of Las Vegas: an international destination for gamblers, tourists, corporations seeking a pro-business environment, and individuals eager to relocate for Las Vegas' traditionally strong job market, reasonably priced housing or retirement amenities. The land sale that kicked off Las Vegas took place by auction on May 15, 1905. It was designed to draw investors and merchants willing to provide the food, clothing, health care and entertainment that turn a work site into a town. Intrepid entrepreneurs could sell not only to the railroaders but also to the steady flow of optimistic boom-chasers who used Las Vegas as a jumping-off point to the bustling mine fields of Beatty, Goldfield, Goodsprings, Rhyolite and Tonopah. Newspapers hyped the region's new accessibility and exaggerated its virtues. The new rail line "opens to the world a territory of fabulous richness. The valleys through which the new (rail) runs are almost rotten with ore," a Los Angeles Daily Times reporter wrote in January 1905. "The towns of Beatty and Rhyolite were building tempestuously and clamoring for materials and food supplies. And Las Vegas was the gateway and the way station between these points and the world at large," Charles C. Corkhill, a Las Vegas newspaper publisher wrote afterwards, in 1913. So the railroad advertised lot prices in its town (which it called Clark's Las Vegas Townsite after Montana Senator William Clark, who owned the San Pedro, Los Angeles &Salt Lake) in publications across the nation. Letters of response poured in from Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. Folks started heading to the townsite. The railroad offered passenger service. Other parties straggled in by wagon, using trails beaten down by Mexican traders and Mormon immigrants. Some newcomers lived in tents. They got water from a since-dried stream that ran from the Big Springs, where the present Las Vegas Valley Water District is headquartered, flowing eastward downhill, roughly between present-day Bonanza and Washington avenues. Eventually the creek joined the Las Vegas Wash, which drains to the Colorado River. Other arrivals stayed in a townsite to the northwest, launched just months earlier by a surveyor, J.T. McWilliams, who was trying to get a jump on Clark's Townsite. All comers "believed implicitly Fortune awaited them with outstretched arms and bade them come and relieve her of her burden of wealth," Corkhill wrote in the same 1913 article. Based on the influx, the railroad revised its land sale from first-come-first-served set prices to an auction format. Forty blocks were measured and cleared of brush and mesquite trees. Fremont Street was to be the town's showcase, designed to terminate at the rail station. To handle the crowd, Charles "Pop" Squires and partners erected a tent 130 feet long by forty wide. They called it the Hotel Las Vegas. "There were thirty rooms in addition to a lobby and a bar. Another tent served as dining room and kitchen," Squires' daughter, Florence Boyer, said in her 1967 oral history. Auction day, May 15, dawned hot with the temperature peaking at an unseasonable 110 degrees, according to some accounts. The auction took place over two days in full sun, with a small covered platform only for the auctioneer and his team. Umbrellas dotted the standing audience. "Collars wilted but excitement remained firm," one reporter put it, in a 1955 newspaper edition commemorating the 50th anniversary of Las Vegas' founding. The railroad pulled in $265,000 from the auction. A prime corner lot originally priced at $500 went for more than $1,000. But even simple wage earners got in on the action, too, when the railroad dropped certain prices. Ed Von Tobel, a clerk at a Los Angeles lumber company, came away with two small $100 lots. The total down payment was $50, but the railroad credited him with $22, which had been the cost of his train ticket to Las Vegas. By May 17, the town was already in swing. "Before night, buildings of all kinds were standing in various stages of completion, many of them being used before the roofs were on," the 1955 anniversary edition noted. At McWilliams townsite the reverse process happened. "Some who had built shacks in his area departed. They hired teams and placed the wooden structures on skids to haul to their new property east of the railroad tracks," Florence Lee Jones wrote in her 1975 book, Water, A History of Las Vegas. "Tents were torn down and carted across town," too, to Clark's Townsite. Water lines did not yet exist. Flies flourished, both on human waste and that from mules, horses and burros being used to build the town and supply the mining district. Typhoid fever flared. An August edition of the Las Vegas Age newspaper reported arrests and fining of people caught bathing in the creek. It warned townspeople to boil their drinking water. Water was already flowing to the railroad station, for operating steam engines and maintaining trains. By late summer 1905, water pipes began serving Miller's Hotel, on the southeast corner of Fremont and Main streets. A system of getting water to houses - via redwood pipes, bound with wire and tarred - began installation in September. At the same time, the Armour & Company ice plant and icehouse also came on line. Painted a bright yellow, the plant supplied the railroad, the town and outlying mining area. That fall another company announced plans to furnish electric power. A "canvas tenderloin district" for prostitution also readily sprang up, centered in Block 16, where the railroad permitted alcohol sales. Las Vegas' reputation as a freewheeling town started early as soiled doves moved into Block 16 and liquor sales spread beyond the railroad's designated drinking zone. Even a lawsuit by the railroad failed to stop the saloon trend - though the prostitutes did remain in Block 16 until World War II, when Army officials at the nearby gunnery school insisted the city shut prostitution down entirely. (At that point, the skin trade moved a few blocks east, to land that was outside city limits.) By autumn 1905, Las Vegas had already earned another stripe of its present reputation, as a town of transients. "The extreme heat, accompanied by millions of flies brought so much misery and grief to the new settlement. So by the end of summer, many had become discouraged and left," Boyer told oral historian Mary Ellen Glass. Squires of the Las Vegas Age, who got into newspaper work after the tent hotel venture, wrote that many real-estate speculators swiftly "made their howl and their escape simultaneously." Other property owners hung on, among them, Von Tobel. "The people who came here in 1905 were all optimists. More of them left than ever stayed," he told a Las Vegas newspaper in 1952. "The people who came to Las Vegas had big ideas." This is the tale of young Las Vegas, from its birth until 1931, which was a turning point in its survival. Against the backdrop of a national Depression, that year saw the legalization of gambling and the launch of the project to build Hoover Dam. With two reasons for tourism, Las Vegas was on its way. |
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