Viva Las Vegas

In the late 1800s a young Spanish scout named Rafael Rivera came upon a valley with sweeping, wild grasses and wells abundant with water. He named it “The Meadows,” or in Spanish, Las Vegas. The valley grew, helped along by the building of a fort and the connection to a rail line, serving as a kind of water station to the trains. Briefly it served as a station for Mormon pioneers on their trek to find a less hostile territory (and to convert the heathens along the way.)

On this day, Las Vegas officially was founded as a city, when the SanPedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, owned by Montana Senator Williams Andrews Clark, auctioned off 110 acres in what today is the city’s  downtown.

Las Vegas, and the whole state of Nevada established themselves early on as a prime destination for gamblers, especially with the growing anti-gambling sentiment in California in the 1800s. Then in 1910 Nevada reluctantly joined the anti-gambling crusade, with a strict law forbidding even the western custom of flipping a coin for the price of a drink. All it did was drive the gambling underground, while authorities mostly looked the other way. Gambling was legalized in the state in 1931 and has remained legal ever since.