History
The first non native americans to settle in the area what would become Las Vegas were a group of Mormons who arrived from Utah in 1855. They constructed a fort located in the current downtown area but would abandon it a few years later. Eventually, other settlers would continue to arrive, taking advantage of the nearby springs as a source of water for agriculture. This water made the area an important water stop and was instrumental in the building of a railroad through the area around 1905. On May 15, 1905, the city of Las Vegas was founded on about 110 acres of land comprising what is now downtown.
Read more about this topic: Downtown Las Vegas
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)