History of The Las Vegas Valley

History Of The Las Vegas Valley

This history of Las Vegas covers both the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Las Vegas Valley. Las Vegas was coined by Raphael Rivera, a scout for a New Mexican trading party headed to Los Angeles, in 1829 who used the water in the area while heading north and west along the Old Spanish Trail from New Mexico. In the 19th century, small parts of the Las Vegas Valley contained artesian wells that supported extensive green areas, hence the name Las Vegas, Spanish for The Meadows. The flows from these wells fed the Las Vegas Wash which runs to the Colorado River.

Read more about History Of The Las Vegas Valley:  Prehistory, 1829–1905: Origins, 1905–1929: Birth, Growth and Crisis, 1930–1941: Hoover Dam and The First Casinos, 1941–1945: War Years, 1947–1963: Postwar Boom and Organized Crime, 1950s: Atomic Testing, Since 1970: Explosive Growth, Since 1989: The Megaresort Era, Late 2000s Towards 2010s: The Economic Bust

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    “The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
    —Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

    “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
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    —Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)

    “In a valley late bees with whining gold
    Thread summer to the loose ends of sleep....”
    —Allen Tate (1899–1979)