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Las Vegas and its Humble Beginnings

Even more than tourists, however, Las vegans themselves saw the frontier image as the foremost characteristic of the town.

Travelers were already identifying Las Vegas with 'all night gambling', much as they equated Reno with 'divorcing'.

But local residents preferred to describe Las Vegas as an old West town above all else, and then to list the features that evoked the last frontier--- convenient marriage and divorce, low taxes, friendly residents, licensed prostitution, permissive laws, abundant self-promotion, plentiful alcohol, cowboy attire, western rodeos, 24-hour entertainment, and legal gambling.

To Las Vegans, the promotional motif of the old West took precedence over a secondary feature like gambling.

They were reluctant to become known as denizens of a community with an economy based on betting, preferring instead the function of a tourist stop.

In this quest Las Vegas enjoyed some success. In 1938, roughly three-quarters of all those visiting the dam traveled through Las Vegas to get there; in 1939, when 630,900 travelers visited Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, 539,000 people also stopped in Las Vegas.

The outbreak of war in Europe that year promised to divert even more Americans to the town as travel abroad came to be proscribed.

Yet even if prospects appeared brighter in 1939, Las Vegans remembered still more booming times during the building of Hoover Dam.

Although the town had enhanced its tourist appeal through promotion since the completion of dam construction, it had not recaptured the rapid growth of the early 1930s, and rapid growth, after all, was the quintessential purpose of any frontier community.

Las Vegas remained a western sideshow to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, lacking the vision that would later enable it to overshadow the dam.

The promotional motif of the last frontier probably imposed a limit on growth. It not only obscured the potential of the business of gambling, but also shortened the range of boosters' imaginations.

The old West could be regarded as quaint, but the theme also reiterated the relatively unsophisticated and uncomfortable life of the frontier.

Las Vegans lacked the requisite facilities, like a resort hotel, to keep tourists in Southern Nevada. Traveling Americans shied away from the prospect of 'roughing it' in a village setting.

Finding little of lasting interests besides 'wide-open' gambling, most visitors did not stay very long or spend very much.

Many no doubt agreed with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes when he described the community as an ugly, rotten little town.

It seemed doubtful that the resort could ever develop to meet the expectations of its boosters so long as townspeople viewed gambling as less than the leading attraction.

The attitude found expression in 1937 when one local editor predicted that Helldorado would ultimately surpass other far western festivals, such as the Pendleton Round-up, because Las Vegas offered extra attractions, like brothels and casinos, that intensified the 'last days of the west'.