IV.

History

The city's name, Spanish for “the meadows”, refers to grassland seen along spring-fed desert streams by early Spanish explorers of the area. The area was home to the Paiute, who hunted, fished, and gathered roots, piñon nuts, and other foods. The first white settlers were Mormons, who maintained a colony on the site from 1855 to 1857. Fort Baker was built here by the United States Army in 1864 to guard a route to California, and the modern community was established in 1905 with the coming of the railway. Floods in 1907 and 1910 washed out the rail lines, and a financial panic in 1907 devastated the mining industry in the surrounding area. The city's main growth began in the 1930s, when Hoover Dam was built 30 miles away on the Colorado River. Dam construction began in 1931, the same year that Nevada legalized gambling. The first casino opened in Las Vegas in 1946, and the city's population increased greatly in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974 daily gambling revenues in Las Vegas topped one million dollars per day. In the 1990s, Las Vegas experienced a building boom of casinos, resorts, and housing. In 1980 84 people were killed by a fire in the former MGM Grand hotel. Three major hotels—including the new MGM Grand, one of the world's largest, built at a total cost of US$1.85 billion—opened in 1993.

Las Vegas is the fastest-growing of all metropolitan areas in the United States, boasting a population increase of 13.9 per cent from 1990-1992. Although it had fewer than 40,000 residents in 1940, that figure has multiplied by a factor of 25 in the last 50 years, amounting to growth without precedent for any major American city. Increasingly, Las Vegas is home to former Pacific Coast residents decamping California to move to the “Silver State”. Disenchanted California migrants constitute about 60 per cent of the newcomers to Las Vegas, and as a result, house building, landscaping, residential security, and different kinds of clean manufacturing processes contribute to the increasingly mixed Las Vegas economy.