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This history of Las Vegas covers both the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, and the Las Vegas Valley. The settlement of Las Vegas was founded in 1905 after opening of a railroad that linked Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. In 1911, the town was incorporated as part of the newly founded Clark County. The prehistoric landscape of the Las Vegas Valley and most of Southern Nevada was once a marsh with water and vegetation. The rivers that created the marsh eventually went underground, and the marsh receded. At some point in the valley’s early geologic history, the water resurfaced and flowed into what is now the Colorado River.

This created a luxurious plant life, forming a wetland oasis in the Mojave Desert landscape. Evidence of prehistoric life in Las Vegas Valley was found in 1993, when a group of construction workers discovered the remains of a Columbian mammoth. Palaeontologists estimate that the mammoth roamed the area some 8,000 to 15,000 years ago. Native Americans lived in the Las Vegas Valley, beginning over 10,000 years ago. A trade caravan of 60 men led by the Mexican merchant Antonio Armijo was charged with establishing a trade route to Los Angeles. Frémont traveled into the Las Vegas Valley on May 3, 1844, while it was still part of Mexico. In 1855, William Bringhurst led a group of 29 Mormon missionaries from Utah to the Las Vegas Valley.

However, because of tensions rising between leaders of the small Mormon community, the summer heat and difficulty growing crops, the missionaries returned to Utah in 1857, abandoning the fort. For the next few years the area remained unoccupied by Americans except for travelers and traders. Army, in an attempt to deceive Confederate spies active in southern California in 1864, falsely publicized that it reclaimed the fort and had renamed it Fort Baker, briefly recalling the area to national attention. 1902 by the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad, then being built across southern Nevada.

Joan of Arc Catholic Church near 4th and Bridger in downtown was founded in 1910. By the early 20th century, wells piped water into the town, providing both a reliable source of fresh water and the means for additional growth. Salt Lake Railroad was completed in 1905, linking Salt Lake City to southern California. Senator William Andrews Clark was the majority owner of the railroad, which was a corporation based in Utah.

Clark subsequently built another railroad branching off from Las Vegas to the boom town of Bullfrog called the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad. With the revenue coming down both railways that intersected there, the area of Las Vegas was quickly growing. Shortly after the city’s incorporation, the State of Nevada reluctantly became the last western state to outlaw gaming. This occurred at midnight, October 1, 1910, when a strict anti-gambling law became effective in Nevada. It even forbade the western custom of flipping a coin for the price of a drink. Nonetheless, Las Vegas had a diversified economy and a stable and prosperous business community, and therefore continued to grow until 1917.

On July 3, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed the appropriation bill for the Boulder Dam. The dam was later renamed the Hoover Dam during the Truman administration. Work started on the dam in 1931 and Las Vegas’ population swelled from around 5,000 citizens to 25,000, with most of the newcomers looking for a job building the dam. Despite the influx of known crime figures, the local business community tried to cast Las Vegas in a respectable light when the Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur visited in 1929 to inspect the dam site. Realizing that gambling would be profitable for local business, the Nevada state legislature legalized gambling at the local level in 1931.