TALES OF VEGAS PAST The Las Vegas Townsite auction of 1905.

Thursday, April 17, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Tales of Vegas Past: Going once, going twice...

By Gregory Crosby

It was a clear morning that Monday of May 15, the sun lighting the sky slowly from between the dip in the horizon that separated Sunrise Mountain from its taller neighbor Frenchman Mountain. As yet there had been no brutally hot weather that year in the desert valley that ran 90 miles long and 30 miles wide. Perhaps a raven sailed down over the open landscape bisected by creeks and washes and a long thin black line of railway ties, the visible fact of the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake railroad snaking its way through what frontier scouts, some 80 or so years before, had declared "the meadows," or in their native Spanish, "Las Vegas."

On that morning, some 200 or so souls, who had paid a special $16 fare for a round trip ticket from Los Angeles to the valley, awoke beneath the canvas ceiling of the Las Vegas Hotel, a sprawling tent that served as the main accommodations for what was referred to as the Clark townsite. Perhaps the most permanent thing about the structure was its huge refrigerator full of bottled beer, most of which would disappear in the heat of the next two days. One wonders what these travelers thought of when they approached the handful of tents that comprised Las Vegas, whether they were speculators who saw mere desert to be bought or sold or dreamers who longed for land and envisioned a bustling railroad town that would drag them along in the wake of its prosperity.

The proprietor of the hotel, and editor of the local newspaper, the Las Vegas Age, one Charles "Pop" Squires, had himself arrived only months before. Coming in on the newly laid tracks, he had asked the conductor what those small white shapes in the distance were. "That's Las Vegas," the conductor replied. The canvas buildings looked more like a ramshackle mining camp than a town. But that was all about to change.

On a wooden platform shaded beneath a huge old mesquite tree just west of Main Street, C.O. Whittemore, president of the Las Vegas Land & Water Co., explained to a crowd of some thousand enthusiastic buyers the developments that his company (a subsidiary of the railroad itself, created to administer the improvements to the new townsite) would bring to the new land owners. The crowd was eager to get on with the sale, though there was no doubt still some grumbling here and there on the part of those who had made applications for lots directly to the railroad. It seemed there had been more hungry applicants than there were properties; hence, the auction. The auctioneer, the charismatic and funny Ben E. Rhodes of Los Angeles, sat with his hat pushed back on his head, waiting for Whittemore, tall in a heavy wool suit, to finish.

As the morning wore on and the sun climbed high, Whittemore would remove his jacket as would dozens of others. No one was dressed for the beginning of the Las Vegas summer, the mercury steadily climbing as Rhodes banged his gavel and began the bidding, spirited in spite of the sun that drove purchasers into whatever shade could be had. Men tugged at celluloid collars as women held wilting bouquets of blossoms. By noon, the 106 degree temperature forced Rhodes to call a two-hour lunch, and dozens sought out that cold beer.

By 3 p.m., the heat was too much, and Rhodes ended the auction early. One hundred seventy-six out of 1,200 townsite lots, parcels of land encompassed by no more than Stewart and Main, Clark and 5th Street, were purchased for $79,566. That evening the desert air was filled with the sounds of saws and hammers as temporary buildings went up on the dusty lots, or buildings were moved from the competing McWilliams townsite to the north above what is now Bonanza. Merchants on Fremont Street and saloon keepers on Block 16, the only block where liquor could be sold, prepared for the next day's business in what was now the town of Las Vegas, Nevada.

How difficult to enter the minds of those people, so distant from us today. Or perhaps not. They were looking for opportunity, businesses to run, money to be made, a place to make a fresh start. They were literally on the ground floor of something, even if few or any could have imagined what this railroad town in the desert, with its few farms and ranches, would eventually become. Today all that remains of that typical moment in the history of the American West, just another confluence of railroad and land speculation like hundreds of others, is a pylon and plaque that marks the spot of the auction. It sits in front of the Plaza hotel, protected from some cabbie's overzealous backing up by two red concrete poles. Las Vegas, in its gaudy and improbable striving, spreads outward in every direction from that momentous day, 98 years ago.