“The Other Las Vegas”—that’s what residents of Las Vegas, New Mexico, call their hometown now that the bigger and brassier Las Vegas, Nevada, has stolen the limelight.
But what New Mexico’s Las Vegas lacks in name recognition it more than makes up for in historical significance. For every megacasino in the Nevada gambling hub, there’s a historic building in its New Mexico namesake that recalls boom times on the Santa Fe Trail, or the U.S. seizure of the territory from Mexico in the 1840s, or the coming of the railroad with its Eastern influences. The upshot is the town’s surprisingly hefty inventory of 918 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, which has gained Las Vegas, N.M., a spot on the National Register’s list of “Distinctive Destinations.”
What’s more, the little town at the foot of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains is the original Las Vegas, founded long before the Nevada upstart dealt its first poker hand. And just as “meadows” (vegas) dictated both official names, the nickname “Sin City” applied equally to the New Mexico settlement in its heyday, with brawls, shootouts, cattle rustling and lynchings prompted by desperados such as Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Still, the Wild West outpost prospered from its location along the Santa Fe Trail and later the railroad: By the end of the 19th century, it was the largest city in New Mexico and a microcosm of Southwestern history.
Las Vegas was founded late in the Spanish-Mexican period, after Mexico gained its independence from Spain—and perhaps more important, after trade with the United States had started rolling on the Santa Fe Trail. During the previous 200-plus years of Spanish colonization in northern New Mexico, commerce with other nations was outlawed. But starting in 1821, to the delight of goods-starved settlers, Mexican officials welcomed outside trade.
In retrospect, even though the town’s founding was still several years off, 1821 proved a portentous year for Las Vegas. For one thing, it marked the first request for a grant in the lush grasslands known as Vegas Grandes, an area that had long been a crossroad between the nomadic Plains Indians and the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande Valley. Luís María Cabeza de Baca and his family attempted to establish a ranch in las vegas, but Indian raids drove the settlers back.
Just south of the future site of Las Vegas, on November 13, 1821, Missouri merchant William Becknell and his trading party stumbled upon a force of 400 Mexican soldiers and Pueblo Indians led by Captain Pedro Ignacio Gallego. Laconically, Captain Gallego later reported: “About 3:30 p.m. encountered six Americans at the Puertocito de la Piedra Lumbre….Not understanding their words nor any of the signs they made, I decided to return to [San Miguel del] Vado….Nothing further occurred.”
With Gallego’s tacit permission, Becknell proceeded to Santa Fe and unloaded his goods, initiating a period of robust trade between New Mexico and the American frontier towns to the east. By the 1830s, caravans of wagons delivered cloth, tools and other manufactured goods to Santa Fe, and sometimes on to Chihuahua, returning with gold dust or silver pesos, and mules bred on the ranchos of New Mexico.
In 1835, 29 individuals from San Miguel del Vado obtained the Las Vegas land grant from the Mexican government. Their new settlement was to be 65 miles east of Santa Fe, on the banks of the Gallinas River. Plans called for dwellings, a plaza, farmlands watered by an acequia (irrigation ditch) and communal lands for grazing sheep. As a way station on the Santa Fe Trail, the plaza was designed to hold livestock—and even a wagon train—in case of Indian attack. The settlers named their village Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de las Vegas Grandes (Our Lady of Sorrows of the Great Meadows).
In a later memoir, local merchant William Kronig recalled Las Vegas as “an adobe-built town composed of about 100 shacks or huts placed at random. A few were built along the main traveled road and around a square.”
Church bells rang out to announce the approach of trade caravans, and residents converged on the plaza with carts full of foodstuffs and other goods for the traders. In the evening the visitors joined the townspeople in the high-spirited music and dancing of a fandango.
To weary travelers arriving from the east, the hardscrabble Mexican town presented a welcome sign of civilization, the first real town since their departure from Missouri or Kansas. Susan Shelby Magoffin, the 19-year-old bride of a Santa Fe trader, described her first glimpse of the settlement: “We drove down a long hill at the foot of which runs a beautiful clear stream…. This circles almost entirely the village of Vegas, crossing it we came immediately in contact with the dwelling houses, pig sties, corn cribs, etc.”
On August 18, 1846, a different sort of traveler recorded his impressions. Private Philip Gooch Ferguson, U.S. Army, wrote: “Tonight camped on the hill east of Las Vegas. Here our curiosity was gratified with a sight of a Mexican Town.” The United States had declared war on Mexico, and Ferguson’s detachment was following Brig. Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny and his Army of the West into Mexican territory. Las Vegas became their first major encounter with a community of Mexican citizens on Mexican soil. The townspeople gathered in the plaza to hear a speech by Kearny, who was backed up by the presence of several large cannons.
With the city’s alcalde (mayor) by his side, Kearny announced to the residents that they were no longer citizens of Mexico but under the “protection” of the U.S. Army. “We come amongst you as friends, not as enemies,” he told them, “but he who is found in arms against me, I will hang!” With that pronouncement, the “Mexican town” assumed a new identity—that of an American frontier town during New Mexico’s long and boisterous territorial era.
The presence of the Army in New Mexico provided protection from Indian raids, thereby encouraging traffic on the Santa Fe Trail. By 1851 the Army moved to the new Fort Union (now Fort Union National Monument), 18 miles north of Las Vegas. With local farmers and merchants providing supplies for the troops, the fort contributed to the growth of Las Vegas.
In the spring of 1862, Confederate troops from Texas invaded Santa Fe, then capital of the territory of New Mexico, en route to Colorado and California. The territorial governor moved his office to Las Vegas, briefly transforming it into the territorial capital. But once the Southern troops withdrew, the territorial governor returned to Santa Fe.
An especially memorable Fourth of July occurred in 1879: For the first time, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad came steaming into town. Actually, the tracks missed Las Vegas by a mile, giving rise to a new town across the river. Now there were two communities named Las Vegas—old and new, west and east, Mexican and Anglo—creating a rift that was to persist for almost a century.
Unlike the roads that meandered around the plaza on the older west side, a neat grid of streets laid out in straight lines distinguished the newer East Las Vegas. The newcomers constructed grandiose Victorian buildings that contrasted with the earlier, earthy adobes. Anglos crossed the bridge to build on both sides of the river, so that even today the elegant three-story Plaza Hotel, dating from 1882, abuts rough-hewn adobes facing the Old Town Plaza.
Along with a renewed surge in prosperity, the arrival of the railroad brought a period of lawlessness that served as the fodder for many a Wild West tale. Saloons and dance halls multiplied, catering to gunslingers, gamblers and shady operators of every stripe. This was the period when Wyatt Earp’s pal Doc Holliday operated a saloon (until he left town just ahead of a lynching party) and Billy the Kid escaped from the Las Vegas jail.
In one month in 1880, 29 men met a violent death—some were hanged from the windmill that stood in the center of the plaza. Outraged citizens recruited the so-called “peace officers” known as the Dodge City Gang, but the stagecoach and train robberies continued, with the perpetrators often shielded by corrupt lawmen.
Meanwhile, Anglo cattle ranchers, their herds increasing exponentially, began encroaching on Las Vegas’ communal lands. From 1889 to 1892, night-riding residents called “Gorras Blancas” (White Hats) protested the intrusion into their pasturelands by cutting fences and burning barns. The cattle wars provided cover for local saloon owner Vicente Silva and his Society of Bandits to engage in large-scale cattle-rustling.
Toward the end of the century, the trains brought wealthy vacationers to the Southwest, and luxury hotels sprang up to host them. One of the most stylish was the Mission Revival–style La Castañeda, built in 1898 as one of Fred Harvey’s railroad hotels. Though no longer open to guests today, it still faces the railroad tracks in faded grandeur.
As the rail system spread, commerce on the Santa Fe Trail declined. Moreover, other railroad cities, like Albuquerque to the southwest, claimed their share of rail-generated profits, so that Las Vegas gradually sank into obscurity.
A modest stone building, constructed during the Depression by the Works Progress Administration, contains details of Las Vegas’ turbulent past. Intriguingly, the City of Las Vegas Museum/Rough Rider Memorial Collection also documents the town’s link to the Cuban campaign of the Spanish-American War. Theodore Roosevelt, then secretary of the Navy, was seeking experienced horsemen for his 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, and New Mexico cowboys filled the bill admirably. Even though horses and riders were somehow separated before the famous charge up San Juan Hill, the cavalrymen stormed the hill on foot and returned victorious. In 1899 the first Rough Riders reunion was held in Las Vegas, with several subsequent reunions taking place there until 1968, when only two veterans of the old unit were still alive. One of those died later that year and the reunions ceased.
In the 20th century, as Las Vegas slid into a long economic decline, the 19thcentury buildings remained standing. “We couldn’t afford to tear them down,” explains current Mayor Henry Sánchez. That suited Hollywood producers just fine. Tom Mix checked in at the Plaza Hotel, and hundreds of faux cowboys dismounted alongside the frontier-era storefronts. Jack Nicholson (in the movie Easy Rider) overnighted in the jail cell that occupies the rear of Tito’s Gallery on Bridge Street.
Finally, in 1970, police, fire and other government departments from East and West Las Vegas came together to form one city but, Mayor Sánchez says with a laugh, “We still have two school districts!” Las Vegas counts nine historic districts spread throughout this community of 16,500 people.
On July 4, Independence Day vies with the anniversary of the arrival of the railroad as a defining moment in the city’s history. The multiday “Fourth of July Fiestas” kicks off with a Fiesta Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows Church. Food vendors line Bridge Street leading to the plaza, while patriotic parades and entertainment share the spotlight with folklórico dances and the Baile de la Reina (Queen’s Ball). In August, locals show off their historic buildings during an annual “Places With a Past” Historic Sites Tour.
When it comes to authentic down-home traditions, there’s only one Las Vegas.
Originally published in the June 2006 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
