Although the city’s success is commonly attributed to its prominence as a tourist town, the railroad industry is where Vegas got its start.

While on a quest to build a rail line connecting Salt Lake City and Las Angeles, Union Pacific railroad developers determined the water-rich valleys of Vegas to be the optimal location to house a way station for travelers, and a town. As a result, in 1905 Las Vegas was established. However, Vegas was only one stop on Union Pacific’s quest to develop the first Transcontinental railroad. This was an ambitious feat because the rail line would be built across 1,700 miles of what Boston papers called “Ruinous space.” Construction crews would have to build across hundreds of miles of desert and at elevations of up to 8,000 feet without a single sizable settlement in sight. It took six years to build the railroad and an army of 20,000 men, most of whom were Chinese and Irish immigrants.

The Union Pacific built repair shops, housed merchants, and trained crews in Vegas. However, when Vegas workers joined in a nationwide rail strike in 1922, the Union Pacific punished them by shutting down the repair shops. This resulted in the loss of 300 jobs and devastated the small community.  By the late 1930s, Vegas had found a new economic opportunity in Nevada’s lax marriage laws. The town creatively promoted easy ways to get married by having a licensing bureau at a train depot, and even kept the county clerk’s office open twenty-four hours a day to maximize ease of access. Between the 1939 and 1941, the number of marriages quadrupled to over 21,000 a year, giving Vegas a huge economic boost.

In 1931, after a measure was approved in support of open gambling the entertainment industry rose to new heights. By 1943 during the height of the boulder dam construction, 5,000 bolder damn construction workers earning a collective $750,000 a month, spent most of their money on entertainment in Vegas. Near the end of Boulder dam construction, Vegas began to be marketed as a convenience town providing the tourist with easy access to Nevada’s many attractions. However, it lacked proper accommodations for tourist. In 1941, El Rancho was the first hotel erected on the strip targeted at attracting high-class clientele and helping to popularize ‘The Strip.’ In 1947 the infamous “Bugsy” Siegel aka Mr. Murder Incorporated opened the famous Flamingo Hotel.

He died in late 1947 before the hotel reached its prime, but his presence in Vegas opened the door for more mobsters to invest in the town. During the 1950s and 1960s money from organized crime, and wall street investors went into building hotels like the Sahara, and the New Frontier. Today, Vegas continues to thrive on the business of entertainment, and the history of crime that helps build the town only adds to its allure.

Works Cited

Badertscher, Eric. “Las Vegas.” Our States: Nevada, Aug. 2018, pp. 1–3. EBSCOhost,   db03.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.asp

Editors, History.com. “Las Vegas.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 2 Dec. 2009,

http://www.history.com/topics/us-states/las-vegas.

Gragg, Larry. “Las Vegas who built America’s playground? Larry Gragg digs beneath the glitzy surface of America’s ‘sin city’ to find out how this extravagant home of gambling and glamour came into being.” History Today, Feb. 2007, p. 51+. World History Collection http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A159921708/PPWH?u=lincclin_bwcc&sid=PPWH&xid=4460bd2a. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019.

J., Edward, and Renehan. “The Transcontinental Railroad, Updated Edition.” LINCCWeb   Catalog Search, 2017, online.infobase.com.db03.linccweb.org/HRC/LearningCenter/Details/2?articleId=358413&lcid=0

Union Pacific History and Chronologies.” Union Pacific, www.up.com/index.htm.https://www.up.com/heritage/history/overview/index.htm,

https://www.up.com/heritage/history/overview/building_road/index.htm

Zobell, Charles. “Las Vegas.” World Book Advanced, World Book, 2019, www-worldbookonline-com.db03.linccweb.org/advanced/article?id=ar314060. Accessed 27 Jan. 2019