Until May 15, 1905, the ground under your feet in the heart of downtown Las Vegas was desert scrub. On that day, the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad auctioned off 1,200 lots in a townsite they had surveyed in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas was born. The auction raised $265,000 in a single day. Men bid for land that had no water, no buildings, and no infrastructure. They were buying a promise.
The railroad needed a watering and service stop between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, and this flat, relatively accessible spot in the valley provided it. Las Vegas — Spanish for 'the meadows,' named for underground springs that allowed grass to grow in an otherwise arid landscape — had sustained travelers on the Old Spanish Trail for a century before the railroad arrived. But the springs were the city's only natural advantage. Everything else had to be built.
For the next two decades, Las Vegas was a small railroad service town of a few thousand people, sustained by the same industries as every other Western railroad stop: saloons, hotels, general stores, and the professional services that followed the workers. Gambling was illegal. The mob hadn't arrived. The neon signs were decades away. Las Vegas in 1905 was an auction in the desert, a bet on the future by people who had no way of knowing what the future held.