Back in 1935, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce founded Helldorado Days near here, the city's original civic celebration and one of the oldest annual events in Nevada. The Helldorado Days rodeo festival was founded in 1935 by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce as a way to attract visitors during the spring off-season, and its Western cowboy theme reflected the city's genuine regional identity — not the manufactured nostalgia of El Rancho Vegas or the Last Frontier, but the authentic cattle-country culture of the Great Basin.
Helldorado featured rodeo competitions, a street parade with floats, a pageant, and the temporary construction of a frontier village that allowed participants to dress in period costumes and stage mock gunfights. For the week of Helldorado, Las Vegas was a Western town rather than a gambling destination — or rather, it was both simultaneously, since the casinos continued operating throughout the festival.
The festival predates the mob era, predates the Strip, predates the neon signs and the showgirls and the megaresorts. It belongs to the Las Vegas that existed before Las Vegas became famous — a small, sun-baked Nevada city with a complicated economy and a strong sense of its own regional identity. That Las Vegas still exists beneath the tourist surface, celebrated in events like Helldorado, and understanding it is essential to understanding why the city has survived every reinvention without entirely losing itself.