A Short History of Las Vegas Author:Barbara Land, Myrick Land Most treatments of Las Vegas tend to trivialize the pioneer past in favor of the glamorous present. Here the Lands provide a fresh, vital, and balanced look at the phenomenal history of this oasis in the thirsty desert. The mobsters are here, of course, as are Elvis, Liberace, and the Rat Pack, but the Lands tell a more complete stor... more »y, from the earliest visitors to "The Meadows" 11,000 years ago to the Mormon pioneers who established a mission outpost in 1855; the ambitious developers who laid out two rival locations before the railroad auction in 1905 that put a tiny, struggling town on the map; and the beginnings of Boulder City in 1931, a virtuous company town for the builders of Hoover Dam, intended to keep them from the fleshpots of wicked nearby Las Vegas, with its newly legalized gambling and infamous red-light district, Block 16.« less