When was las vegas discovered

It was the beginning of the construction of Boulder Dam or Hoover Dam as it was later named when the Las Vegas population really began to boom.

During off-hours, the male construction workers went looking for a good time and local businessmen and crime bosses were happy to cash in on the demand. Mafia crime bosses and money men started developing the casinos and showgirl establishments to keep the workers happy and give them something to spend their pay on. Even though it was well known that criminal figures were behind many of these establishments, Las Vegas officials tried to maintain a respectable reputation for the city.

In a major scandal of the day, a federal official on a tour of the dam construction site was caught with the odor of alcohol on his breath after a visit to the Block 16 area of Las Vegas which was a known area of ill-repute. Because of this, the American government decided to build the town of Boulder City close to the dam for the workers. The town was federally controlled and therefore maintained a higher level of moral standards and a better reputation than Las Vegas.

The Nevada State legislature, realizing how profitable gambling would be for local businesses, legalized gaming again in Since Las Vegas already had several illegally established underground gambling businesses it took the lead in what was to become a major industry. Find out where you can still play coin-operated slot machines in Las Vegas in our article here. Soon casinos started popping up on Fremont Street wikipedia. The street was the first paved street in Las Vegas and also had the first traffic signal installed in Las Vegas was well on its way to becoming the official gambling capital of the world.

The feds did their best to keep the government dam workers away from Las Vegas but secret routes and smuggling developed to sneak the workers into Las Vegas anyway. Even with some of the workers still finding their way into the city, businesses in Las Vegas were hurting due to the restriction of workers but in the hydroelectric dam was finally completed and the switch for electricity was turned on.

Las Vegas would never be the same. The downtown Fremont area became known as Glitter Gulch because of all the new bright lights powered from the abundant electricity of Hoover Dam see our article about visiting Hoover Dam here.

Even though the dam workers left after construction was completed, Lake Mead and Hoover Dam itself became major tourism draws and it was soon evident that more hotels needed to be built to accommodate the high-class tourists that were beginning to arrive.

In the late s, the success of El Rancho Vegas inspired others to open up hotels along Highway 91, which would later evolve into the Strip. East Coast mobster Bugsy Siegel — backed by fellow mob boss Meyer Lansky — was amongst these hotel builders, opening the Hollywood-inspired Flamingo Hotel in Although Siegel was murdered in , fellow mobsters helped to carry out his vision for Las Vegas; during the s and s, the Riviera, the New Frontier, the Sands, and the Sahara opened, mostly funded by racketeering and drug trafficking money.

But soon enough, many mobsters received investments from reputable groups such as Wall Street banks and the Mormon Church. In , billionaire and businessman Howard Hughes was staying at the Desert Inn. He decided he did not want to leave and opted to purchase the hotel instead. He bought over a dozen more hotels, slowly pushing out mobster-owned hotels that dominated the city.

By the s, Mafia-financed casinos had disappeared. In , Steve Wynn instigated a new trend in hotel design and construction: the mega hotel. He opened the Mirage , the first glamorous resort hotel in Las Vegas. Transformed over the next two decades, the Strip saw many developments inspired by iconic cities, such as New York , Paris , and Rome , and countries, including Egypt.

By , Las Vegas had more than 86, hotel and motel rooms, with 13 of the 20 largest resort hotels on the planet. Entertainment and casinos remain the biggest source of income in Las Vegas. Settled by the English in , South Carolina became the eighth state to ratify the U. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Las Vegas: Prehistory and Founding Canyon petroglyphs attest to human presence in southern Nevada for more than 10, years, and members of the Paiute tribe were in the area as early as A.

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