Viva Las Vegas
Las Vegas once rivaled great western cities like Denver and Tucson in size and importance. Quite a feat given its current population–of 13,000.
The original Sin City of the West lies in the Blood of Christ’s shadow, the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, southernmost outpost of the Rockies. First laid out by settlers with a Mexican land grant in 1835, Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de las Vegas Grandes–Our Lady of Sorrows of the Great Meadows–became an important stop for weary overlanders on the Santa Fe Trail.
Soon after the outbreak of the Mexican War, the American Army of the West swept through the village on its way to Santa Fe. The town plaza bore witness to General Stephen Kearney’s proclamation that the United States claimed New Mexico as its own. Most locals watched in ambivalence, just hoping for the Navajo raids to stop.
Railroads reached the new American territory a few decades later. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway established a station in 1879, setting up a rival town across the river, also called Las Vegas. The requisite boom followed.
For a time, Las Vegas was the largest city in the Southwest, but booms brought more than business and development. All that prosperity attracted a more sinister crowd with less honorable intentions.
To get a sense of the place during that era, conjure an image of a Wild West boomtown using every movie cliché and dime novel trope, then double it. That was Las Vegas in 1880.
Though the town itself has drifted into obscurity–or at least a reserved maturity, the names of the characters who walked its streets live on in legend. Doc Holliday, Big Nose Kate, Billy the Kid, Dave Rudabaugh, Wyatt Earp, and Mysterious Dave Mather to name a few.
A criminal cabal known as the Dodge City Gang ran the place for a while, banning weapons in the town even as they murdered and robbed at will. After months of terror, locals formed their own vigilante syndicate to drive them out. One historian of the Old West described the city in glowing terms: “Without exception there was no town which harbored a more disreputable gang of desperadoes and outlaws than did Las Vegas.” Sin City indeed.
Vigilante mobs even repurposed the remains of a giant old windmill in the center of the plaza to grisly effect. The Hanging Windmill.
Bird's Eye View of Las Vegas - 1882. "Old Town" is on top, west of the river, with "New Town" on the bottom. Library of Congress.
Most of the gamblers, cowboys, outlaws, and killers disappeared after a while, drifting on to bigger or deader things. They left behind a small community at the sharp divide of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains; one of the world’s great natural contrasts. Eventually the rival towns on the Gallinas River merged, and another city founded further west would take both its name and its notoriety in the American Southwest.
In recent years, the original Sin City found new life in a measure of restoration and redevelopment. Hollywood resurrected a faint echo of its wild past, filming stories like No Country for Old Men and the show Longmire in and around the town. Then, in 2022, Las Vegas watched the flames of the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history lash at its doorstep.
The town survived, and still sits there, The Lady of Sorrows under the Blood of Christ, a half-remembered testament to a brief, and boisterous, time. Viva Las Vegas.
Sheriff Walt Longmire's Abasaroka County Bronco stands ready outside the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico during a shoot for Longmire. The hotel overlooks the same plaza that hosted General Kearney's speech in 1846 and the Hanging Windmill in later decades. Photo courtesy of u/lotusbloom74, reddit
