The Vegas Approach: What Primm Means

The casinos appear about forty-five miles before Las Vegas. This is not an accident. Primm, Nevada sits at the state line precisely because Nevada gambling law begins at the state line and does not require that you wait.

The first building you see with slot machines is doing something deliberate: it is telling you that you have crossed a boundary where different rules apply, and that crossing counts for something immediately. Las Vegas is not a natural city. There is no river here, no harbor, no particular resource that explains why two million people live in a desert valley.

The Paiute people, the Southern Paiute, occupied the Vegas Valley and the surrounding Mojave for centuries before American exploration arrived. They were not consulted about what would be built here. Las Vegas was a railroad water stop in nineteen-oh-five, incorporated as a city in nineteen eleven.

The federal dam that created Lake Mead, completed in nineteen thirty-five, provided the water and power that made the city possible. Nevada legalized casino gambling in nineteen thirty-one. The coincidence of cheap federal electricity and legal gambling is what produced Las Vegas.

As you approach from the south, the Strip appears before the city. The casinos are taller than anything else for thirty miles in every direction, lit in colors that are visible from altitude. They are designed to be the first thing you see and the last thing you stop thinking about.

The approach works on the same principle as Primm: the experience begins before you arrive. The desert that surrounds all of it is real and indifferent and would reclaim this valley within a generation if the water stopped.