Summerlin, Nevada: Nuwuvi Desert to Howard Hughes's Ghost Ranch

The desert edge you're in was Southern Paiute, or Nuwuvi, territory for centuries. The Nuwuvi were skilled desert-adapted people who ranged across the Las Vegas Valley, harvesting pine nuts in the Spring Mountains above and gathering along the artesian springs below, until American settlers in the mid-eighteen hundreds pushed them off the well-watered lowlands entirely.

In nineteen fifty-two, the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes bought roughly thirty thousand acres along the western rim of the Las Vegas Valley for about three dollars an acre. He envisioned an aviation complex but never built it. The land sat empty for more than twenty years after Hughes died in nineteen seventy-six.

His estate eventually named the development Summerlin, after Hughes's paternal grandmother Jean Amelia Summerlin. The first village opened in nineteen ninety. Today Summerlin spans twenty-two thousand five hundred acres, making it one of the largest master-planned communities in the country, named for a woman almost no one who lives here has ever heard of.