The Mormon Fort: Where Las Vegas Was Founded

Two miles north of the Strip, behind a chain-link fence on the edge of a parking lot, stands the oldest surviving non-Indigenous structure in Nevada. It does not look like the founding of a city. It looks like an old adobe wall.

In eighteen fifty-five, Brigham Young sent a party of thirty Mormon missionaries south from Salt Lake City to establish a way station on the route to Southern California and, if possible, to establish a relationship with the Southern Paiute people who lived in the valley. They built an adobe fort at the edge of the Las Vegas Springs, the freshwater source that the Paiute had used for centuries and that a Spanish trade expedition had mapped twenty-six years earlier.

The mission lasted two years. The missionaries could not make the desert farming work. They could not convert the Paiute, who had their own relationship to this land and their own reasons for skepticism toward men arriving from distant authority. In eighteen fifty-seven, with larger conflicts in the Utah Territory demanding Brigham Young's attention, the missionaries abandoned the fort and returned north.

The adobe walls they left behind were eventually incorporated into a ranch, then a municipal water works, and eventually the state historic park you see here. What remained is a fragment, one corner of the original structure, preserved precisely because it is the oldest thing in the city.

Las Vegas was formally incorporated as a railroad town in nineteen oh five, fifty years after the missionaries left. The fort predates the city's founding by half a century. If you are looking for where Las Vegas actually begins, in the sense of the first structure built by settlers who intended to stay, this is it.