The Paiute and the Springs: Two Thousand Years Before the Neon

Two miles west of the Strip, underneath the interpretive exhibits of the Springs Preserve, the ground holds the memory of water.

For at least two thousand years before Rafael Rivera recorded the springs for a Spanish trade expedition in eighteen twenty-nine, Southern Paiute peoples built seasonal camps around the freshwater source in this valley. The springs produced enough water to sustain hunting, plant gathering, and the kind of settled seasonal presence that made the Las Vegas Valley, in the Paiute world, a reliable place. The Paiute name for this region translated roughly as 'the meadows.' Spanish speakers later rendered it as Las Vegas, and the name stuck even after the meadows themselves were gone.

The Mormon missionaries who arrived in eighteen fifty-five, sent by Brigham Young to establish a way station on the route to Southern California, built their fort on Paiute land without treaty or purchase. They stayed two years, abandoned the effort, and left. The railroad arrived in nineteen oh five, on land the federal government sold without Paiute consent. A ten-acre reservation for the Las Vegas Band of Paiute was established in nineteen eleven, in a valley their ancestors had occupied for millennia, though federal recognition of the tribe did not come until nineteen seventy.

The reservation has since grown to approximately three thousand eight hundred fifty acres, and the Paiute Tribe of Las Vegas remains a federally recognized government within the Las Vegas metro area, one of the few urban tribal governments in the American West. The springs that made the valley habitable were pumped dry by the twentieth century's water demands. The Springs Preserve was built on the site of those springs, and the Paiute Tribe has partnered with the museum to maintain an Indigenous presence in the interpretive program.

What the valley lost when it lost the springs, and what it gained instead, is the central bargain of Las Vegas. The Paiute did not make that bargain. It was made around them.