Las Vegas, New Mexico: First Stop on the Trail
New Mexico
Do not confuse this Las Vegas with the Nevada glitter strip. This one is older by decades and far quieter. In eighteen thirty-five, twenty-nine settlers from the village of San Miguel del Vado received a land grant from the Mexican government and founded a community on the Gallinas River, sixty-five miles east of Santa Fe.
They called it Nuestra Senora de los Dolores de Las Vegas Grandes, the Great Meadows of Our Lady of Sorrows, named for the sweeping grasslands that surrounded them. It became the first town on the Santa Fe Trail where wagon caravans stopped after crossing seven hundred miles of open prairie from Missouri. General Stephen Kearny rode in on August fifteenth, eighteen forty-six, climbed a rooftop on the plaza, and claimed New Mexico for the United States without a shot fired.
Fifty-two years later, twenty-one of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders came from Las Vegas, and the city hosted their annual reunion into the late nineteen sixties.
