In the shimmering heart of the Mojave Desert, a story unfolds that rewrites the neon-scripted tale of Las Vegas—a city celebrated for its audacious spectacle and improbable rise from arid obscurity. Before the gleaming casinos and grand marquees, before sin christened the city its neon cathedral, there was another Las Vegas, veiled now in the dust of forgotten history.
This nascent Las Vegas—an embryonic whisper of the present-day clamor—pulsed to life in the earthen cradle of McWilliams Town Site, blossoming unexpectedly like a desert mirage. A frontier settlement teetering on the cusp of the 20th century, it boasted a tapestry of 2,000 to 3,000 souls, who, unbeknownst to them, were the vanguard of a legend in the making. For 18 fleeting months from 1904 to 1905, this was Las Vegas, Nevada.
At the heart of this origin story stood John Thomas McWilliams, the enterprising Canadian-born surveyor, a man whose vision paralleled the railroad tycoons of lore. In 1902, he arrived, tasked by the San Pedro, Los Angeles, & Salt Lake Railroad with surveying a portion of the desert held by Helen J. Stewart—one of the region’s few settlers. Yet, it was not merely a survey that McWilliams would chart—it was the blueprint of a burgeoning community, one that would preempt the grand plans of the railroad itself.
Upon this unforgiving canvas, McWilliams crafted a grid of possibility, broad avenues that would herald the city we know today—Bonanza Road, Washington Avenue, A and H streets. Here, on an 80-acre swathe acquired from Stewart herself, he etched his dreams into the desert earth.
As if by alchemy, the settlement drew breath, powered by the sinew and sweat of railroad workers and their kin. From near and far they converged, forging homes out of the wilderness, and in time, they gave form to the geometry of streets with storefronts and abodes, among them the nascent tendrils of Las Vegas’ first bank, First State. In the womb of this frontier town even the whisper of entertainment echoed as construction of the Trocadero—slated to house 800 patrons—began under the baton of vaudevillian Chuancy Pulsifer.
Yet, if this Las Vegas was a dream, it was one shadowed by a fatal flaw—a lack of water rights. The lifeline of any desert settlement, precious water, remained firmly in the grasp of Senator William A. Clark, whose rival settlement bloomed across the tracks, drawing away residents with the siren call of running water.
The denouement came swiftly. A land auction by Clark, infused with the promise of hydration, led to a mass exodus from McWilliams’ Las Vegas. Buildings were uprooted and literally slid across to Clark’s burgeoning town. McWilliams, steadfast to his vision, watched as his Las Vegas receded into a ghostly echo, soon scarred by a devastating fire and derisively nicknamed “Ragtown.”
In the spectral quiet that followed, McWilliams’ Las Vegas dissolved into the annals of history, its founder’s name eroding into the obscurity of Old Town, then the west side. McWilliams, steadfast till the end, succumbed to mortality in his abode on Wilson Street. His legacy, and that of the settlers who cast their fates with his Las Vegas, faded amidst the burgeoning shadow of Clark’s triumph.
Now whispered only in the hushed reverence of historians, the McWilliams Town Site lingers as a footnote to the flamboyant chapters of the Las Vegas we know. Here, in the Historic West Side—a moniker owed not to McWilliams but to the Black community that rose against segregationist confines—the echoes of the first Las Vegas barely murmur beneath the clamor of progress.
In the end, it is a tale of two cities: one that dazzled the world, the other lost to the sands and time. And in the echoes of history, the image of J.T. McWilliams fades, a specter in the desert winds—a man who founded a city that once bore the name Las Vegas, vanquished not by scarcity of water, but by the tides of fate.
