Old Spanish Trail (via National Park Service)
Las Vegas likes to play up a Western history it really doesn’t have. The place is simply too new. The city was only created in 1905, hundreds of years after Boston, New York and Philadelphia. At the turn of the century five years earlier, the U.S. Census reported the population of all of the Las Vegas area was all of 18. Cowboys, Indians, cattle and other trappings of the traditional Old West were in short supply.
It took Las Vegas 30 years to even start Helldorado Days, an annual celebration of its supposed Wild West culture. When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, enterprising casino operators latched onto Western imagery as a tourist draw. This still persists, helped by such annual events as the National Finals Rodeo, the nation’s largest, and the occasional cowboy sign illuminated in neon.
Las Vegas’s latest effort to claim historic frontier honors opened on Friday at the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas. It’s an exhibition entitled “The Old Spanish Trail: Connecting a Network of Paths.” The show focuses on the OST, a meandering 19th Century trade route running 2,700 miles over several routings from Santa Fe., N.M., to Los Angeles that went through the future Las Vegas. In posted signage, the museum asserts the OST was “a conduit for revolutionary change throughout the vast, arid expanse we call the American Southwest” that “has earned its historic legacy.”
Over the weekend I toured the exhibit, which is to run for six months. I saw no evidence of that “revolutionary change” or “historic legacy.” What I did see was mainly–nothing.
Although forged by indigenous peoples centuries earlier, the OST as a viable trade route lasted for only about 20 years, from 1829 to 1850, when the U.S. became the law following the Mexican War. The OST was too rugged, too dangerous and too long for wagon trains and was used only by the occasional trading party moving goods to and from the Pacific Ocean using hundreds of mules and horses. It’s doubtful that more than a handful of parties made the round trip in any given year. Moreover, the combined population of the two cities at its ends totaled only 6,500 in 1850, not making for much of a buying market.
The OST made a few merchants wealthy, including Antonio Armigo, of Santa Fe. He led the first round trip in 1829-1830 and wrote the first published report documenting the route (in Spanish). But the OST did little good for most of the in-between folks–including in Nevada.
All the pre-motorized action was to the north. Brigham Young completely avoided the OST, forging his own path bringing 148 pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Illinois in their epic 1847 exodus to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, 400 miles north of Las Vegas. It’s called the Mormon Trail and had a much greater impact on history. The Oregon Trail from Missouri to the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington State drew about 10,000 travelers a year. Dwarfing OST traffic, as many as 50,000 folks a year plied the California Emigrant Trail also from Missouri to the northern California gold fields, cutting across northern Nevada along the future U.S. 50.
The opening of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 through Utah and northern Nevada to California eventually put all the trails out of business.
I did not see mentions of the other routes I just described at the Nevada State Museum.
With this kind of action all around, the Nevada State Museum had to scurry for material in support of the OST’s historical significance, except, perhaps, as an example of failure. There was little economic data provided. One display admitted that the OST was simply “a pack trail.” But another disturbingly described the “slave trade” of Indian tribes trading captured members of other tribes–often women and children–to the Spanish parties for horses.
The exhibition hall was full of display cases of what I would call 19th century artifacts. It was not clear to me how much of this material actually had moved along the OST.
Any discussion of the OST and Las Vegas necessitates invoking the name of military adventurer and future politician John C. Frémont (1813-1890), for whom Fremont Street in Las Vegas, predecessor to The Strip, and a gaggle of places and institutions mainly in the West are named. He is mercifully mentioned in only one display, for popularizing the OST–as noted above, he didn’t blaze it–and including Las Vegas in a map he produced (in English) for the U.S. government. This is true.
I say mercifully because there’s a history involving the Nevada State Museum, Frémont–and me. In 2018, the museum hosted a traveling exhibition called “Finding Frémont” that was all about him. It was a highly laudatory look at the man I consider a war criminal for killing Indians and Latinos in the run-up to the Mexican War. To put it mildly, the 2018 presentation left out a little stuff. As I wrote in my opening-day review:
I saw no mention of his massacre of Indians, no mention of his massacre of Latinos, no mention of his being a tax cheat, no mention of his using inside information to get a lucrative land grant and fiddle with its boundaries, little mention of his poor military skills, little mention of his dreadful political skills, no mention of his role as an absentee lawmaker and office-holder, and no mention of his peddling worthless bonds or conviction and prison sentence for fraud. While the exhibit is informative, I think a more accurate title would be “Whitewashing Frémont.”
A week later, I debated a museum curator on “KNPR’s State of Nevada,” an influential weekday public affairs show on Las Vegas public radio station KNPR, and won an admission there were significant omissions in the presented Fremont’s chronology. You can listen to the discussion by clicking here.
Ironically, the Nevada State Museum sits in central Las Vegas at the park-like Springs Preserve. That’s where on May 3, 1844, Fremont likely spent the only night of his life in Las Vegas as part of his Western explorations undermining Mexican sovereignty in the service of Manifest Destiny. That was the gringo-centric, jingonistic U.S. doctrine divinely calling for the Stars and Stripes from sea to shining sea.
In the sole paragraph of his later-published journal mentioning Las Vegas (which means “The Meadows” in Spanish), he said the water was too warm to drink but delightful for bathing. Early the next morning, he and his presumably squeaky-clean soldiers picked up the OST toward Utah and never returned. In case you wonder, the springs dried up by 1962, replaced as a water source by the nearby Hoover Dam.
The museum is open Thursday to Monday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Admission, which includes the museum with the OST exhibition and the Springs Preserve, is $9.95 for locals, $4.95 for their kiddos. As for the OST itself, it’s still possible to hike portions of it in a number of states, including Nevada, and for free.
I should point out that this OST is completely different from another historically overhyped OST. That was the mostly paved auto route fashioned early in the 20th Century running from St. Augustine, Fla., through New Orleans, Houston (where I lived decades before becoming New To Las Vegas), San Antonio, El Paso and Phoenix to San Diego, Calif.
Its backers falsely claimed the route followed the path of “Spanish Conquistadors” 400 years earlier. In fact, the only Spanish don in that time frame who attempted this journey overland, Hernando de Soto, started on Florida’s Gulf Coast near Tampa (not from St. Augustine), took a completely different route–far more inland after heading north–and in 1542 got only as far west as present day East Texas. That’s maybe 1,200 miles shy of San Diego. In any event, at no point did this OST, roughly following today’s Interstate 10, intersect the OST traversing Las Vegas.
In a display headlined, “Conclusion,” the Nevada State Museum exhibition makes the bold claim that its OST had the effect of “enabling trade, settlement and the growth of cities such as … eventually, Las Vegas.” Really? The OST basically had been unused, with Las Vegas unpopulated and laying fallow, for more than a half-century until corrupt Montana mining tycoon William A. Clark decided to build a railroad line from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. He needed the waters of Las Vegas to cool his iron horses and workers to tend them. In 1905 he auctioned off 1,110 lots around his newly built train station in the Mojave Desert, instantly creating Las Vegas and setting it on the path to become the largest U.S. city founded in the 20th century. Clark County, where Vegas sits, is named for him.
That’s what got the growth going here, not cowboys and Indians.