The railroad’s town provided a water distribution system from the Las Vegas Springs, the rights to which it had acquired along with Stewart’s ranch.<\/p>\n
So, when Montana Sen. William A. Clark, owner of the railroad, began advertising the May 15-16, 1905 land auction that would establish Clark’s Las Vegas Townsite on the other side of the freshly built railroad tracks, the thing that stuck out to residents of the O.G. Las Vegas about Clark’s lots was that they all included running water.<\/p>\n
McWilliams got a jump on it, but he didn’t have the water rights, and that’s what destroyed him,” Emmett Gates, a Las Vegas documentary filmmaker, told Casino.org.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAn undated drawing shows the layout of McWilliams\u2019 Las Vegas Townsite. (Image: UNLV Special Collections)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn just a few weeks, McWilliams\u2019 Las Vegas emptied out while Clark’s became today’s downtown.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople with businesses placed the buildings on skids and moved them across the tracks to the Clark side,\u201d Gates said.<\/p>\n
Once Clark\u2019s Las Vegas became the official one, the original fell into almost immediate decline. A fire in September 1905 consumed most of what was left of the town, including the half-built Trocadero.<\/strong><\/p>\nMcWilliams, who refused to relocate, insisted that the blighted area be called \u201cThe Original Las Vegas Townsite,\u201d but no one listened. They were already denigrating it as \u201cRagtown.\u201d Later, its name became Old Town and then the Westside.<\/p>\n
Lost Founder<\/h2>\n In the fall of 1941, McWilliams died of a heart attack at 222 Wilson Ave., before his neighborhood even had paved streets or a sewer system. After his widow also died there in the ’60s, their house was demolished to make way for Interstate 15.<\/p>\nThis marker is located near the corner of West McWilliams Avenue and H Street on McWilliams’ former land. (Image: Michael Kindig)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nToday, the area is known as the Historic Westside, but not because of any particular honor paid the original Las Vegas. Its historicity derives from the Black community that built the neighborhood up after getting herded and trapped there, beginning in 1931, due to the openly racist policies of Las Vegas Mayor Ernie Cragin.<\/p>\n
And so William Clark got all the glory. He receives all the credit for founding Las Vegas. He even got the county in which the city resides named after him.<\/p>\n
All McWilliams got was forgotten. His legacy is JT McWilliams Elementary School and the nearby McWilliams Avenue, on which a sign fronting a vacant lot commemorates his townsite. Mount Charleston, where he owned a second home, also has a McWilliams Campsite.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s absolutely nothing that remains of the McWilliams Townsite,\u201d said Gates, \u201cand historians are the only ones who use that name, because they\u2019re the only ones who remember who McWilliams was.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cLost Vegas\u201d is an occasional\u00a0Casino.org\u00a0series featuring remembrances of Las Vegas\u2019 forgotten history. Click here<\/a>\u00a0to read other entries in the series. Think you know a good Vegas story lost to history? Email corey@casino.org.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Las Vegas wasn\u2019t even the first Las Vegas in Las Vegas.\u00a0A thriving community of 2,000-3,000, also called Las Vegas, was established before the railroad that supposedly built Las Vegas even got there. J.T. (John Thomas) McWilliams — born in Ontario, Canada in 1863 — was a freelance land and water surveyor hired in 1902 by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":312504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81886],"tags":[90046,88401,90049,90043,23,90041,90072,90042,90048,90047,85992,90045,90044],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
LOST VEGAS: The Original Las Vegas That No One Knows About - Casino.org<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n