Published February 9, 2005. Reprinted with permission from the Deseret Morning News.

'Centennial' 150 years in the making
Lee Benson, Deseret Morning News

The advertising flier that arrived in Monday's mail was from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

"Let Las Vegas' Centennial Celebration Begin!" it began.

What followed were details of plans to commemorate 100 years since Las Vegas was incorporated as a city on May 15, 1905.

Since this is an event "100 years in the making" and since this is Las Vegas we're talking about, the celebrating will last the entire year. They're going to party like it's 1999, and 1998, and 1997. . .

What's not to toast? The Boulder Dam in 1928, legalized gambling and quickie divorces in 1931, Bugsy Siegel opening the Flamingo Hotel in 1946, the Rat Pack at the Sands in 1960, Elvis and Priscilla at the Aladdin in 1967, Evel Knievel at Caesars Palace in 1973, the opening of The Mirage in 1989.

Apt to get lost in the shuffle, however, is the real beginning of Las Vegas.

The Mormons in 1855.

Few humans alive know the story better than Fred Woods. Fred is a professor of church history and doctrine at BYU who has paid particular attention over the years to researching the first permanent white settlement established at Las Vegas — when Brigham Young sent 30 Mormon men on a mission in the spring of 1855 to what was then called Las Vegas springs.

The city was started a hundred years ago, but the Mormons were there 50 years earlier," says Fred. "Not only is this year a centennial anniversary for Las Vegas, it's a sesquicentennial."

To commemorate the sesquicentennial, Fred is putting the finishing touches on his book, "A Gamble in the Desert: the Mormon Mission in Las Vegas (1855-1857)." The seven-chapter book is scheduled to be published by the Mormon Historic Sites Foundation (www.mormonhistoricsitesfoundation.org) later this spring and will go into great detail about the attempt by leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to install a way station on the "Mormon Corridor" between Salt Lake City and the Pacific Ocean.

Las Vegas — Spanish for "the meadows" — offered the first water supply after a watering hole in southern Utah known as the muddy. Early Spanish explorers termed the 52 miles between the muddy and Vegas jornada del muerte, or "journey of death."

Some people still call it that — in memory of their wallets.

Anyway, Brigham Young wanted to do something about the lack of travelers' services back then, so he sent the 30 men from LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City in 1855, followed the next year by women and children.

At its height, the Las Vegas Mission had a population of 103.

It turned out to be a two-year mission — standard procedure these days, but the plan in 1855 was for much longer duration. The problem, as Fred Woods' research reveals, was a power struggle between two LDS leaders, William Bringhurst and Nathaniel Jones. Some folks sided with Bringhurst, some with Jones, and soon enough the house divided against itself fell.

This history is little-known because what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

In 1857, the Mormon mission was abandoned, leaving a partially finished adobe fort that a homesteader named Octavius Decatur Gass later fixed up and turned into a ranch that turned into downtown Las Vegas.

It was the coming of the railroad that finally brought about city incorporation papers in 1905. They were signed at a site no more than a long throw of the dice from the original Mormon mission.