Clark County History
Clark County wasn’t always Clark County. It was first the sacred, ancestral lands of the Southern Paiute, and an important travel corridor for the Anasazi and Yuman peoples. Archaeologists found evidence in the Tule Springs Preserve that humans were in the area of southern Nevada as early as 10,000 years ago.

The southern Nevada Paiutes were a mobile people. They hunted, gathered, and made their settlements near water sources. In the desert, this is vital to survival, and available water is the only reason that the Las Vegas Valley is as populated as it is today.

In fact, water piped from nearby wells in the Las Vegas area helped the city grow from a railroad stopover/watering hole, into the buzzing metropolis that it is today.

Some of the first non-Indigenous people to visit the area were explorers, (overland from Mexico), and American beaver trappers who sold the pelts of their harvest. By 1855, the Mormon Church had arrived in the area and built its first Mission, but later abandoned the area because life on the desert frontier was more unforgiving than normal.

The American Westward Expansion reinvigorated interest in the area, and backed with governmental support, enterprising settlers moved to the area again—successfully this time—and picked up where previous efforts in irrigation had left off.

The Las Vegas Valley played an important role geographically. It was in between the Mormon settlements in the cities of Salt Lake and Los Angeles and was also an important water stop along the Spanish Trail for those trading goods between Santa Fe and California. Many would-be miners stopped in the fledgling city of Las Vegas on their way to strike it rich in the goldfields, too. A gamble they wouldn’t soon forget.

By 1902, the Santa Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake railroads had begun to stretch across the Las Vegas Valley, unlocking what was once a remote desert outpost. In 1909, Clark County was created to manage the rapidly-swelling population of the area. The county was created from land in Lincoln County and encompassed an area all the way down to the tip of Nevada.

William Andrews Clark

Clark County is named after a famous William Clark, and it's not the world-renowned explorer and Governor of the Missouri Territory. It’s the other important William A. Clark, a Montana Senator, copper magnate, and one of the founders of the City of Las Vegas.

Clark, along with another Senator from Utah, Thomas Kearns, ensured that the railroad made it to Las Vegas, and because of this early economic infusion, the town (and county) has grown ceaselessly to this day. Clark County was named for him in honor of his efforts.

However, W. A. Clark went on to become one of the richest American men of all time, amassing a mining fortune so large it would have been billions in today’s money. He didn’t have a lot of friends or admirers though, so although money can buy a lot of things, it can’t buy what they end up saying about you in the history books…