[This is a transcription of a newspaper article from The San Francisco Call, Wednesday, May 18, 1904. For a larger image of the newspaper page, please visit the Library of Congress, Chronicling America project.]
Frederick S. Dellenbaugh established his artistic reputation in Nevada with one painting. "Las Vegas Ranch," executed in 1876, was painted as the artist was resting on his way to a mining camp in Southern California. It has the distinction of being the first known painting of the Las Vegas Valley. Dellenbaugh studied art in New York, Munich, and Paris. However, it is his career as a topographer and writer that is highly regarded to this day.
Below is reprinted with permission from the Nevada Historical Society Quarterly.
Between 1860 and 1879 four major expeditions sponsored by the U.S government surveyed, mapped, and explored a large geographical region west of the Mississippi River.
The Wadsworth and Columbus Freight Road was a 130-mile wagon road connecting Wadsworth on the Central Pacific Railroad to the Columbus Mining District in the deserts of southwestern Nevada. From 1871 to 1882, freight wagons hauled supplies and mining machinery south to the Columbus District's towns and silver mines, and returned loaded with borax from the surrounding salt marshes.
Many visitors to Las Vegas take sightseeing air flights to the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam. What may be surprising is that these flight destinations have been popular since the 1930s.
The San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad, the first direct route from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles when it was completed in 1905, was perhaps the single most significant factor in the creation of what would become the city of Las Vegas, and later, Clark County.
From the beginning, transportation to and from the Truckee Meadows has been a significant theme in the history of Reno. The emigrant trails, stage roads, the Pony Express, and the railroad have all served to bring people and goods through the region. The transcontinental railroad, coming through the area in 1868, represented the most important event in the sputtering creation of Reno.
The North Las Vegas Airport opened as Sky Haven Airport on December 7, 1941. The airport, the creation of John and Florence Murphy and their partner, John Barrett, was celebrating its opening day when news of the air raid on Pearl Harbor came. The scheduled flying demonstration was immediately put on hold as the nation progressed to war.
In January 1936, Nevada Highways and Parks—known today as Nevada Magazine—was introduced by the state highway department. The Silver State was hardly the tourist magnet it is now. Legalized gambling in Nevada was five years old, the population of Las Vegas was less than 8,000, and Hoover Dam was less than a year old. State highway publicist and Nevada Highways and Parks editor Fred Greulich wrote a majority of the articles and collected photos that promoted Nevada's open roads—albeit in black and white.
