Sunday, June 12, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

LAS VEGAS HISTORY: Fort is where it really began

Festivities mark 150th anniversary of first permanent white settlement in valley

The Meadows Missionaries re-enact a flag ceremony Saturday at the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort. The original flag, sewn from scraps of linen, flannel and denim in 1855, marked the site where settlers could rest. Photos by Jane Kalinowsky Johanna Jones, left, gets a handmade pioneer doll from Jeanene Oshae at the fort. Jason Coffey shows the Triunfo family how a 19th-century soldier would attach a bayonet to his musket. Robert Grant spins goat hair and fluff into yarn so that his wife, Jenny Kim Grant, can make a belt during Saturday's sesquicentennial celebration at the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort. Members of the Meadows Missionaries re-enact a flag-raising at the fort. The celebration Saturday marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Mormons to the Las Vegas Valley.

A full half-century before the 1905 land auction that was recently commemorated with a birthday cake as big as a basketball court, 30 men arrived here from Salt Lake City to establish the Las Vegas Valley's first permanent white settlement.

Las Vegas attorney Garry Hayes' great-great-grand- uncle was one of those men.

"I actually had a relative here who suffered," said Hayes, a Las Vegas native. "It really makes that connection."

That relative, George Washington Bean, was in his mid-20s when he made the 35-day trek here from Salt Lake City in early summer 1855 to help build what is now known as the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort.

In his journal, he wrote of his arrival: "We reached the water at last, also fine meadow grass. This was the 15th of June, the hottest weather I ever saw."

Hayes and about 2,000 others gathered at the fort Saturday to celebrate its sesquicentennial beneath a makeshift American flag like the one the settlers flew there in 1855.

The flag was raised by historic re-enactors of the Meadows Missionaries and the Soldiers of the Fort, who stood at attention in their period uniforms as the crowd sang the national anthem.

"Today we celebrate this place and the courageous and innovative people who inhabited it," said Nevada State Parks Director David Morrow, who served as master of ceremonies.

The event also served as a dedication for the $1.9 million visitors center at the site, which became a state historic park in 1990.

Morrow thanked the contractors and volunteers for the many hours they worked to get the visitors center open just in time.

"We committed to getting this building done by this date. Up until about 6 o'clock last night, it was touch and go," he said with a chuckle.

For Las Vegas resident William Prescott, portraying an army private in the ceremony took on extra significance. Early next month, Prescott and his Army National Guard unit from St. George, Utah, will begin a yearlong deployment to Iraq.

Roadside bombs aside, Prescott said the modern soldier has a number of advantages over his 19th-century predecessor. For one thing, he won't have to wear a dark blue wool jacket and pants in the Iraqi heat. "And I think MREs are better than hardtack and coffee," he said.

Saturday's event marked the second sesquicentennial celebration at an important Mormon outpost for history buff Joseph Holbart. In 1997, Holbart dressed up as a member of the historic Mormon battalion and marched during the 150th anniversary of Fort Moore in Los Angeles.

"I moved here from Los Angeles and heard about this," he said. "I'm a walk-on."

Holbart's health kept him from marching Saturday, so the 75-year-old stood in the shade of a mesquite tree and watched the flag-raising through the prescription lenses he had specially made for a 140-year-old pair of eyeglasses with gold-wire frames.

Holbart came to the ceremony dressed in a white shirt and pants like those the Mormon settlers might have sewn out of the covers on their wagons at journey's end. He brought along his smooth-bore musket, made for the U.S. Army in 1842.

"I'd never even heard of the Mormons until 1964. Then you hear all about how they settled this whole area," said Holbart, now a member of the church. "It's amazing. We have this great country, and we take it for granted. There was a lot of hardship involved."

The pioneers were sent to the Las Vegas Valley by Mormon leader Brigham Young to establish a way station between Mormon settlements in Utah and California and make friends with American Indians in the area.

Two years later, Young recalled the missionaries and abandoned the site after a dispute among church leaders, but the high-walled fort continued to provide shelter for travelers and U.S. soldiers for decades.

About $4.5 million has been spent so far to preserve the site, and restoration efforts continue.

As a member of the Preservation Association of Clark County for 20 years, Hayes said he has seen the old fort site grow from "less than an acre of land in disrepair" to what it is today.

"We started out basically trying to keep the place from falling apart," he said. "It's been kind of a labor of love."

Now he hopes more people will come to see what amounts to the birthplace of Nevada's largest city.

"I know people who have lived in Las Vegas their whole lives but have never been here," said George Washington Bean's great-great-grandnephew. "That's a tragedy."