| William Andrews Clark
1839-1925
Our county is named after a wealthy U.S. Senator from
Montana. William Andrews Clark was born in Pennsylvania in 1839, the son
of Scotch-Irish parents. When he was 17, the family moved to Iowa as homesteaders.
Clark served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, but by 1862,
he was out of the army and starting to mine in Colorado and Montana.
Clark took the money he made from mining and invested
it in buying and selling food and other supplies to miners. With that
money, he bought a mill and made a fortune milling the ore of other miners.
A railroad in Las Vegas
After he was elected a U.S. Senator in Montana, Clark and his younger
brother, J. Ross Clark, bought a new railroad. Clark envisioned a railroad
that would connect Southern California to Utah. Las Vegas was a good place
for a train depot because it was a half-way point between the two states.
It allowed the workers to change crews and service the trains between
Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.
Clark meets Stewart
Clark needed water to make his project work but, in the middle of the
desert water can be hard to find. He discovered that a woman named
Helen J. Stewart owned most of the land and water in the area. Clark's
railroad company bought Stewart's 1,800-acre ranch and the rights to the
water on the land for $55,000 in 1902.
The railroad was a success. After it opened, the railroad
company held an auction to sell land in the area to people who wanted
to build homes and businesses near the train station. That auction, held
on May 15, 1905, is famous for being the
day that Las Vegas became a town site.
A few years after the auction, Las Vegas
was given its own county. The people decided to name their new county
after Clark. |
