Contact
Subscribe
Feb 2007 Issue
by Fred E. Woods
Las Vegas, Nevada! Gambling Mecca of the world. This is the Vegas the world knows.
But scroll back the years to 1855. Who took the first gamble in the desert?
None other than ‘the American Moses,’ Brigham Young. This was a gamble unlike any other. The only wager involved was that thirty men would be willing to leave their families, homes and livelihoods to build a settlement that would serve as a way station along the Mormon Corridor and a way to bring Christianity to the Native Americans.
In the spring of 1855 during general conference in Salt Lake City, Young surprised a group of men in the congregation by designating their names to serve a mission to Las Vegas. This call necessitated 450 arduous travel miles to an arid and barren wasteland mottled with scorpions, snakes and hostile Indians.
How did the men handle the desert obstacles? What of their families which were left behind? How did the local Native Americans receive them? What did the mission accomplish? These questions and more are examined in this captivating work.
Today, with a towering temple and over 100,000 Latter-day Saints living in the Las Vegas region, we are compelled to draw the conclusion that Brigham’s gamble in the desert indeed paid off.
A Gamble in the Desert follows the trials and challenges of the first Mormon pioneers to the Vegas desert and tells a remarkable story that has remained in relative obscurity until 2005, which marked the centennial anniversary of Las Vegas and the sesquicentennial of the Mormon mission.
