Las Vegas

The railroad's 1879 arrival split the town in two: the old adobe Plaza on the west side of the river, and East Las Vegas, the railside boomtown that attracted gamblers, gunmen, and drummers. Doc Holliday practiced dentistry here in 1879 and 1880 — his shingle is a matter of record — before moving on to Tombstone and his appointment with the OK Corral. In December 1880 Billy the Kid spent a night in the Las Vegas jail while officers ferried him south to stand trial; the town's respectable citizens, per the accounts, had to be kept from attending to him directly.

In June 1899 Las Vegas hosted the first reunion of the Rough Riders, with Colonel Roosevelt himself in attendance. The Plaza Hotel — the 'Belle of the Southwest,' built in 1882 by Benigno Romero's hotel company — presided over it all, later hosting silent-film producer Romaine Fielding's studio operation and, in the 1960s, the Mama Lucy Gang of machine politicians. Fred Harvey's Castañeda Hotel opened in 1898 a block from the depot; the Montezuma Hotel rose and burned at the hot springs up the canyon.

The outrages had their own ledger. The era's lawlessness ran to vigilante committees and a jail that saw its share of lynchings threatened and occasionally delivered; the town's respectable and criminal registers overlap in ways the files don't pretend to untangle. The Montezuma, for its part, was rebuilt after its 1885 fire, burned again, and now houses the United World College — the castle at the hot springs outlasting every owner who improved it.

The Plaza Hotel's resident is supposedly Byron T. Mills — a former proprietor, sometime mayor, six feet four inches tall by the newspaper accounts, dead in 1947. Room 310 is rented to guests who specifically request it, on the theory that Mills' old office was there. A local investigator's census-work shows the slippage: Mills did live at the hotel in the 1930s and '40s, but in second-floor front rooms, and the ghost story's earliest printed appearance dates to a 1992 article attaching orange-blossom perfume to an unnamed female presence. The record, in other words, supports a haunting less than it supports a good room rate.

Other reports are municipal in scale — figures on the Plaza, and, per the file, the collective listed as the frontier dead. A longtime desk clerk reported a child's voice in the basement coal tunnel calling 'Grandma.' The file notes the reports and the debunkings with equal courtesy.

Some nine hundred buildings stand on the historic register here — more than most cities ten times its size — and the Castañeda reopened in 2019 after a restoration decades in waiting. Room 310 still takes reservations. Whatever walks the Plaza, it walks a town that outlived most of the West it came from.