Monday, April 1, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
DRIVING AROUND America's newest million-soul metropolis, one of the last things you're going to pick up is a sense of history.
Seems like most everything you see is either brand new or under construction or the future site of the latest, greatest something or other.
Neighborhoods built 20 years ago are considered old in this city. Resorts that don't reinvent themselves every five years are hopelessly passe.
Historic buildings and archaeological sites are bulldozed every day. Historical markers are nonexistent.
Las Vegas, however, does have a history. This city did start somewhere.
But you wouldn't recognize it if you drove over it.
Nevertheless, a stand of cottonwoods and willows just south of the U.S. 95 Expressway and east of the Meadows Mall mark the site where it all began.
Sometime in 1831 or 1832, historians figure, European traders looking for a shortcut on the old Spanish Trail between Santa Fe and Los Angeles happened upon a group of miraculous artesian springs gushing from the desert.
Those springs were later described by Mormon missionary George W. Bean as being 20 to 30 feet in diameter and having "very clear" water.
"... at a depth of two feet," Bean wrote, "the white sand bubbles all over as tho' it was the bottom, but upon wading in there is no foundation there. It has been sounded to a depth of 60 feet, without finding bottom; and a person cannot sink to the armpits on account of the strong upward rush of water."
The journals of many famous explorers and military leaders, including John C. Fremont, record encampments at the springs.
The water from four springs combined into a stream about 5 feet wide and 2 feet deep that flowed eastward into a series of mesquite groves and grassy meadows that eventually gave the city its name.
Those springs, however, began to draw growing numbers of European settlers: first the Mormons, then the miners and ranchers, then the railroad, which immediately bought the springs and their water rights.
Less than 100 years later, the springs, which had provided the water for Anasazi and Paiute Indians for millenia, were gone.
Now, says Michael Johnson, a hydrologist for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the water table is 150 feet down.
The water that fed the springs -- and still feeds Las Vegas Valley Water District wells -- originates from snowmelt in the Spring Mountains to the west, sinks underground in alluvial soils and used to come back to the surface through geological faults.
That system provides a sustainable yield of up to 35,000 acre-feet per year, says Johnson, but people have been pumping more for at least 50 years.
Wells around the valley now pump 62,000 acre-feet a year, he said, though the authority's program to reinject treated water into the basin during the winter months has been "slowing the rate of decline."
But no matter how you stir it, the ancient springs are now bone dry and won't be coming back anytime soon.
These days, the springs area is littered with water extraction equipment, some of which is now old enough to be classified historic.
"Big Springs," for example, is covered by a collapsed wooden platform that was once a settling tank. Old well heads and rusted pump parts abound.
"These springs have always been the focal point for animals and vegetation," Johnson says during a recent tour of the area.
And where there are animals and vegetation -- in other words, food -- you're bound to find people.
In fact, says anthropologist Claude Warren, at least three cultures lived by the springs.
The UNLV professor conducted "some minor testing" back in 1972 when the area was being sized for a suit of freeway concrete. With minimal work he found sites that were inhabited by the Anasazi, a Pueblo-related culture that flourished across the Southwest and lived in the valley from about 4000 B.C. to 1100 A.D.; the Paiutes, who were living here when the Europeans came; and pioneer ranchers, who constructed a crude dugout cabin.
There used to be Indian sites "all over this valley," Warren says, but they're rapidly being destroyed by development.
"There soon won't be many left to worry about," he says resignedly. "There are no preservation laws, except on federal land."
Still, Warren says, there is a good site right there where it all began and he hopes to excavate it one day. He talks, somewhat wistfully, of a park complete with historical displays of the three cultures.
"The whole thing is just sitting there," he says.
All of us newcomers, Warren says, could learn a lot from our desert predecessors.
"You can't appreciate the early adaptations to the desert until you see what these people did," Warren says. "You have to have a great deal of respect for them.
"They adapted to the desert. The Europeans have yet to do that. The Europeans are adapting the desert to them and in the process destroying it."
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