Mormon settlers abandon the Las Vegas Valley…
1857 CE
Two years earlier, William Bringhurst had led a group of twenty-nine Mormon missionaries from Utah to the Las Vegas Valley in present Nevada.
When the Mormons created the State of Deseret in 1847, they had laid claim to all of Nevada within the Great Basin and the Colorado watershed.
The missionaries have built a one hundred and fifty-square-foot (fourteen square meters) adobe fort near a creek and use flood irrigation to water their crops (a process still used at the site today).
However, because of tensions rising between leaders of the small Mormon community, the summer heat and difficulty growing crops, the missionaries return to Utah, abandoning the fort.