Octavius Decatur Gass

A neglected Las Vegas pioneer

Gass Avenue is a short road in downtown Las Vegas. It is most visible where it crosses Las Vegas Boulevard South, which, a mile or so south of Gass, is better known as the Las Vegas Strip.

The street is named for Octavius Decatur Gass, one of the founding fathers of Las Vegas.

As Las Vegas pioneers go, Helen J. Stewart — the “first lady of Las Vegas” — gets most of the glory, and rightly so, considering the hardships she endured and the era in which she overcame them. But there would have been no first lady of Las Vegas without the earlier efforts of O.D. Gass.

The first residents of Las Vegas were the Southern Paiutes, of course. Then Mormon settlers arrived in 1855. They built a fort and planted crops. But the Mormons, for a variety of reasons, stayed only two years. They abandoned the fort and returned to Utah. In 1865, Gass took over the property and built the Las Vegas Ranch. It took a lot of work to erect buildings and cultivate the fallow fields.

Gass, an Ohio native, came west as a miner. But in Las Vegas he transformed into a farmer and rancher. He grew fruits and vegetables, and had hundreds of cattle grazing on his more than 600 acres. He grew grapes and made wine. He employed more than 30 people, many of them Paiutes. Gass learned the Paiute language. He often played host to weary travelers headed for California. He got involved in politics — Arizona politics. You see, at that time, Las Vegas was part of the Arizona Territory. Gass rose to become speaker of Arizona’s territorial assembly.

Unfortunately, Gass’s good fortune in Las Vegas had a time limit. He didn’t like it when, in 1867, Congress made Las Vegas part of Nevada Territory rather than Arizona. He refused to pay back taxes that Lincoln County claimed he owed, and his bills mounted. Meanwhile, his wife and children were complaining about living in the middle of nowhere, and two of his children had become school-aged in a place with no school.

In 1879, Gass mortgaged his ranch for $5,000 to Archibald Stewart, a businessman from Pioche, 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas. When Gass couldn’t pay his mortgage, he had to give up the ranch to Stewart in 1881. Gass moved to Southern California. He took his cattle with him. His death in 1924 earned only a brief, inaccurate obituary in the Las Vegas Age newspaper.

Stewart and his wife, Helen, decided to move to the Las Vegas Ranch with their children, setting the stage for a more famous Las Vegas origin story.