Why were settlements started in places like Vegas and Pheonix if they weren’t connected to a river that connected to the ocean like the Mississippi River for trade and had no viable farmland?
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r/explainlikeimfive should really be renamed to “My original understanding of my question was wrong”.
99% of questions here have false premises. Just do a Google search before asking.
Let’s talk about Las Vegas. First, in Spanish the name translates to The Meadows. Why would Las Vegas have a name like that? Well it used to have a spring that allowed a meadow to grow. Should you ever go visit Las Vegas, the original meadow area is now a park.
Phoenix has (or at least had, or occasionally has) rivers, and people have lived near them for thousands of years. Indigenous people in the Southwest and other parts of the Americas were quite skilled at irrigation techniques. Nothing like the Mississippi, but what is?
Phoenix also gets a lot more rain than you’d think, and hasn’t been as consistently hot as it is these days. It’s always been hot, yes, but not just global warming but the insane heat island the city creates is not necessarily the natural state of things. Drive from downtown Phoenix to another part of the valley that’s less urbanized, especially at night. You might be shocked at the temperature difference.
Vegas has a mound you can visit that shows how there was originally groundwater there (could still be) and that’s why people stayed there.
The Salt River used to have water in it when Phoenix was established, Phoenix is at the site where the Salt and Gila rivers converged. It wasn’t until the Salt Project built a series of dams upriver that the Salt River ran dry all year round.
Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix, was established as Hayden’s Ferry, and was a ferry that operated on the Salt River at the same time.
Vegas has a mound you can visit that shows how there was originally groundwater there (could still be) and that’s why people stayed there.
r/explainlikeimfive should really be renamed to “My original understanding of my question was wrong”.
99% of questions here have false premises. Just do a Google search before asking.
Let’s talk about Las Vegas. First, in Spanish the name translates to The Meadows. Why would Las Vegas have a name like that? Well it used to have a spring that allowed a meadow to grow. Should you ever go visit Las Vegas, the original meadow area is now a park.
Let’s talk about Las Vegas. First, in Spanish the name translates to The Meadows. Why would Las Vegas have a name like that? Well it used to have a spring that allowed a meadow to grow. Should you ever go visit Las Vegas, the original meadow area is now a park.
Both started out with a small amount of water – neither exactly have the Mississippi flowing past, but Phoenix had the Girls river, and Vegas had springs that provided enough water to sustain small settlements.
Those settlements didn’t really offer a huge amount on their own, but they do provide support and stopping points for travel routes and hubs for the industries nearby like silver mining in the Phoenix area.
Back in the day this left them fairly limited – no big employers to cause a population boom, pretty inhospitable weather, and limited resources.
Skip forwards to today and we now have the ability to bring in water over long distances to support them, air conditioning to make the heat livable (and enjoyable to many now that you can easily escape it when necessary), and industries like gambling, tech and other non-physical industries that have provided work.
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