KVIG Informative

A Las Vegas rancher deeded ten acres of her property to the federal government in 1911, placing it in trust for a small band of Southern Paiute people living near the springs that gave the city its name. That same ten-acre parcel, a few blocks north of the Fremont Street Experience, now holds one of Nevada’s first legal cannabis consumption lounges — a line of revenue nobody signing the original deed could have imagined.

Helen J. Stewart deeded 10 acres of her ranch near downtown Las Vegas to the United States on Dec. 30, 1911, to be held in trust for the Southern Paiute people living in the area, according to the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe’s own published history and a finding aid for the original deed held by UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Both sources call the result the Las Vegas Paiute Colony, and UNLV’s finding aid states that the 10-acre parcel remained the tribe’s only communal land for the next seven decades.

The Colony sits near the intersection of North Main Street and Paiute Drive in what is now the heart of downtown Las Vegas, according to a historical marker placed by the city of Las Vegas and Clark County. A federal day school opened on the site in the fall of 1912 but closed within a few months, the marker states.

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The 10-acre Colony remained the tribe’s entire land base until 1983, when Congress added a much larger parcel northwest of the city known as Snow Mountain, according to the tribe’s own history. Both UNLV’s archive and a city historical marker treat the two as legally distinct: the original 1911 site as the Colony, and the 1983 addition as reservation land.

The 1911 parcel is still held in trust for the tribe today, more than a century after Stewart signed it over. It is no longer the quiet settlement it was when the school opened and closed within months in 1912.

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NuWu Cannabis Marketplace, the tribe’s dispensary and consumption lounge, now operates at 1235 Paiute Circle, on the same ground the United States received in trust from Stewart more than a century ago, according to the dispensary’s own location listing. The tribe’s own government lists that marketplace alongside a golf resort and two smoke shops among the enterprises it now runs, according to the tribe’s own published information.

A single 10-acre deed, signed in the last days of 1911, was the only ground Las Vegas’s first Native residents could count on for the next seventy years. It is still theirs, still held in trust, and still generating revenue nobody signing that deed could have imagined — proof that the smallest land claims can outlast the city built up around them.