KVIG Informative

The Las Vegas Paiute Tribe’s first golf course opened northwest of Las Vegas in 1995 with a clubhouse that was still just a tent in the desert. Three decades later, the tribe’s own government lists the resort that grew from it as one of three businesses funding health care, education and community programs for its members today.

The Las Vegas Tribe of Paiute Indians of the Las Vegas Indian Colony was recognized as a sovereign nation under the Indian Reorganization Act on June 18, 1934, and operates under a tribal constitution the federal government approved on July 22, 1970, according to the tribe’s own account on the Las Vegas Paiute Golf Resort’s website. The tribe’s trust land traces back to a Dec. 30, 1911, deed from Helen J. Stewart conveying roughly 10 acres in downtown Las Vegas, and to a 1983 act of Congress returning several thousand additional acres at the base of the Spring Mountains — land the tribe calls the Snow Mountain Reservation, according to the tribe’s published history.

It was on tribal land in that same area, about 25 minutes northwest of the Las Vegas Strip, that the tribe built its golf resort. The first course, called Snow Mountain, opened in 1995 as a par-72, 7,158-yard design by Pete Dye, a World Golf Hall of Fame architect, according to the tribe’s own government website. A second course, Sun Mountain, opened in 1997, and a third, The Wolf, followed in 2001; at 7,604 yards, the tribe’s government describes The Wolf as the longest golf course in Nevada. Dye designed all three, and the golf resort’s own website calls the combined 54-hole facility the first master-planned, multi-course golf complex of its kind built on Native American land.

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The resort sits at 10325 Nu-Wav Kaiv Blvd., and the tribe’s government describes the three courses together as spanning 54 holes in the desert between the Spring Mountains and the Sheep Range. The clubhouse that started as a tent in 1995 has since grown into a 50,000-square-foot building that the resort’s own website describes as housing an award-winning restaurant, Nevada’s largest golf shop and a wedding venue booked through 2026.

The tribe’s government lists the golf resort today alongside two other enterprises, the NuWu Cannabis Marketplace and the Tribal Smoke Shop, as the businesses it credits with funding health care, education and community programs for tribal members, according to the tribe’s official website. The same website lists Benny Tso as tribal chairman and Chris Spotted Eagle as vice chairman of the tribal government that oversees those enterprises today.

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None of the tribe’s own published material ties a specific tribal council vote or named official to the decision to build the golf resort, and neither the tribe’s government site nor the resort’s own site gives a construction cost or contractor. What both sources agree on is simpler: a reservation that held nothing but a tent and open desert in 1995 now operates 54 holes of championship golf, a 50,000-square-foot clubhouse and two other retail enterprises, all under tribal ownership.

The same tribe whose trust land was fixed at 10 acres from 1911 until Congress acted in 1983 now runs an economy large enough, by its own account, to pay for its members’ health care and schooling. The tent clubhouse is gone. The land it stood on is still doing work the tribe’s original 10 acres downtown never could.