Las Vegases in Nevada and New Mexico sometimes get mixed up — online

The Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, is still in use. It was built in 1882. (Courtesy)

The "Calumet Says Howdy" sign in Las Vegas, New Mexico, is a remnant of the 1984 movie "Red Dawn," which was filmed in the area. The film took place in the fictional town of Calumet, Colorado. (Courtesy)

Las Vegas is packed with tourists in the summer, is the filming location for iconic movies and gets about 80 inches of snow each year.

Las Vegas, New Mexico, that is.

“There’s nothing like the Strip here,” said Lee Einer, the public information officer for New Mexico’s Las Vegas, about two hours northeast of Albuquerque. “Our nightlife is relatively sedate.

“I have a (motorcycle) cruiser and I love to take day trips from here. There are a couple of great lakes nearby. Taos isn’t too far. There’s scenery and great twisty mountain roads that are great to take on a bike.”

The city in New Mexico was established by a Mexican land grant in 1835. New Mexico’s city has a valid claim to being the first Las Vegas in the country, predating Nevada’s by 70 years. The Nevada city was briefly called “Los Vegas” in an attempt to avoid confusion.

Locals in Las Vegas, New Mexico, have heard stories about tourists arriving looking for bright lights, gaming, showgirls and the Strip, but they say it’s rare. It’s unlikely anyone who gets there is going to confuse the small city 700 miles east of Nevada with the bustle and glow of the Strip, but online frequently people mix the two up.

“I get emails all of the time from people complaining about something the Las Vegas, Nevada, government has done,” Einer said. “They’ll email me to complain about garbage pickup or telling me that they saw a city employee driving while on their cellphone.”

Mix-ups locally are more likely to come from someone unexpectedly encountering a film set. The town has been used as the backdrop for films since Western movie star Tom Mix was filming there a century ago. Parts of “Easy Rider,” “Red Dawn,” “Convoy” and “All the Pretty Horses” have been filmed in the town near where the Sangre de Cristo Mountains meet the Great Plains. The final season of the A&E drama “Longmire” is being filmed there.

“When ‘No Country for Old Men’ was being filmed here, they converted the overpass over I-25 into the Mexican-American border,” Einer said. “They put a border check halfway across the overpass and had signage pointing to Mexico. We had a number of tourists passing through that were completely perplexed.”

Hollywood comes to Las Vegas, New Mexico, for the wide variety of landscapes in the area and the wide range of architecture, including streets that look like they have been frozen in time. The old Spanish plaza still has rings embedded in the sidewalk for people to tie their horses to.

“When the railroad came through, it brought a lot of people from back East with their own idea of what a house should look like,” Einer said. “Alongside all of the adobe construction that was already here, we got plantation homes, tons of gingerbread Victorian houses and Arts and Crafts homes. Those many styles of homes started to collide and form odd hybrids here. This is really a mecca for people with an interest in architecture.”

More than 900 buildings in the city of about 13,600 residents are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of the highest numbers per capita in the country. The city suffered economic challenges in the mid-20th century that ensured many of the structures weren’t lost to redevelopment. The city’s 2010 Downtown Action Plan noted, “So many of these historic buildings are still standing here because no one had the money to tear them down.”

The old town was built on the west side of Gallinas Creek. The railroad built a town a mile east on the other side of the creek. The two towns weren’t merged until the 1970s.

Although Las Vegas started as a sleepy village, when the railroad came to town in 1879 it became one of the roughest towns in the country, with gunslingers and desperados such as Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Mysterious Dave Mather spending time there. Doc Holliday and his girlfriend, Big Nose Kate, lived there for about a year. The first law presence in the town was Hoodoo Brown and the Dodge City Gang.

“He was a gunslinger and his gang was his deputies,” said Michael Rebman, museum specialist at the City of Las Vegas Museum and Rough Rider Memorial Collection. “They enforced the law by day and robbed wagons at night.”

Without a real legal system or lawmen, the populace took the law into its own hands.

“In the town plaza there was a windmill that was used to draw water for the livestock,” Rebman said. “By the time the railroad showed up, the well had run dry and they didn’t need it, but it was the perfect place for hanging outlaws. Locals would break into the city jail at night and grab the gunslingers, murderers and drunks and hang them from the windmill. When the windmill was replaced by a gazebo, they hung the outlaws from the railroad bridge.”

Las Vegas is no longer a rough-and-tumble frontier town, although you can still catch a train to it, as long as you’re willing to drive 110 miles down from Nevada’s Las Vegas to the Amtrak station in Needles, Calif. There are plenty of places to stay, including historic hotels and bed and breakfasts. Just don’t go looking for showgirls, gaming or late-night entertainment.

“We’re the Las Vegas you’ve never heard of,” Einer said. “But please, come visit us sometime. I think you’ll like it here.”

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor, email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.