PICRYL makes the world's public domain media fun to find and easy to use. PICRYL is an AI-driven search & similarity engine. PICRYL is the largest media source for public domain images, scans, and documents. The World's Largest Public Domain Media Search Engine A combination of local Las Vegas business owners, Mormon financiers, and Mafia crime lords helped develop the casinos and showgirl theaters to entertain the largely male dam construction workers. It created a market for large scale entertainment. Work started and Las Vegas' population swelled to 25,000, with most of the newcomers, mostly males, working on building the dam. On July 3, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed the appropriation bill for the Boulder Dam later renamed the Hoover Dam.
On May 15, 1905, Las Vegas officially was founded as a city, when 110 acres (45 ha), in what would later become downtown, were auctioned to ready buyers. At that time, several parts of the valley contained artesian wells surrounded by extensive green areas. The name Las Vegas was given to the area in 1829 by a Mexican scout named Richard, a member of the Antonio Armijo trading party that was traveling to Los Angeles, and stopped for water there.
