Big Springs debate resurfaces

Monday, July 27, 1998 | 10:55 a.m.

Big Springs is the birthplace of Las Vegas.

It's not much to look at, sitting behind the fence surrounding the Las Vegas Valley Water District well field. But people flocked to its artesian springs as early as 11,000 years ago.

Some cottonwoods and grasses wave a natural green flag to the south as motorists pass the site south of U.S. 95 between the Valley View Boulevard and Rancho Drive ramps. Many residents don't know this island exists in the urban desert.

But scientists looking at what lurks beneath the surface have made some startling discoveries recently.

Archaeologist Greg Seymour of the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies on the UNLV campus, who was hired to conduct sensitive environmental studies of Big Springs, has found ancient tools at the site.

"This has been a magnet for human beings for the past 5,000 years at least," he said of the watering hole that gave Las Vegas its name. "Las Vegas" in Spanish means "The Meadows."

Seymour found ancient rocks formed when water flowed through caliche, the hardpan deposited across the Las Vegas Valley. Someone chiseled those rocks into tools while wandering near Big Springs.

Although similar tools have been found scattered throughout other places in Southern Nevada, they may have been made at Big Springs, Seymour said. "This is unusual rock, and it may not be found anywhere else in the world," he said.

While the Las Vegas Valley Water District hopes to preserve Big Springs as a park and educational center, the Nevada Department of Transportation is planning an expansion of the U.S. 95 Expressway.

The question is which way to expand the expressway: pave over the springs' creek beds south of the existing highway or bulldoze the 62 homes north of it.

If Big Springs is preserved, it will become the Mojave Desert Preserve, a haven for rare species and for schoolchildren to learn about the city's history.

"Hopefully the springs won't be paved over," said Donald Baepler, director of the Harry Reid Center. "We have so little history, and this is prehistoric as well as historic."

Instead of digging a trench with a backhoe, Seymour uses the least invasive scientific techniques to make the site reveal the ancient and modern people who were drawn the lush springs in the middle of the harsh Mojave Desert.

And Seymour has updated earlier work at the site before it was listed on the National Register of Historical Places in 1979. Archaeologist Claude Warren in 1972 discovered an arrowhead that was dated at 1,400 years old. Seymour, using the latest dating technique, now says the stone point is almost 5,000 years old.

"Who knows what else is buried out there?" he asked.

Biologists made another discovery this spring: Wheat sprouted in the Las Vegas Spring channel after Southern Nevada's wet winter. But there's no wheat in bird seed or other modern sources such as the stalks growing near the creeks, said Kim Zukovsky, environmental planner for the Big Springs project.

"It looks like the historical seeds stayed there and when the right conditions came along, the wheat grew," she said. The springs once fed orchards, fields of alfalfa and hay and vegetable gardens to support the pioneers.

Kent Cooper, NDOT project manager, said the public will have a chance to be heard during September and October. "We are waiting for the environmental studies to be completed," he said.