Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort State Historic Park

This guide to the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort centers on Helen Stewart, widowed in 1884 when a neighbor shot her husband Archibald dead at their desert ranch, leaving her pregnant with their fifth child beside the adobe walls of a fort built by Mormon missionaries in 1855. Rather than sell up and leave, she stayed to work the land with her father, quietly buying water rights and acreage for two decades. Look for the original adobe wall, the last surviving piece of that 1855 fort.