Las Vegas at night

The Plaza Hotel at sunrise

Driving the full way from Las Cruces to the Springs would have been brutal. We decided on one last stop less than four hours from home, but with enough character to merit a stop. 

There were a number of crossroads with a few old hotels and a bar or restaurant, but many stretches with no lodging anywhere. 

Fortunately, Las Vegas checked all the boxes. I don't mean the Las Vegas everyone knows, but the historic one in northeastern New Mexico. Their shared name, which translates from Spanish as “the meadows,” feels much more applicable to the New Mexico city. New Mexico’s Las Vegas lies along the high plains, 100 miles south of Raton, and just east of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. 

Much of the land to Vegas’ west is protected as the Pecos Wilderness, including the headwaters of the Pecos River and Truchas Peak, New Mexico’s second-highest mountain. 

Las Vegas is a city many have seen but few have heard of. The city has more than a century of movie-making experience, starting with Tom Mix westerns in the 1910s. 

In Easy Rider, the parade scene took place in Las Vegas (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper end up arrested for crashing the parade). 

When U.S. enemies invaded Colorado in the original Red Dawn, Las Vegas became Calumet, “Where the Great Plains Meet the Might Rockies” and where our teenage heroes faced off with the invaders. Most of the buildings used in filming were Vegas originals, and still stand, with the Calumet cowgirl mural still visible. 

 In the TV series Longmire, Vegas plays Absaroka, Wyoming, even if the town plaza is unmistakably New Mexican. New Mexico’s long-running film credit makes it a common stand-in for the rest of the West, with the town’s proximity to the High Plains playing Kansas in Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp. 

These days Vegas might be best known for No Country for Old Men, as it played a major filming site. Rewatching the movie after I returned, I was shocked at how much of Las Vegas appeared in the movie. The city stood in for Texas border towns Eagle Pass and Laredo, with a highway bridge dressed up to look like a U.S.-Mexico border crossing. 

The motor courts on the east edge of town and the historic Plaza Hotel played prominent roles. Dating to 1881, the Plaza Hotel holds reams of history, not just movies. The hotel hosted the first reunion of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in 1901, and Roosevelt announced his run for reelection in 1904 from Vegas. The Plaza doubled its size when its owner bought a defunct department store adjacent to it on the Las Vegas Plaza. 

The hotel was our main reason for stopping here. The historic hotel is still priced reasonably, has a café, a nice bar in the fine-dining restaurant, a coffee bar, and a lobby selling local wares. When you walk in, there stands a staircase where Javier Bardem’s hitman confronts Woody Harrelson’s bounty hunter. Many of the rooms have signs explaining who stayed there during which production, including President Roosevelt, the Coen Brothers, Patrick Swayze, James Woods, and dozens more.  

The rooms were spacious and somewhat spartan (with a 21st century bathroom), but I am not complaining. Historic hotels should emulate their prime era, and the Plaza certainly does. When the Topeka, Atchison and Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1879, Las Vegas took off and the demand for hotels soared. 

After a dinner in the café, we wandered the plaza and the main streets that were mostly deserted on a Sunday evening. A handful of bars and restaurants stayed open. Outside downtown sat Las Vegas’ Carnegie library, the only Carnegie built in New Mexico, and New Mexico Highlands University, a modern-looking university that dates back to 1891. 

We passed the now-closed Western Wear store where Josh Brolin wandered in wearing just a hospital gown and cowboy boots. A slow current drove the Gallinas River, separating the two towns that later merged into Las Vegas. The river broadens on the south end of town; it will join the Pecos River further downstream. 

The plaza was well-lit but empty, just a few carryout customers from the pizza place and people ending Sunday dinner at the Plaza Hotel. A few skittish cats sprinted across the plaza. 

In the sunrise, the pavilion was the domain of pigeons. We came back after a hearty breakfast at Charlie's S'pic & Span (amazing tortillas made onsite), the plaza needed a last look. The hotel’s façade glowed in the chilly but clear morning. A few people walked dogs but it stayed quiet aside from the pigeons. 

 At one end of the plaza stands a plaque attached several pieces of petrified wood. On it is the declaration that Brigadier Gen. Stephen Kearny gave at the Las Vegas Plaza in 1846 at the start of the Mexican-American War, telling the town residents they are now part of the U.S. 

I’ll take the little, historic Las Vegas over the eyesore in the desert any day. Hopefully I’ll take in the little town on the high plains against before too much time slips away.

Tortillas on the line