Moapa Valley

The Muddy River is a rare thing in this desert—a perennial stream—and it has drawn people for two thousand years. Ancestral Puebloan farmers worked its floodplain until about 1150, and the fur trapper Jedediah Smith passed through in 1826. In the 1860s, Brigham Young sent Mormon pioneers to settle the valley and raise cotton during the Civil War. The government established the Moapa River Indian Reservation here in 1873, home today to the Moapa Band of Paiutes. The valley still farms the river's water, wedged between Lake Mead and the red sandstone of Valley of Fire.

What the plaque says

Rich in prehistoric, pueblo-type culture, and noted by the explorer Jedediah Smith in 1826, Moapa Valley is crossed by the Old Spanish Trail. In 1865 Brigham Young sent 75 families to settle the area, to grow cotton for the people of Utah, and to connect Utah with the Pacific Ocean via the Colorado River. Located near the junction of the Muddy and Virgin Rivers,and now under Lake Mead, the "Cotton Mission" was named St. Thomas for its leader, Thomas Smith. A prosperous, self-contained agriculture was built up in the valley, which included orchards, vineyards, cotton, grains and vegetables. The December, 1870 survey placed the valley in Nevada and because Nevada taxes were greater than those of Utah, the settlers, now including those in St. Joseph, (Old) Overton, West Point and Logandale, began leaving two months later. They left the results of seven years of labor, more than 18 miles of irrigation canal and several hundred acres of cleared land. Other Mormons resettled the land in 1880. The area remains one of the most agriculturally productive in the state.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lost City Museum — 7.0 mi
  The Ancestral Puebloan metropolis Lake Mead drowned — and the museum that saved what it could
• Valley of Fire State Park — 11 mi
  Jurassic sand dunes turned to blazing red stone — Nevada's oldest and largest state park

More markers nearby

• Pueblo Grande De Nevada — 8.8 mi
• Nevada’s First State Park — 14 mi
• Arrowhead Trail (1914- 1924) — 14 mi
• Old Spanish Trail (The Journey of the Dead Man) — 18 mi