A room at the Nevada Club Inn nowadays runs about $44 a night.  150 years ago, $44 was the price of a steamboat ticket for a trip along the Colorado River from the Gulf of California to Hardyville, the first County Seat of Mohave County, now Bullhead City, which takes its name from the appearance of a large rock that was visible in the Colorado River before Davis Dam turned it into Lake Mohave.

     The Nevada Club Inn takes its name from the Nevada Club in Laughlin, originally called the Bobcat, which opened in 1967 and was only the second casino there, right after the Riverside in 1966.  Odie Lopp, a friend of Don Laughlin, bought the Bobcat, renamed it the Nevada Club and operated it from 1970 to 1975, when it was closed briefly.  John Jenkins next bought it in 1976, and then Del Webb bought in 1978, along with the Raintree Inn in Bullhead City, which was to serve as the Nugget’s hotel for many years after that because the Nevada Club had no hotel of its own - only a few dozen rooms above the casino. Thus the Raintree Inn became the Nevada Club Inn and for the next 27 years “NCI” was a department of the casino.

      In 1988, Steve Wynn bought Del Webb’s Nevada Club for $40 million.  At the same time he acquired the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, and changed the Nevada Club to the Golden Nugget Laughlin.  The Nevada Club Inn was included in the package but its name was not changed and it kept the logo. Steve Wynn planned to put a hotel tower next to the casino but groundwater was found too close to the surface and the tower could not be built. The original architectural rendering of the tower shown below remains at the Nevada Club Inn.

     In 1992, a 300 room hotel was added to the Golden Nugget, and NCI became a satellite which served to house the Nugget’s employees, entertainers and tour bus drivers.  In 2004, the Golden Nugget was up for sale again, but the buyer didn’t want NCI so the Golden Nugget sold it to a group that owned the hotel adjacent to NCI, the River Valley Suites. As it turned out, the deal to buy the Nugget fell through and instead, Landry’s Restaurants acquired the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas and Laughlin in 2005 for a reported $245 million.

     Since 2005, the new owners of the Nevada Club Inn have renovated NCI, refaced its huge sign - retaining the original logo, resurfaced the tennis court, remodeled the interior and landscaped its hillside.  Keeping the connection with the Golden Nugget alive, NCI still houses a few of the Nugget’s employees as well as a few entertainers and tour bus drivers on occasion.  Mostly, however, NCI now serves the public as “The Heart of Old Bullhead” and the finest hotel in the area. Being a block off the highway, it often goes unnoticed, but as the new billboard at 4th and Highway 95 reads, the Nevada Club Inn has: “The nicest hotel, the best amenities, the lowest price, you could not ask for more.”

NEVADA CLUB CASINO CHIPS AND MEMORABILIA

THE DON LAUGHLIN ERA

      As early as 1903, the US government began considering a dam project at Pyramid Canyon, but it was not until almost 40 years later that construction began and, due to the interruption of World War II, it was not until 1953 that Davis Dam was completed. Original Bullhead City, which began near where the Nevada Club Inn is, was developed to house the construction workers during that period. Then it languished for the next decade after the dam was finished and the crews left.

     Don Laughlin was about 33 when he came to the tri-state area from Las Vegas and found a boarded up eight room motel on the Nevada side, then called South Pointe, which he bought for $235,000 with $35,000 down, in 1964. As a kid in Minnesota, as the story goes, he made money trapping muskrat and mink; and as a teenager he placed slot machines in bars and got a share of the revenues, which he later parlayed when he bought the 101 Club in Las Vegas. With the opening of the Riverside Resort in 1966, Don hit the jackpot, and soon began ferrying gamblers across the river. The Riverside began with four rooms to rent - the other four housed his family - a dozen slot machines and two blackjack tables. Over the years, over 1000 rooms and thousands of slot machines were added, and his success spawned a casino building boom in the 1980’s - nearly all of which had their own ferries and docks before the bridge was built - and now there are a dozen casinos in Laughlin employing more than 13,000 people and hosting millions of people each year. Don is in his late 70’s, but he still makes his home at the Riverside and although he moves a little more slowly nowadays, he still runs the busiest casino in town.

      In 1984, Bullhead was incorporated as a city and in 2004, the 11,000 acre Laughlin Ranch began selling golf course homes in the foothills to the east and was soon annexed by the City, which now has a population of over 50,000.

HISTORICAL AND AREA ATTRACTIONS

     Just a few miles to the west of Laughlin along Hwy 163 is Spirit Mountain, a sacred place to the Indians, where ancient petro glyphs survive and boulders stand on their own as if they were alive.

     A little farther to the south is the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge, which has a sprawling shallow lake and surrounding marsh, and is a wonderful place for boating and fishing.  Just watch out for giant wild boar and other wildlife along the shores.  From there it is less than an hour’s drive to Lake Havasu, for those who need to see the imported history of the London Bridge.
 

     100,000 years ago, the Mohave Valley was lush with vegetation but climate changes gradually transformed it into a desert, which is now among the nation's hottest spots in the summer. During the rest of the year, however, the temperature average is an ideal 76°.

TO BE CONTINUED

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