Hull and architect Wayne McAllister gave the desert a new language: wagon-wheel chandeliers, cowhide curtains, deer heads on the walls, and a glittering swimming pool pushed right up against the highway so no motorist could miss it. The windmill that rose above the property wasn’t pumping water—it hid the air-conditioning equipment, its blades outlined in neon so drivers could see it at night. Staff were ordered into cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats. “Howdy, Pardner” became the official greeting. The place was an instant sensation. Highway 91 jammed up on opening night.
Not to be outdone, Texas theater owner R.E. Griffith and his architect nephew William Moore bought the old Pair-O-Dice land from McAfee for $35,000 and built the Last Frontier. Their slogan said everything: “The Early West in Modern Splendor.”
They went all in. Navajo artisans from New Mexico laid sandstone. The lobby displayed rifles, a moose head, mountain lions, and two hundred pairs of longhorn steer horns—some five feet across. Beds had horns over the headboards. Stagecoaches met guests at the airport. Moonlight horseback rides left from Moore’s own thirty-horse stable. They even created a full Western village stocked with 900 tons of artifacts from ghost towns—trains, a Chinese temple, an old jail, and life-size papier-mâché characters named Flat Rack Jack, Sheriff Bill McGee, and Sit-too-Long.
And right there on the property they placed a little redwood church, scaled down from a Gold Rush chapel in California. The Little Church of the West still stands today—the only structure from that original Wild West phase that remains, and one of the most famous wedding chapels in Las Vegas.
These men weren’t preserving history. They were manufacturing it. False fronts. Movie-set streets. A cowboy gas station marked “1856.” They understood something fundamental about this desert: if the story is spectacular enough, people will believe it—and they will come.
