Q: What was the first hospital in Las Vegas like?
A: It was a tent — a hot, dusty railroad yard tent — but it got the job done, thanks to the man behind it.
Allowing for Southern Paiute shamans and the ailments that early settlers like the Gass and Stewart families dealt with, the first hospital in Las Vegas was not, as some Las Vegans seem to think, the old clinic at 8th Street and Ogden Ave. that Dr. Roy Martin built in 1931. Nor was it the Clark County Indigent Hospital that opened that year on a dirt road now called West Charleston Boulevard.
The first doctor was Halle L. Hewetson, who came here in the employ of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad. Born in Ohio in 1864, Hewetson graduated from the University of Pennsylvania medical program and served in the army before going to work for the Union Pacific Railroad. While the rail line was under construction in 1904, he pitched his tent in the railroad yard and installed four cots for patients. Nothing resembling air conditioning existed, so he followed a couple of general rules that future Las Vegas doctors employed: no surgery unless in case of emergency, and if possible, then only in the early morning hours, the coolest part of the day.
In 1905, with the railroad built, Las Vegas became a townsite. Dr. Hewetson talked his bosses into erecting a wooden building and concentrated on treating railroad workers, while Dr. Roy Martin joined him in town and opened his own clinic. The two doctors often helped each other (including the time Hewetson broke his leg; he set it himself, then Martin accompanied him to Los Angeles for treatment). Hewetson talked the railroad into a better health-care facility for its workers, renting a building with 14 beds, a nursery, an area for indigents and room for Hewetson to live on the ground floor. Today, Hewetson’s legacy lives on in an elementary school named for him (Martin has a middle school), and in his family: His grandson B. Mahlon Brown served for 25 years as a state senator, his great-grandson Mahlon as U.S. attorney, and his great-great-grandson Bert as a municipal judge.