Exodus Arena: Cashman Field and the (Re)Development of Sports and Recreation in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada

Cashman Field is a minor league sport stadium one-mile north of the world famous “Fremont Street Experience” in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. Minor league sports stadiums are microcosms of their communities, and Cashman Field’s history is Las Vegas’s history. Although the city’s first permanent sports venue, the stadium endured numerous cycles of colonialism, stadium building, successful operation, neglect, decay, and abandonment. Now at the end of another cycle, Cashman Field is being forgotten as Las Vegas transitions into a major league sports town. Sports stadiums reveal the social, cultural, and economic factors that define twentieth-century American history, but Cashman Field’s specific site is too important to Las Vegas’s history to be silenced and erased. The locations was a reliable water source for the Southern Paiutes, center of the local Elks club’s city-promoting Helldorado frontier festival, and home to Las Vegas’s first professional sports teams. Oral histories, newspaper articles, and sporting event attendance figures reveal Cashman Field as an essential site of civic engagement, social interaction, and resistance in Las Vegas’s contested outdoor recreation and sporting landscape