Secret owner of the lost ranch at Pine Creek

Three quarters of a mile off the Scenic Loop in Red Rock Canyon National Recreation Area, hikers come across the remains of a structure, which today is not on the map. A concrete basement foundation of a home suddenly appears in a clearing, as the trail meets Pine Creek, in the afternoon shadow of the massive cliffs of Mount Wilson and Bridge Mountain.

Most barely notice the ruin, if at all. Understandable, considering the breathtaking beauty of it's surroundings. Close enough to the tremendous, brilliantly colored sandstone bluffs to make you feel like you can reach out and touch them; pristine Pine Creek, a glistening ribbon winding through a green valley toward you, her clear, trickling pools creating the southern border of the property; a meadow providing a stunning view of the mountains and the Pine Creek Canyon dividing them. This is the Wilson homesite.

Interactive map to the site:

The history books have little to say about the place, with one notable exception published by the Friends of Red Rock Canyon in 2015: Seekers, Saints & Scoundrels, which I highly recommend.

A family named Bearden settled the place in the early years of the 20th century, but soon left for the conveniences of town. Mr. and Mrs. Horace Wilson came to the area from Indiana, and took over the homestead around 1920. They were the last full time residents of the property, and are often the only ones mentioned in connection to it. They moved from the ranch to the conveniences of Las Vegas in 1933. The property burned down not long after.

Seekers is among the few accounts which did not miss the involvement of the the Hunt family at the property, as millionaire Leigh S. J. Hunt is said to have acquired the place in 1929 from the Wilsons, using it as a weekend lodge, until he died in 1933. But there was much more to the Hunt story than initially meets the eye.

Leigh S. J. Hunt was a globetrotting empire builder of the industrial age, with few to rival his story. Like the Wilsons, he was from Indiana, where he was born in 1855. The eldest of ten children, he grew up farming. Unlike his nine siblings, he had in common with his father a voracious appetite to read and to learn. Educated by correspondence course, he obtained a college degree and became the President of Iowa Agricultural College, now Iowa State University, before he was 30. He married a diminutive, yet formidable graduate student named Jessie Noble. They had a son, Henry Leigh Hunt, in 1886.

Finding academia too slow, Hunt soon started his own lecture series, before heading west to make his fortune. In Los Angeles he learned of the wilds of Seattle, moving there in 1885. He formed a bank, railroads, mines. Befriending a Scotsman named Peter Kirk, the two founded a smelting town across Lake Washington: Kirkland. Leigh bought and expanded the Seattle Post Intelligencer. He built a tremendous estate at Yarrow, on Lake Washington and on the adjacent peninsula now called Hunt's Point. Leigh S. J. Hunt was the wealthiest man in Seattle, until he lost it all, in the Panic of 1893.

Undeterred, he continued west, across the Pacific. So far west, it was east - Shanghai. He made a deal with the King of Corea (Korea) to build a railroad from Pyongyang to the coast, but swapped that license for a mining concession, owned by frustrated Americans who had been unable to build their imported stamp mill. The machinery had been rusting in the wilderness near the Manchurian border. Hunt hiked to the site alone, where there were no roads, 400 miles into the interior. An uncanny ability to relate to other cultures brought Hunt success where his predecessors saw only savages. He built the original tunnel mine and stamp mill planned, then grew it ten fold.

By 1902 he had made another fortune in gold, and went down in history when he famously returned to Seattle, surprising all of his former investors there with repayment in full. But his health then demanded a dry climate, so he sold most of his stake in his Oriental Consolidated Mining Company, and headed to Soudan (The Sudan).

Hunt partnered with Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute to hire managers who were former slave cotton farmers, while employing the expertise of the dynastic French botanists Henri and Philippe de Vilmorin, creating, on the banks of the upper Nile, Egyptian Long Staple Cotton. Another pioneering fortune made.

It was the Sennar Dam construction, on the fork of the blue Nile, that drew Hunt's attention to the era of the Dam. His wife's cousin, Herbert Hoover, stopped in to tell him about another dam project planned for the American West. Thus it was the Boulder Canyon Project that brought Leigh S. J. Hunt to Las Vegas. He was convinced that the water and power produced by what would become Hoover Dam, combined with the demand for the comfort and health of desert living, would lead the tiny town of Las Vegas to becoming the resort destination of the world.

Hunt arrived in Las Vegas in 1922, and hit the ground promoting. He assembled a 'who's who' of his long list of global, swashbuckling investors to buy up land along what was then called highway 91. Their syndicate acquired over 4,000 acres. He began to attract major hoteliers to consider resort construction in Las Vegas. His son, by then successful in Brazil, joined Leigh in Las Vegas. Henry introduced his parents to his wife, Louise de Vilmorin, daughter of the Paris seed king Philippe de Vilmorin and later a famous author and poetess. It was 1925, and the Hunts were the largest land owners in Las Vegas, well on their way to landing developers.

Then in 1929, Leigh Hunt's cash vanished overnight in the great crash of the American stock market. He was instantly a "land poor" millionaire.

Leigh S. J. Hunt had a stellar reputation as nothing but a man the most upstanding character. Often described in history books as a promotor, the man took greater risks than any investor who followed him. He always went first, and they knew it. They considered him more than a business associate, he was their leader. None doubted his intent, nor the ferocity with which he would fight for them. As Hunt faced the potential of another bankruptcy, his oldest believer, the only man said to have addressed him by his first name, his biggest investor in Las Vegas holdings and oldest, most loyal friend, would not be dissuaded from stepping in.

Partly because these men of vast wealth and connections had disdain for the public eye, most historical accounts of the area speak little of Leigh S. J. Hunt. Even less so of his low-profile rescuer at the outset of the great depression. Quietly into Las Vegas from Paris, flew Harry Fessenden Meserve.

Descendent of a Lieutenant aboard the brigadier Satisfaction in the American Revolutionary War, Yale class of 1888, Meserve had moved to Seattle just a few years after Hunt, where the two became friends. Meserve would sign on as manager of Hunt's Mercantile Bank, later joining the empire builder in Korea and managing the Unsan mines. Oriental Consolidated Mining would ultimately pull over $30 million ($900 million in 2021 dollars) in gold and quartz out of what is now North Korea. Meserve remained there for years after hunt had moved to the Sudan, occupying the tremendous home Hunt had built there, and continuing to manage operations.

From the Sudan, Meserve returned to New York to begin the international banking division of National City Bank of New York. With help from Hunt's son Henry, he had opened the first US bank ever established on foreign soil, in Rio de Janeiro, 1915. Next he opened three branches in Russia, and famously made the massive American bank loans to Czar Nicholas II, as the US tried to prop up the Czarist regime. Were it not for Meserve's close relationships to the Czar's foreign minister, and the American Red Cross, he and his daughter would likely not have escaped being pinned down in the basement of the National Hotel in Moscow, as its top floor was shelled to cinders. They had narrowly evaded as the Bolshevik Revolution as troops advanced, fleeing to the east, via the trans-Siberian railroad, then made Paris their home.

Meserve provided the necessary cash to keep the Hunt operations rolling. Investors were still possible despite the depression, and if anyone could convince them, Meserve knew that man was Leigh S. J. Hunt. Harry felt that Leigh needed a place to take investors out of the tiny town of Las Vegas, where there were no decent hotels, to make his best pitch. He needed a lodge.

It isn't known if Leigh Hunt and Horace Wilson were friends from Indiana, or became acquainted later, but it is clear that Hunt approached Wilson and agreed to purchase the Wilson's ranch in 1929. It was also agreed that Wilson would remain as caretaker of the property, allowing him to continue working the small farm there. Wilson added a large, panoramic patio for the new owner. Leigh went back to work promoting what would become known as the Las Vegas Strip. He had his lodge, and a deed to prove it, bearing the name of the new owner: Harry Fessenden Meserve.

And so Leigh S. J. Hunt was never the owner of the Wilson homestead. The owner, during all the Hunt years, was always Meserve. His old friend never told a soul.

The international empire builder died in Las Vegas at his office in 1933. He was 78. Jessie Noble Hunt executed his last wish, spreading the ashes of her husband in the center of the lake near the Dam he promoted for years as the coming harbinger of the resort corridor of the world. Leigh S. J. Hunt is interred at Lake Mead.

Jessie lived to the age of of 98 in Las Vegas. Her son distributed her ashes at Yarrow, her favorite home on Lake Washington, in 1960.

Harry Fessenden Meserve returned to Paris and his daughter, the stunning Lascelle Meserve, giving her hand in marriage to the Count Nicholas de Basily, last Foreign Minister of Czar Nicholas II of Russia. The three of them fled Paris before the Blitz. Harry Fessenden Meserve then returned to Las Vegas in 1938 to assist Walter Hunsaker, loyal secretary to the Hunt family, with developing the Las Vegas land portfolio. His health failing, Meserve retired to the home of Henry Leigh Hunt in Florida, in constant contact with Henry, still in Paris, to save friends from the Nazis storming toward the City. Meserve died in Sarasota in 1941.

The memoire of Meserve's daughter, Lascelle Meserve de Basily

Henry Leigh Hunt led a life to rival his father's. Decorated with the Croix de Guerre and two citations in the WWI Battle of Belleau Wood, Captain Henry Leigh Hunt ran the Trust Department at Meserve's former employer, National City Bank New York Paris Branch, from 1931 until the Nazis stormed in. Having traveled the world and dined with kings his entire life, he debriefed all manor of individuals traveling through Paris in the run up to World War II, filing regular intelligence reports through his Las Vegas office, to bank and government officials in New York and D.C. He assisted key individuals in escaping France before, during and after the fall of Paris.

Henry returned to the US in 1940 with his three daughters. He settled in Las Vegas to manage the Hunt land holdings, which soon held the Huntridge Theater and Huntridge community, where Meserve had been the primary investor. Highway 91, where the bulk of the Hunt syndicate's land portfolio lay, became known as the Las Vegas Strip. Their properties would eventually hold all of the major hotels which made the place famous, as well as the Convention Center; the Las Vegas Country Club; and much more. In 1955 Henry Leigh Hunt, virtually unknown in Las Vegas where he was the largest land owner, was appointed Honorary Consul of the Principality of Monaco by Prince Rainier III. He retired to France in 1962, where he lived out his last ten years.

As mysterious and astonishing as the story of Leigh S. J. Hunt is, his son Henry Leigh Hunt is an astounding phantom, showing up at various key moments, and in memoires of famous people, over six decades on five continents. I've chased his ghost through two wars, twenty states and two dozen countries for a decade. Telling the entire, incredible story of the Hunt dynasty will be the work of a lifetime, and much stranger than fiction.

So when you sit in the ruin of the lodge at Pine Creek, as beautiful as ever it was, realize you are not unique in that human condition that requires you to escape the regular environs to clear the head of stress, and stretch the imagination. Here stood titans doing the same, who dreamed of a spectacular destination such as the world had never known.

Interactive map tot he site:

More by Jonathan Warren:

Saving Spring Mountain Ranch: A baroness, a billionaire an enchanted retreat, and the preservationists who put you on the invitation list

Pure Adventure: A preservationist's challenge, youthful overconfidence, and a river of doubt

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