Farming the Las Vegas Valley: Bill Tomiyasu (1882-1969) | America 250
This excerpt from "The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas" is presented with permission from the publisher. Copies of the book are available for purchase at LasVegasAdvisor.com.
By Joan Whitely
He wasn't an engineer or a construction worker, but Yonema "Bill" Tomiyasu just as surely helped build Hoover Dam. He was a local farmer who fed the dam's workers with the literal fruits, and vegetables, of his labor: fresh tomatoes, asparagus, luscious watermelons, and canteloupe [sic]. All were items of produce that, prior to Tomiyasu's innovative farming techniques, mostly had to be shipped to Las Vegas from elsewhere, at added expense.
A Japanese-born immigrant who planted roots in Southern Nevada in 1914, Tomiyasu was one of the first Asian Americans to settle here. He arrived with the specific intention of owning and operating a ranch — which people of Japanese origin were not permitted to do, at the time, in neighboring California, where Tomiyasu had been living.
He went on to help his adopted country fight his land of birth during World War II, delivering produce and poultry to the mess hall of the airplane gunnery school near Las Vegas which today is Nellis Air Force Base. Then the Las Vegas Valley began to urbanize. The Indian labor that Tomiyasu used to hire for ranch hands became scarce, and gradually he switched from agriculture to raising landscape plants.
In the 1930s, Tomiyasu struck a great coup for the family business,
landing a long-term contract to supply food
to [Hoover Dam] construction camp mess halls.
A street, Tomiyasu Lane, still runs where the family ranch used to lie, though the land itself — in southeast Las Vegas, near the intersection of Pecos and Sunset roads — is broken up into many private upper-crust estates. Just south of Wayne Newton's property. A public building also bears the family name: the Bill Y. Tomiyasu Elementary School at 5445 Annie Oakley Drive. And throughout the valley, trees continue to prosper that were germinated and raised to saplings by Bill Tomiyasu.
Nanyu Tomiyasu* recounts the story his dad personally told of the exodus from Japan to California, and then of his eventual move to Las Vegas. Yonema was born near Nagasaki, Japan, the son of a sugar cane farmer who also raised chickens. There he learned the skills that would carry him through life. But times were hard for the Japanese peasant class. Nanyu recalls that his father's family could hardly ever afford to eat any of the eggs their hens laid. So Yonema vowed to become affluent one day. "He said, 'One thing's a must for me. I'm going to have six eggs a day.' And he did," Nanyu says.
In 1898, at age 16, Yonema left Japan for the United States to "have a look-see," as Nanyu puts it. He landed in British Columbia, Canada, then made his way to California, near San Jose, where a sister was already living. He made ends meet by picking fruit. But "he gradually drifted on down toward Fresno, Santa Barbara," taking jobs in gardening and plant nursery work, Nanyu says. By 1910, Yonema — still single — was living in San Bernardino. He had hired on at an Elks Club as a groundskeeper, but eventually transferred to the kitchen and became head cook.
"An Elks member who was a real estate agent … came up to Las Vegas to sell lots," Nanyu continues. On his return the agent, M.M Riley, "walked in the kitchen and told my dad, 'You'd better go to Las Vegas. There's lots of water, lots of land up there. It's hot, and gets fairly cold [in winter]. But if you can stand the weather conditions, you can make a living up there."
In his "From Where I Sit" column in the June 28, 1930, Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, co-owner Al Cahlan mentioned Tomiyasu's efforts to cultivate the Colorado River bottomlands: "It seems like about the time you get disgusted trying to find a good melon in the shipments from other climes, the home-grown melons land in town, and the search is over … Bill Tomiyasu and Fred Haganuma (also of Japanese descent) are pioneering the game down on the river bank, near Searchlight, building each year, and bring new raw acreage into production. They are demonstrating just what can be done under the influence of this remarkable Clark County climate, with water on the desert lands."
During Nanyu's childhood years, the family — which had grown to include three more siblings — spent most of its time working the fields. "We supplied restaurants" in Beatty, Jean, Goodsprings, and Sloan, Nanyu recalls. The children and their mother helped Tomiyasu harvest, clean, and bundle the produce. Regularly, Nanyu went with his father on his delivery rounds, bouncing along dirt roads in a heavily laden family truck.
In the 1930s Tomiyasu struck a great coup for the family business, landing a long-term contract with the Six Companies — a consortium of companies building Hoover Dam to supply food to their construction camp mess halls.
Before World War II, Japanese truck farmers in the West had already distinguished themselves as hard-working. "Issei (Japanese-born) men and women farmed side by side, often paid higher rents, and sustained their families on smaller profit margins," Andrew B. Russell wrote in his 1996 master's thesis for UNLV, which is titled Friends, Neighbors, Foes, and Invaders: Conflicting Images and Experiences of Japanese Americans in Wartime Nevada.
Russell theorizes in his thesis that the earliest Japanese in Clark County — who arrived soon after the first Las Vegas lots were sold in 1905 — were able to keep a low profile. They did not earn unwanted prejudicial attention because most had a language barrier, worked solely for the railroad, and lived together in a compound. As World War II loomed, though, anti-Japanese sentiment kept on building in California, with some spillover to Nevada.
"Nevada's preoccupation with these immigrants was a reaction to California's more successful efforts at restricting the Japanese. These, it was feared, might cause a great influx of Japanese into Nevada," writes Russell in another article, about the Japanese in Nevada from 1905 to 1945, which was published in the spring 1988 Nevada Historical Society Quarterly.
After the war, Tomiyasu prospered, until the 1960s, when he obtained a loan to expand his nursery operations. The way Nanyu remembers it, a member of their church invited them to take the loan. In an ensuing lawsuit, the Tomiyasus claimed that someone fraudulently obscured the repayment terms in such a way that the Tomiyasu family ended up delinquent.
In a controversial foreclosure that made Las Vegas headlines and went to the Nevada Supreme Court, Tomiyasu lost the entire 100-acre ranch — valued then at $240,000 and today some of the most valuable land in Paradise Valley — over an $18,000, second-trust deed. The supreme court ruled 2-1 for the purchasers of the foreclosed property. The family was evicted, but resumed nursery operations at another location.
Yonema Tomiyasu died in 1969 at the age of 87. But his legacy lives on, in several ways. Nanyu jokes that allergy sufferers can thank his father for the abundance of fruitless mulberry trees that dot the Las Vegas landscape — and dust it every spring with their pollens.
*Nanyu Tomiyasu passed away in 2002. “Obituaries for Oct. 3, 2002.” Las Vegas Sun.
