"In the beginning was the trailer. It was white with eggshell-blue trim, donated in 1976 by the State of Connecticut, along with some castoff office furniture, to the Pequot Indians, an impoverished, nearly defunct tribe. The trailer served as headquarters for the tribe’s first attempts at economic development projects, which included raising swine and growing hydroponic lettuce.

The trailer has disappeared, but you can see a photo of it at the Pequots’ $200 million heritage museum, the one they built with revenue from Foxwoods, in Mashantucket — the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere. The Pequots are still building. Now, besides the casino, with its 1,400 hotel rooms and Romanesque-style pools looking out onto densely wooded hills, its championship golf courses and oversize Hard Rock Cafe and, of course, eight acres of slot machines and betting tables, the Pequots are about to open a 30-story glass-faced monument to Mammon, the MGM Grand at Foxwoods, which includes a 4,000-seat theater; smarter guest rooms; shops by Chopard, Bulgari and Apple; and a roster of celebrity restaurants.

Nine miles up the road from Foxwoods, in Uncasville, there are trailers, too. But they are construction trailers, out of which the neighboring Mohegan tribe is working on a billion-dollar expansion to the second-largest casino in the hemisphere, Mohegan Sun. Not content with a 55-foot indoor waterfall, a martini bar beneath one of the world’s largest planetarium domes, and a 10,000-seat concert arena that doubles as home court for the Mohegans’ very own women’s professional basketball team, the tribe is adding another few hundred yards of shop-lined corridors, a wavy-walled casino dedicated to the wind and a sky-hugging hotel whose lobby is modestly entitled the Source of Life.

Connecticut’s Indians are not begging for old desks any more. In 15 years, Foxwoods, which opened in 1993, and Mohegan Sun, which arrived three years later, have exploded into a two-player subindustry that rakes in $2.5 billion a year from gambling alone, according to Alan P. Meister, an economist with the Analysis Group, a firm that tracks Indian casinos. (The casinos on the Las Vegas strip take in $6.4 billion a year altogether — but there are 37 of them.) "

Get the Story:
Escapes: Raising the Ante in Connecticut (The New York Times 4/18)
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