When LIFE magazine published its Vegas report card on its 50th birthday, it featured photos that captured the breadth of life in the city -- from the action at the tables to scenes behind the stage curtain. But it didn't publish them all. Now the magazine is sharing a few more.

In 1955, 50 years after Las Vegas was founded, LIFE magazine took a rather skeptical look at the boomtown and its prospects for growth in a cover story titled “Gambling Town Pushes Its Luck.” The Loomis Dean images in this gallery, meanwhile — many of which were never published in LIFE — provide some wonderful visual reminders of just how raw a place Las Vegas was in the mid-’50s, before the Rat Pack made the city its home away from home and decades before it would begin to reinvent itself as a family-friendly mecca.