The American Desert,1955: A new way of life in the U.S.

TO the ordinary air traveler winging across the U.S. Southwest, the great American desert still seems an arid and forbidding waste of sand, dry lake beds and jagged rock mountains. But to the observant, a careful look reveals surprising signs of a new civilization rising among the ocotillos and greasewood. Thin asphalt ribbons stretch across the sand, linking black and white dots of clustered homes, blue bands of irrigation canals and rectangles of bright green new farms. From California’s southern coastal ranges inland 375 miles to the central Arizona cities of Phoenix and Tucson, the searing desert, long a shunned part of the U.S.’s land surface, is filling up. Today, thousands of pioneers are moving in, claiming a brand-new empire in which to build new homes, farms, businesses and a whole new way of life.

To the ill-equipped and the unwary, the desert can still be a savage and treacherous foe. But to the man who comes to the desert with caution and respect, the forbidding area has much to offer: fabulous mineral riches, water so pure that it tastes like distilled water, incredibly fertile farmland and a growing season 365 days long. Above all, the desert offers the restless migrants from city stress a combination of peace, solitude and a fresh start on a new frontier. “There are three ways of life now,” says Indio (Calif.) Publisher Ole Nordland. “The city, the farm and the desert.”

Mass Migration. Ever since the Spaniards first explored the region in the 16th century, man has been able to promote a cautious friendship with the great deserts of the Southwest. Springs and river water from the Colorado, Mojave,* Verde, Salt and Gila gave rise to settlements and small farming districts. Deep wells supported a slowly growing population, clustered along well-traveled desert highways in a few centers—Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Barstow. In the mountains, miners hammered away at sun-baked mineral vaults, and on the sandy desert floor men learned to irrigate and raise truck crops, cotton, dates and citrus trees.

But within the past 15 years, so casually that the nation at large was scarcely aware of the change, man discovered how to live comfortably al most anywhere he chose on the desert. From the old centers, suburbs began mushrooming out through the mesquite and yuccas. Long fingers of civilization stretched along brand-new desert highways, reaching toward new cities that sprang up among the saguaros and Joshua trees.

Behind the push was one of the greatest migra tions the world has ever known. Since 1940, more than 5,000,000 newcomers have moved into the Far West; 200,000 are still arriving in California each year. They flow into Los Angeles and the main cities of the Southwest and, in search of more space and freer living, push on through the populated centers and out over the desert.

Tucson is adding 1,000 to its population each month, Phoenix even more. Las Vegas’ Clark County claims 80,000 permanent newcomers since 1940; Yuma, Ariz, more than 20,000. On California’s Mojave Desert, population has soared 360% (from 32,000 to 147,000); one of its new cities, Ridgecrest, not even an entity in 1940, already counts 6,700 residents and is steadily climbing. The fertile Coachella Valley, north of California’s Salton Sea, has doubled in population (from 16,000 to 32,000) since 1950, and Henderson, incorporated in 1953 twelve miles out in the desert from Las Vegas, has become Nevada’s third largest city (after Las Vegas and Reno), with a population of 11,500.

Water by Phone. The changing face of the desert reflects the great migration. New cement plants have sprung up in the Mojave’s Ivanpah, Oro Grande and Tehachapi. There are a new steam plant and expanded manganese mine near Las Vegas, Molybdenum Corp. of America’s new 50-million-ton “rare earth” mine at Mountain Pass, Calif., a $28 million Hughes guided-missile plant and a Douglas Aircraft experimentation plant at Tucson, industry” new plants at aviation, Phoenix, electronics and a and brand-new, “smokeless $120 million Magma Copper mine, mill smelter and town at San Manuel, Ariz., to mine the newest and biggest proved deposit of copper ore in the U.S. (see color pictures).

Fancy new all-year resorts, surrounded by high-priced desert estates, have risen in California’s Apple Valley, along the 30-mile-long Salton Sea (239 feet below sea level) and at Arizona’s Scottsdale and Paradise Valley near Phoenix. New housing subdivisions have mushroomed into the desert at Palmdale, Lancaster, Hesperia and Lucerne Valley in the Mojave, at Indio, Coachella and Twentynine Palms in the Colorado Desert, across the floor of the Las Vegas Valley and out for miles on all sides of Tucson and Phoenix.

Great areas of the desert have turned green with new water wells and hundreds of miles of new irrigation canals. The fertile soil and year-round growing season give desert agriculture an intensity and diversity undreamed of by the Midwest dirt farmer. In California’s rich, 650,000-acre Imperial Valley, grains, cotton, lettuce, sheep, flax, cattle and carrots can be raised side by side. Farmers change their crops to meet changing market conditions, and, when water is needed, a telephone order brings it sluicing through laterals from the All-American Canal, which stretches 80 miles to the Colorado River.

In the Coachella Valley, the land is so fertile that most ranchers double-crop, producing two yields a year from the same acreage. On an intensively worked ranch of 80 acres, Henry Sakemi, a Nisei farmer, raises tomatoes, peas, corn, beans, romaine lettuce and squash. His overhead is steep: four tractors, cultivators, disks, plows, subsoilers, harrows, planters and bed-shapers, besides the cost for water and labor (up to 90 field hands during harvest). But his yields are immense: 200 crates per acre of sweet corn, each crate holding five dozen ears, and tomatoes that net a steady $500-a-year-profit per acre. On his relatively small ranch he grosses $100,000 a year. “In a good year,” says Rancher Sakemi, “my profit margin has hit as much as 30% to 35%.”

Farther north, on the Mojave Desert, Rancher Stoddard Jess has built one of the desert’s tidiest agricultural arrangements. His chief crop is turkeys, 55,000 birds or more each year, and better than 100,000 poults. In a complex of freshwater ponds, he raises a million rainbow trout from fingerlings. The trout fatten on entrails from the dressed turkeys and on worms grown as a crop on the ranch. Water from the ponds irrigates fields of corn, and the turkeys are turned loose to fatten on the corn.

Out of the Submarines. The desert influx got its first big push with World War II. The military services and aircraft industry, seeking space for maneuvers and testing, as well as the desert’s clear, dry weather and year-round sunshine, were the first to move out in expansive style. They sank hundreds of wells, established mushrooming service installations: Edwards and George Air Force Bases in the Mojave, the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station near Inyokern, the Army’s Camp Irwin at Barstow, Marine Corps depots and bases at Mojave, Barstow and Twenty-nine Palms, and other big bases at Las Vegas and in the Arizona Desert around Tucson and Phoenix. At Frenchman Flat, 70 miles north of Las Vegas, the AEC set up its nuclear-weapons test site.

Where the military pioneered, citizens followed in vigorous and increasing waves. People who looked for a healthy climate, pleasant living, new opportunities and the freedom of elbow space found them in the desert. Modern technology was ready to help combat the desert’s age-old barriers. A dozen years before, old settlers slept in wet sheets or went to bed in “submarines,” welded metal boxes over which cooling water was pumped during the night. Now, at war’s end, there was modern air cooling and refrigeration. In homes, offices and resorts, men found. they could live, work and play in air-conditioned comfort and move about in air-conditioned cars. Big machines and modern techniques met other problems, from the drilling of deep wells and the mass production of swimming pools to the erection in double-quick time of whole towns, planned to order.

In Arizona, guest ranches once advertised desert seclusion. Now surrounded by housing developments and shopping centers, they are eying distant locations, wondering how far to retreat to avoid still another move. As the settlers push out of Los Angeles, buying up one desert tract after another, realtors bulldoze farther and farther into the desert.

Big Dreams. With the increasing pool of skilled workers, payrolls are swelling at desert plants and industries. The wartime installations, now permanent, compete for workers with newer desert arrivals such as the $50 million complex of chemical and metal plants at Henderson, Nev. Aircraft workers, fleeing the smog and traffic of Los Angeles, find work with North American, Lockheed or Northrop at new assembly and testing plants on the Mojave.

Other immigrants are finding new starts in real estate, insurance, farming and stock raising. Mojave desert realtors obligingly indoctrinate home buyers in the business of poultry raising, sell them the equipment along with their new homes, even arrange the buying (on credit) of chicks and feed and the marketing of the grown product. Today, a new housing project near Lancaster claims to be the most concentrated poultry raising area in the U.S., with every backyard a crowded chicken run.

More spectacularly, the new desert boom is studded with examples of settlers who have come up fast and furiously:

¶ Near Victorville, Calif., Goerge McCarthy was trying to make ends meet by running a small guest ranch. Two years ago he sold a piece of Mojave Desert land that had cost him $180. His price: $250,000. Today he is subdividing 3,300 acres that cost him less than $1 an acre into half-acre tracts to sell for $2,000 apiece.

¶ Del E. Webb, once a Phoenix carpenter, became a builder, grew with the desert boom, is now a multimillionaire contractor and developer, with interests ranging from oil to part ownership of the New York Yankees.

¶ In Arizona’s Paradise Valley, where Frank Lloyd Wright and his students at nearby Taliesin West design homes for desert living. Realtor Merle Cheney bought 6,000 acres of land for as low as 25¢ an acre, now sells it at prices up to $3,000 an acre.

¶In Apple Valley, Calif., Long Beach Oilmen Newton Bass and Bernard Westlund developed 26,000 acres of desert land they bought in 1946 for an average of $50 an acre into a plush resort, now use 90 salesmen and a fleet of radio-controlled cars to sell half-acre lots for as much as $11,500.

Success stories like these set many desert newcomers shooting in all directions, wavering in a single day between buying a laundry and investing in a tungsten mine. Optimistic and energetic in a new land, they dream big dreams to match the big country. Those with capital look for investments and find them: Ontario (Calif.) Aircraft Executive Glenn Odekirk has interests in desert tungsten and uranium; Hollywood Actor John Ireland and Tennis Star Don Budge are building a swank, $298,000 racquet club outside Phoenix. The less well-heeled look for likely sites for gas stations, ice-cream routes, or the acquaintance of semebody “who’s got something good.” Even those without cash find it easier on the desert to try new jobs and to borrow money with no more collateral than a good idea.

No Place But Here. Water has always been the limiting factor to the desert’s growth. There are few places on the desert where a man, for a price, cannot sink a well and bring up water. But the price is sometimes prohibitive, and the water table is going down. The Colorado is tapped for domestic and industrial use in Nevada’s Clark County, for irrigation in the Yuma area of Arizona and (via the long All-American and Coachella Canals) in the Imperial Valley and the Coachella Valley, and for domestic consumption in Los Angeles. As the area grows and demand increases, men will have to find new sources of supply. When that time arrives, area officials hope that scientists will have learned how to convert sea water into fresh water at an economic price.

Meanwhile, the desert, offering many things to many men, is still attracting increasing numbers of new settlers. Some, like Tucson Businessman Larry Sierck, who migrated from Davenport, Iowa five years ago and is still in his 30s, come for the opportunities of the fresh new land. Others, like William Bentham and his wife, who left Los Angeles when Bentham got ulcers in his city job, come for the healthy climate and the pleasant living. Today the ulcers are gone and the Mojave Desert location has turned into valuable property. “But, hell,” he says, “if we sold, where would we go, Sudie and me? I don’t want to goany place but here.”

* One of the world’s strangest streams, the Mojave (pronounced Mohahvee) is born in the snow melt of the San Bernardinos, disappears underground, here and there marking its strange northward course by popping unaccountably above the .surface of the sand. At one place, east of Victorville, Calif., it forms a subterranean reservoir as big as Tahoe, the state’s largest lake.