A Comparative Case Study of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea

University of Nevada, Reno

The Promise of Pleasure and Prosperity in the Desert Landscape, 1958-1976: A Comparative Case Study of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

Margarethe R. Eirenschmalz

Dr. C. Elizabeth Raymond/Thesis Advisor

December, 2018

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the thesis prepared under our supervision by

MARGARETHE R. EIRENSCHMALZ

Entitled

The Promise Of Pleasure And Prosperity In The Desert Landscape, 1958-1976: A Comparative Case Study Of Lake Tahoe And The Salton Sea

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

C. Elizabeth Raymond, Ph.D., Advisor

William Rowley, Ph.D., Committee Member

William Eubank, Ph.D., Graduate School Representative

David W. Zeh, Ph.D., Dean, Graduate School

December, 2018

Abstract

In the early 1950s the Salton Sea was hailed as a desert paradise to rival Palm

Springs and the Riviera. By 1976 it had become a blemish on the landscape of Southern

California and little more than an agricultural sump. Lake Tahoe on the other hand has thrived as a tourist and recreational destination for over a century; even when its slopes had been denuded of much of its forests people were still eager to visit the area. A fundamental preference for a European landscape aesthetic explains the continued attraction of Lake Tahoe and the efforts that have been made on its behalf; while a rejection of the desert landscape aesthetic accounts for the neglect suffered by the Salton

Sea’s reputation and environment.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Landscape Perceived………………………………………………………. 1

Chapter 1: The Desert Aesthetic…………………………………………………………. 9

Chapter 2: The Palm and the Pine - Lake Tahoe……………………………………….. 50

Chapter 3: Of Pupfish and Cutthroat - The Salton Sea…………………………………. 71

Chapter 4: Welcome to Insert Name Here……………………………………………… 93

Conclusion: What could have been……………………………………………………. 130

Appendix A………………………….………………………………………………… 141

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………... 143

iii

List of Images Image 1: Tahoe Paradise………………………………………………………………... 95 Image 2: Salton Riviera……………………………………………………………….... 95 Image 3: Aerial View of Desert Shore, California…………………………………...… 97 Image 4: Aerial View of Tahoe Keys Marina, South Lake Tahoe, CA………………… 97 Image 5: Salton Sea Vista………………………………………………………………. 99 Image 6: Lake Tahoe…………………………………………………………………… 99 Image 7: Greetings from the Salton Sea, Desert Shores……………………...……….. 102 Image 8: Greetings from Lake Tahoe…………………………………………...…….. 102 Image 9: Lake Tahoe: An Illustrated Guide and History…………………….……….. 104 Image 10: Salton Sea Story………………………………………….………………… 104 Image 11: North Shore Beach Yacht Club Line-up…………………………..……….. 107 Image 12: Cal-Neva Line-up……………………………………..…………………… 107 Image 13: Salton Bay Yacht Club Casino……………….……………………………. 108 Image 14: Barney’s Casino……………………………………………………………. 108 Image 15: 11 lb. Cutthroat……………...... …………………………………………… 111 Image 16: Girl with Fish……………………...……………………………………….. 111 Image 17: The Salton Sea 500………………………………………………………… 113 Image 18: Lake Tahoe Mile-High Regatta………………………………...………….. 113 Image 19: Pretty Jimmie Bernard………………………………………………..……. 114 Image 20: Tahoe Keys………………………………………………………...………. 114 Image 21: School Girl Conquers Lake Tahoe………………...……………………….. 116 Image 22: L. B. Housewives Break Record for 10-mile Salton Sea Swim…………… 116 Image 23: The Gem of the Desert……………………..………………………………. 117 Image 24: Ninth Hole at Tahoe City……………………………………………...…… 117 Image 25: Miracle in the Desert……………………………………………….………. 122 Image 26: Tahoe Paradise……………………………………………………...……… 122 iv

Image 27: Salton Sea Ashtray…………………………………………………………. 126 Image 28: Lake Tahoe………………………………………………………………… 126 Image 29: Lake Tahoe in the cool evergreen Shangi-La of the Sierras……..………… 139 Image 30: ‘Miracle in the Desert’ Salton City!...... 139

Introduction: Landscape Perceived

When I stood on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, looking south, I could see the curve of the earth because from my perspective the lake ended in the horizon rather than a beach. Yet I knew this was an inland body of water because of the mountain range that rose above this oceanic horizon. This combination of apparently watery endlessness and the limits of geological formation felt distinctly different from the sense of vastness that I have experienced when visiting the Pacific shore and facing west. This difference is the result of several factors. The visual difference is perhaps the most obvious; despite the vast size of the Salton Sea I could see mountain ranges at the far edges of most sides of the valley regardless of where I was along the lake’s shoreline. More distinctive is the fact that the blue of the water did not simply melt into the blue of the sky. Even with the large size of the lake the air was not only hot but also dry and did not have the fishy, salty scent of the ocean. In spite of the oppressive heat, which in the more humid areas of the

Imperial Valley gave me the sense of being suffocated in a gigantic pancake, I found standing at the shore of the Salton Sea to be very peaceful and comforting. That is not how I would describe my sensations when visiting a beach of the Pacific Ocean or the second object of my analysis, Lake Tahoe. Lake Tahoe makes me feel chilled, even on the warmest of days, perhaps it is its remarkably vivid blue color. I also experience a sense of confinement when visiting Lake Tahoe despite its size which, when compared to the alpine lakes I grew up around, is of gigantic dimensions. It is the mountainous crown surrounding Lake Tahoe with a comparative tight fit and the verticality of the forests that instill in me this sense of confinement which is more the result of my emotional

2 relationship and my cultural association with this type of landscape than it is the result of any quantifiable explanation.

Landscape scholar Yi-Fu Tuan begins his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience with a similar anecdote. He describes how Paul Tillich, a German theologian, raised in a small, medieval town experienced feelings of “openness, infinity, unrestricted space” in the apparently contrary settings of the Baltic seashore and metropolitan Berlin.1 While I do not intend to compare such obviously distinctive environments as the seashore and the city in this analysis, my comparison between the

Salton Sea and Lake Tahoe will demonstrate that though peripherally these two lakes could easily be lumped together as western American lakes, major water basins in desert areas, and as lakes of significant size, these lakes could hardly be more different if one were the ocean and the other the city.

Lake Tahoe always evokes the image of a bright blue, cool, and pure surface of water surrounded by great green forests or snowy mountains, regardless of whether it is called Mountain Lake, Lake Bigler, or “Lake of the Sky.”2 Lake Tahoe is situated in the

Sierra Nevada straddling the border between Nevada and California. The lake is twenty- two miles long and twelve miles wide. Its depth is 1636 feet and its surface lies 6,225 feet above sea level.3

Lake Tahoe was first discovered by European Americans in 1844, as John C.

Frémont observed it during one of his survey explorations in the area. In 1859 the area around Lake Tahoe became a crucial lumber resource to support mining at the Comstock

1 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977), 3-4. 2 George Wharton James, The Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe in the high Sierras of California and Nevada (Pasadena, CA: George Wharton James, 1915), Title Page. 3 Michael J. Makley, A Short History of Lake Tahoe (Reno: U of Nevada P, 2011), 1.

Lode, across the Washoe Valley, in Virginia City. Since this time, Lake Tahoe has been both appreciated and exploited in a variety of ways. The lumber industry left much of the lake basin denuded by the time mining on the Comstock came to an end, but even then some residents and entrepreneurs had already taken an interest in the preservation of the lake environment. This coexistence between preservation and economic interest has exemplified the lake’s existence since its discovery and frequently it has been much more of a struggle between the two sides than a matter of simple cooperation. The lake has been developed because of its beauty and purity, but this in turn has led to conditions that have threatened these very attributes.

The Salton Sea is the latest inland body of water in a long succession of bodies of water filling the Salton Trough over the last several thousand years. The Salton Sea is located in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys in the Colorado Desert. The lake is about thirty-five miles long and over fifteen miles wide. Its average depth is 29.9 feet and its surface lies 232-235 feet below sea level.4

The Salton Sea in its current incarnation was accidentally created in 1905, due to a miscalculation on the part of engineers seeking to improve the irrigation canals and increase the flow of water to farmers in the Imperial Valley. The unique nature of the

Salton Sea is that it is the first manmade iteration of Salton Trough lakes, collectively known as Lake Cahuilla, and that its ecological composition is dramatically different from that of the previous versions created between the Pleistocene period and the last

4 Kim Stringfellow, Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005 (Santa Fe: Center for American Places, 2005), 6; William deBuys, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in low-down California (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1999), 7.

4 natural flooding of the trough in 1891.5 In the brief century of its existence, the history of the Salton Sea has been divisive, elusive, and complicated. Some environmentalists would like to see the Salton Trough revert to its pre-accident state while others value it as one of the few remaining large wetlands in California. The surrounding sizable and affluent towns hate the smells that emanate from the Salton Sea every summer, but realize that the thin layer of water it comprises is all that prevents dust storms from blowing through their towns, bringing over 100 years of a toxic accumulation of selenium, pesticides, and other chemicals into their lungs, eyes, and mouths; while the few remaining original residents of the Salton Sea developments dream of a halcyon age that never truly existed. The Salton Sea is an example of an artificial landscape which has become a natural landscape. The Salton Sea may be the result of an accident, was seen as an opportunity and perceived as a nuisance, but now has become a necessity to the southern California ecosystem.

Lake Tahoe has long been labeled the “Jewel of the Sierra” while the Salton Sea was once referred to as a “Gem of the Desert.”6 The histories and environments of these two lakes contrast dramatically, but, upon closer inspection, they present intriguing parallels. Lake Tahoe could easily suffer the same fate as the Salton Sea through contamination and exploitation, while the Salton Sea also had, and perhaps still has, the

5 David J. Levenkron, Sand and Rubble: The Salton City Story (Los Angeles: Justice Publishers, 1982), 29; deBuys, 65. 6 In George M. Wheeler’s Report upon United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 103, Lake Tahoe is referred to as “gem of the Sierras,” but over the years this has been transformed into “Jewel of the Sierra,” sources for this version of the phrase are diverse ranging from postcards such as this one on Ebay (https://tinyurl.com/yc9d3jmt) to a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tx6MtLYOEo) to a range of articles in magazines and websites such as MotorHome, Sunnyscope, and Forbes). The phrase “Gem of the Desert” was used in advertising materials describing the Salton Sea and the surrounding area such as in Stringfellow, 86-87.

5 potential to become a gem with many facets. Despite their considerably different origins, these two lakes have a shared history of struggle for survival; a variety of stakeholders, both local and remote, have aimed for the lakes to be recognized as valuable cultural, recreational, economic, and environmental resources. In the case of Lake Tahoe environmental preservation and economic aspiration have entered into a sometimes tentative arrangement of cooperation that has allowed multiple stakeholders to be contributors to the future of the lake. No such concrete arrangement exists at the Salton

Sea, where environmental preservation is stagnating and economic development is nonexistent despite its proximity to the wealth of Palm Springs and the agricultural industry of the Imperial Valley.

The lakes’ divergent present states do not negate the potential both places exhibited in the promotional materials created on their behalf during the 1950s and

1960s. A comparison of these materials from this time period reveals great similarities in the goals and the attitudes of the promoters. The recreational and social amenities and the situation and design of land developments in each location were very much alike despite the fact that the respective environments are very different. It is my argument that despite its array of environmental and economic problems the Salton Sea could have become the “Salton Riviera” envisioned by one of its first promoters if not for an intrinsic preference on the part of Americans for the European aesthetic landscape model based on the verdant and mountainous “Alps of America” that corresponded with the environmental and scenic attributes of Lake Tahoe and its surroundings.7

7 Levenkron, 50; Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920 (New York: New York UP, 1990), 154.

In the 1950s the Salton Sea had every potential to become another Lake Tahoe; but, because the economic and infrastructural development necessary to make desert residence appealing to a large number of people did not become a reality, the Salton Sea area never generated enough, what William deBuys calls, “critical mass” to support a positive perception of the land.8 Years of active contamination have not made it any easier to see economic value in the landscape of the Salton Sea; but it retains undeniable environmental and, at least to some, aesthetic value.

Through a comparative case study of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea this thesis illustrates that the concept of the desert aesthetic is not as culturally pervasive as previous scholars have claimed. I argue that the rejection of the desert aesthetic is at the center of an inter-related web of factors that sustain and influence the prevailing attitudes toward the Salton Sea. These factors include the attainment of an infrastructural critical mass necessary to effectively support a region’s current population and encourage future migration into an area, the perception of an area’s value and the environmental impact that positive or negative value judgments bring with them, and the promotion and resultant popularity of a region in relation to the socio-economic status of its users. The rejection of the desert aesthetic underlies the other factors, while, at the same time, these potentially negative factors further strengthen the rejection of the desert aesthetic, which results in a reciprocal continuum. This reciprocal relationship can be seen through the economic, environmental, and recreational histories of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea.

Even popularity and promotion may prove to be unsustainable in the long run due to the overriding impact of the rejection of the desert aesthetic on all other factors, as was the

8 deBuys, 212.

7 case for the Salton Sea. In contrast, negative environmental developments in the case of

Lake Tahoe were not enough to negatively impact its overall evaluation, as the preferred

European landscape aesthetic positively underpins perception of the area’s value.

The following narrative will guide the reader from a general introduction to the desert aesthetic to a discussion of the specific promotional materials produced for each location. The concept of the perception of a landscape as a landscape of value or worthlessness is discussed in each of these chapters at a concentric level. Chapter One provides the broadest perspective of the concept of perception and value judgment by providing an account of the development of the desert aesthetic and refuting claims as to its pervasiveness. To do this the chapter utilizes applicable literature from the field of landscape studies, the history of recreation and tourism in the American West, and contemporary literary works about the desert. Chapters Two and Three provide a brief history of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea respectively and explain how historical factors and use of the two landscapes over time resulted in differing approaches to development, stewardship, and perception. These chapters provide location specific perspectives about the perception of value based on general historical accounts, environmental histories, critical historical and scientific scholarship, newspaper commentary, and government publications. Chapter Four provides the most focused perspective regarding the perception of value, taking into account the impact of the desert aesthetic as well as historical events, by analyzing a number of concrete examples of promotional materials from each location from the 1950s and 1960s. It evaluates the similarities and differences these comparisons reveal about perceptions of the Salton Sea and Lake Tahoe during this time period. This chapter examines what promoters of the two areas

8 considered to be the things that their target audiences would look for in each location in light of the prevailing landscape aesthetic and draws conclusions about the values assessed to the landscapes by promoters.

Chapter 1: The Desert Aesthetic

The acceptance or rejection of a particular landscape aesthetic is the basis of my argument. The two contrasting aesthetic concepts representative of acceptance and rejection are the desert aesthetic and the European aesthetic briefly defined in the introduction. I intend to show that a rejection of the desert aesthetic, in reciprocity with economic, environmental, and promotional factors, resulted in the failure of the Salton

Sea area, while the acceptance of the European aesthetic provided the intuitive foundation for the success of Lake Tahoe despite economic and environmental obstacles.

The first part of this chapter will provide a review of scholarly and literary works that have informed my understanding of the desert aesthetic. By describing these works this review aims to outline the intuitive nature of landscape preference which is an almost unquantifiable concept. Instead, general landscape preference and a preference for certain landscape features such as trees and grass appears to be a qualitative judgment based on emotion and cultural conditioning. Part two of this chapter will provide a chronology of the development of the American desert aesthetic to illustrate how certain scholars have concluded the desert aesthetic to be a pervasive concept. This section aims to demonstrate that the desert aesthetic is far from pervasive in American culture and is instead a very selective, conditionally dependent, concept.

Defining the Desert Aesthetic

This is review is composed of fundamental works that illustrate the history of perception of the American West and the evolution of the desert aesthetic from a scholarly and a literary perspective. This history of the desert aesthetic includes

10 theoretical works on landscape studies, histories of American tourism and landscape perception, and primary sources that illustrate the varying perceptions of the desert landscape. This review aims to provide insight into the diversity of the meanings associated with landscapes in general and desert landscapes in particular. This diversity ranges from the spiritual to the concrete and from the intellectual to the physical.

Foundational to my assessment of the values attributed to different landscapes such as those in my case studies are Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place and Topophilia: A

Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values and Roderick Nash’s

Wilderness and the American Mind. Topophilia was written “out of a need to sort and order in some way the wide variety of attitudes and values relating to man’s physical environment.” But Tuan was dissatisfied with the need to resort to “convenient and conventional categories” such as “suburb, town, and city.” Space and Place “is an attempt to achieve a more coherent statement” through the lens of “human experience, which ranges from inchoate feeling to explicit conception,” instead of the use of place and culturally specific categories. 9 While both of these books address the same basic subject matter, “the complex nature of human experience,” a significant part of which are

“perception, attitudes, and values,” the books differ enough in their presentation that it is useful for my purposes to draw on both of them together rather than one or the other exclusively.10

Tuan’s works emphasizes the significance of basic human experience of place and the feelings generated by it.11 This understanding of landscape perception is crucial to

9 Tuan, Space and Place, v. 10 Tuan, Space and Place, v; Tuan, Topophilia, title page. 11 Tuan, Space and Place, 5-7.

11 my analysis because it defines the “value” of a landscape on an aesthetic and generally intangible level. At the core of Tuan’s work lies the centrality of emotion, of the sensation of feeling, a somewhat ambiguous term, located separately from but equal to intellectual thought. Emotion is influenced by different levels of experience ranging from biological endowments such as sight and spatial values; to experience based on prior behavior; to conceptual experience, such as understanding of intangible space or attachment to place.

In most cultures, including the American culture, desert environments do not create positive feelings on any of the three levels of experience. An example to illustrate this point is the significance of vertical height. Tuan considers height a significant measure in most languages, yet deserts frequently have little to denote height other than mountains on the horizon which are outside a person’s boundary for useful measurement; as a result the planting of trees, if sustainable, appears to be one of the first actions taken by desert settlers.12 Another concept applicable to desert life is the difference between space and spaciousness. Tuan states that, “space and spaciousness are closely related terms, as are population density and crowding; but ample space is not always experienced as spaciousness, and high density does not necessarily mean crowding. Spaciousness and crowding are antithetical feelings. The point at which one feeling turns into another depends on conditions that are hard to generalize.”13 He goes on to say that,

“spaciousness is closely associated with the sense of being free. Freedom implies space…,” but at the same time “space and freedom are a threat…To be open and free is

12 Tuan, Space and Place, 37; deBuys, 88. 13 Tuan, Space and Place, 51.

12 to be exposed and vulnerable.”14 The implication of spaciousness in the desert setting is that a person may experience too much space and by extension too much freedom. One interpretation of this freedom applicable to my case study is the lack of formal infrastructure in the Salton Sea area. Two examples of this freedom can be seen in the trailer community of Slab City. This place has no running water or electricity, yet its residents value this location for its independence. Similarly, since Slab City is not a recognized town, it does not provide social services, but neither can it ask for taxes–this can be a positive or a negative depending on the person.

In Wilderness and the American Mind Roderick Nash provides a history of the concept of wilderness from its beginnings as the “uncivilized” land encountered by the first European settlers to the present-day (at time of publication in 1967) conception of wilderness as a land resource set aside in its “primitive” or “original” state for the purpose of allowing man to experience land that has been exposed to the least human influence possible. Nash states that “the American conception of wilderness has almost always been a compound of attraction and repulsion,” a sentiment that seems to hold true to the present.15 While Nash does not include the desert landscape in his discussion of wilderness, his work is extremely informative in that it provides an extensive account of people’s attitudes towards the land as they encountered it and transformed it from wilderness to civilization. Equally important is his documentation of the motivation that led others such as John Muir to declare a need to preserve wilderness because this

14 Tuan, Space and Place, 53-54. 15 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 231.

13 landscape is crucial to a completely different set of emotions such as the need for freedom discussed by Tuan or the opportunity to find spirituality in nature.

Patricia Limerick contributes to the discussion about wilderness and, specifically, the desert aesthetic in her book Desert Passages. In the preface Limerick states that,

“Nash’s survey of attitudes toward wilderness is otherwise thorough and insightful. This one oversight appears to be symptomatic of the fact that deserts have not figured very largely in studies of American attitudes toward nature. The omission is understandable; deserts do not fit well in generalizations designed with better-watered landscapes in mind.”16 Limerick’s analysis of human attitudes to the desert is presented through the lens of literature. She looks at the work of eight authors and discusses how each sees and, more importantly, feels about the desert through their writing. Through her analysis

Desert Passages provides an explanation of how the desert has been depicted over time as expressed through a range of literary works and how these works in turn have shaped people’s perception of the desert ranging from wasteland to blank slate of potential to being valuable in its own right. Limerick’s chapter on Edward Abbey is particularly representative of the struggle for recognition of the desert as a landscape of value equal to that of the rest of the continent.

Early in the work Limerick provides a caution. She gives a definition of deserts based on geologic appearance, the “impression of vacancy,” and aridity. She says that,

“even with this definition, the phrase attitudes toward nature throws a thin cloak of simplicity over a mass of complexity. It is perfectly possible for an individual or group to hold what appear to be contradictory attitudes simultaneously. The same individual

16 Limerick, 8-9.

14 can experience discomfort or inconvenience from heat, cold, or a difficult terrain, inspect the landscape for exploitable resources, and admire a view, all at the same time.”17 Tuan,

Nash, and Limerick provide methods to understanding people’s attitudes towards landscapes, but not one can offer an absolutely definitive explanation of why one person feels about a certain landscape in one way while another reacts in another way.

Recognition of the complex, and potentially antithetical, interrelationship between different attitudes instilled in a person by a given landscape as well as personal context is fundamental to this case study.

While Tuan, Nash, and Limerick provide tools to interpret people’s attitudes toward landscapes, John Sears, Earl Pomeroy, and Anne Hyde provide the historical background to landscapes of the American West and tourism. In Sacred Places:

American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century John Sears describes the development of an American tourist culture. Sears states that, many “who described their visits to tourist attractions in the nineteenth century often referred to themselves as

‘pilgrims.’”18 He goes on to describe the names of several tourist attractions, such as “the

Valley of Humility,” and suggests that “nineteenth –century American tourist attractions assumed some of the functions of sacred places in traditional societies.”19 As Sears continues his description of the development of American tourism he addresses the fact that unlike European medieval shrines, which were peripherally associated with commercial activity, “the [American] tourist attractions themselves strongly reflected the

17 Limerick, 6. 18 John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989), 5. 19 Sears, 5.

15 more secular, bourgeois culture which was developing in America, a culture increasingly oriented to consumerism.”20

In his introduction to American tourism Sears brings up two important points, the concept of the sacred and the process of consumption. The concept of the sacred was also addressed in Tuan’s works in relation to the concept of mythical space and by Nash in his discussions of John Muir’s Transcendentalism.21 By making the connection between the sacred and consumerism Sears defines a new relationship between man and landscape. This new relationship resulted in a new way to confer value to landscapes.

Sears discusses several artists and writers who “sometimes chose famous places as the subject of their work; sometimes their work made the places famous. In either case, their work conferred value on the scenes depicted and helped shape the perception of tourists who visited them.”22 The concept that a landscape does not have inherent value, but that value must be conferred by its users is one of the foundational questions of this case study.

The works of Hyde and Pomeroy are the point of origin for the argument of this case study. Both authors, Hyde more explicitly than Pomeroy, claim that around late

1880s the American attitudes toward landscape underwent a conversion in favor of the

20 Sears, 9. 21 Tuan states that, “mythical space functions as a component in a world view or cosmology.” He describes mythical space as a primarily intellectual construct which frequently is based on or refers to physical realities. He concludes his chapter on mythical space with the statement that, “Mythical space is also a response of feeling and imagination to fundamental human needs.” This may be applied to the desire to see God or the divine in the land. Tuan, Space and Place, 85-100; Nash, 125-129. 22 Sears, 5.

16 desert aesthetic.23 While I do not deny the fact that a desert aesthetic came into being, I disagree with Hyde’s assertion as to the lasting cultural impact of this aesthetic.

In his book, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America, Earl

Pomeroy describes the experience of the tourist in the West across time. This statement may seem redundant, but Pomeroy is explicit in his focus on the tourist because as he says the tourist is ubiquitous. It is because of their commonplace presence that Pomeroy wants to discuss the tourists of the West rather than the pioneers or explorers “who come for only a moment and are gone.”24 Pomeroy says that, “from the beginnings of the West the tourist has been important to Westerners, though like other people they sometimes resent him, or affect to wish themselves rid of him.” This statement seems to imply that tourism migrated only from the East, but Pomeroy demonstrates that Westerners as well as Easterners and those in between traveled the West in search of the “Golden West.” He makes this very clear when he states that according to Overland, “by the [eighteen- eighties] Westerners were camping on an impressive scale. Many families visited the

Yellowstone with their own tents and equipment.”25

Pomeroy provides a thematic account of the tourist in the West. For example, he discusses the railroad tourist, who visited established attractions and stayed at major hotels. On the other hand Pomeroy also discusses various stages of “roughing it” throughout time; the same person can be a railroad tourist as well as an experimental rancher or a national park camper. Pomeroy discusses “how sojourners, some of whom first came as tourists, became resident westerners and in becoming changed their attitudes

23 Hyde, 191-243;Pomeroy, 158-161. 24 Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1957), xv. 25 Pomeroy, 141.

17 toward regional settings and traditions.”26 What is significant about Pomeroy’s portrayal of the tourist is that he describes a person that can change both his use of the land and his attitudes toward it. A man that may have seen value in the land only because of its gold or lumber may discover that the landscape, its scenery, and aesthetic qualities are of equal or greater value to him.

Unlike Pomeroy’s In Search of the Golden West Anne Hyde’s An American

Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920 is a chronological account of American perception of the West. Hyde addresses many of the same subjects as Pomeroy, such as railroad travel, resort hotels, the introduction of the automobile, and the popularity of national parks; but she does so from a very different perspective.

Hyde’s focus is on the relationship between the American West, the process of its discovery and definition, and a national American culture and landscape aesthetic.

In her introduction Hyde argues that, “the particular language and imagery created in the century-long encounter with far western landscape forever altered American aesthetic standards.” She says that the unique sights of the Far West required Americans to devise a new method of landscape description and appreciation which no longer relied on European aesthetic precedents thereby forging “a particularly American culture.” A part of this new American culture was the desert aesthetic. 27

Like Pomeroy, Hyde also heavily relies on the accounts of “explorers, travelers, and tourists,” for similar reasons, observing that this category of people came West

“predominantly for the sake of knowledge or pleasure” unlike “emigrants who often had

26 Pomeroy, viii. 27 Hyde, 9.

18 different concerns.” As a result of the publicity people like explorers and travelers received and the works they published “their impressions profoundly affected national ideas about the region.” Because they kept coming decade after decade they made new discoveries and created new impressions that continually altered the perceptions and attitudes of the rest of the nation. 28

Of particular interest to this case study is Hyde’s description of the development of desert appreciation. It is important to remember that the “Far West” is not only composed of desert, but, as Hyde describes the evolution of Western perception, for much of the nineteenth century the large parts of the West that are desert were simply ignored as a passing obstacle on the traveler’s way to the real destination of aesthetic appreciation.29 This changed at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century when several events took place concurrently. Several “desert writers” started drawing attention to the aesthetic potential of the desert landscape itself rather than simply describing it as a wasteland or a place to be reclaimed. Simultaneously a history of the West significant enough to rival that of Europe was discovered by anthropologists.

Finally, with the advent of the automobile travelers could direct their trips through the desert at their own pace, in comparative comfort, but going slowly enough to see its detail. As Hyde puts it, “a combination of scientific effort and growing national confidence allowed Americans to see the far western landscape for what it was: a treasure trove of symbols for a powerful national culture, one that combined ideals developed in the East with realities presented by the West.”30

28 Hyde, 9. 29 Hyde, 138-139. 30 Hyde, 304.

One other work contributes significant scholarly commentary to the history of the

Southwestern deserts specifically–most other works on the region are primarily illustrative or scientific in nature. Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-down

California, by William deBuys combines photography with text to provide a detailed historic narrative of the Imperial Valley and Colorado River delta. DeBuys’s book is extremely informative because it covers an extensive span of time beginning with

Spanish exploration and emigrant migration up to its date of publication in 1999. It also discusses this geographical area from just about every imaginable perspective such as economically, legally, culturally, and environmentally. The most important argument deBuys makes in his book is about the complexity of the Colorado Desert. The topic of the Salton Sea is only a small part of the book since it only existed for a fifth of the entire time period described. Yet it is the last hundred plus years that have had the most significant impact on both the area’s environment and its occupants. The moment that water was diverted from the Colorado River into the Imperial Valley changed the

Colorado Desert forever. While this may appear to be an obvious point, deBuys’s work illustrates the multiple dimensions of this change, including the assumption that situating a resort town next to a lake that is a natural sump is a good idea. The implicit argument that deBuys makes by presenting this complex story is that action needs to be taken, but that perhaps preservation of the Salton Sea is not an optimal goal. Despite the disappointment of local residents, perhaps the lake should be allowed to dry up and efforts should instead be focused on revitalization of the Colorado Delta. The work connects the perception of landscape and the perception of the environment, especially exploring how environmental conditions influence the valuation of a landscape.

The final section of this review will discuss the works of four “desert writers.”

These writers are discussed in the works of both Limerick and Hyde, but deserve to be addressed in their own right. These four writers are by no means the entire enclave of desert writers; but discussion is limited to them because their works were influential in the physical formation, i.e. economic development and environmental conservation, and the aesthetic understanding at the heart of this case study. Unlike the preceding scholars whose work is applicable to my theoretical and historical understanding of landscape studies and the desert aesthetic, these works provided me with contemporary snap-shots of Americans’ perception of the desert. Each of these writers presents a different attitude towards the desert and how this landscape should be utilized. In essence, each of these authors confers on the desert landscape a different value that can be connected to the particular approach, i.e. economic, philosophic, he uses in his writing.

In 1899 William E. Smythe wrote The Conquest of Arid America, and, by the time he released a revised edition in 1905, several of his prophetic predictions about the implementation of desert irrigation on a national level had come true. The National

Reclamation Act of 1902, also known as the Newlands Reclamation Act, after the

Nevada senator who sponsored the bill, allowed the implementation of a number of irrigation and reclamation projects across the Southwest in the early years of the twentieth century. These projects included the Truckee-Carson Reclamation Project which impacted Lake Tahoe, but not the Imperial Valley Irrigation project in California because this project was a private enterprise.31

31 William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (London: Macmillan, 1905), 276, 307-322.

Smythe was an advocate of irrigation-based farming because he saw it as a solution to the social problem of the “surplus man.” Smythe describes this “surplus man” or “surplus population” in the 1900 version of his book, The Conquest of Arid America.

The “surplus man” resides “chiefly in cities and towns east of the Mississippi river” and labors in the “overcrowded eastern industries, stores, and professions, and, in smaller measure, [on] unprofitable eastern farms.”32 Smythe believed that irrigation-based agriculture could offer these displaced people the opportunity to develop strong social units because irrigation projects are “beyond the reach of the individual” and because

“irrigation compels the adoption of the small-farm unit” thereby averting the loneliness that is “the bane of rural life.” 33 He believed irrigation projects would allow industrial independence through “subsistence of one’s own labors” as well as the promotion of democracy as “there shall be no monopoly of land.”34 As important as the concepts of independence and democracy were to Smythe, more important was the idea that irrigation was a divine edict. Throughout his book he states that irrigation provides the true means to living on the land as God intended with statements such as, “And irrigation is a miracle!” and “It is the fortune of Arid America to be so palpably crude material that it cannot be used at all, save upon the divine terms.”35

Smythe exhibits a remarkable attitude toward the American West when he makes statements such as, “the vast territory to the West–so little known, so lightly esteemed, so sparsely peopled–is distinctly the better half of the United States” and “fortunate beyond all other parts of the United States in its climate and in the surpassing wealth of its

32 William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York: Harper, 1900), 247-248. 33 Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1905), 31, 45-46. 34 Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1905), 43. 35 Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1905), 40, 331.

22 forests, its quarries and its mines, western America is yet more favored in another element of its physical foundation. This is the substantial aridity which prevails throughout its vast proportions.”36 Smythe sees beauty and possibility in the desert landscape because of its potential to be reclaimed through irrigation. He considers irrigation to be a far more prudent and predictable method of farming than reliance on seasonal weather and rainfall, but in all his advocacy and promotion of the benefits of irrigation he never once questions whether there is enough water to meet the diverse needs of the entire spectrum of human culture.37 Based on this brief summary of

Smythe’s work, his approach to the desert is from a very utilitarian perspective that aims to reshape the desert landscape into a productive place for man, a tradition followed by most desert developers.

John Van Dyke wrote about the desert from the perspective of an art historian, misanthrope, and Easterner. In the opening chapter of his book, The Desert, Van Dyke is riding toward a range of desert mountains that he describes as “the surviving remnant no doubt of some noble range that long centuries ago was beaten by wind and rain into desert sand. And yet before one gets to them they may prove quite formidable heights, with precipitous sides and unsurmountable tops.” A few paragraphs later he continues,

“who of the desert has not spent his day riding at a mountain and never even reaching its base? This land of illusions and thin air. The vision is so cleared at times that the truth itself is deceptive.”38 Just in a few sentences Van Dyke already conveys a multitude of

36 Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1905), 19, 30. 37 Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1905), 40, 48. 38 John Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (New York: Scribner’s, 1912), 1-2.

23 impressions and attitudes. He sees the desert as an uncertain and deceptive environment which can nonetheless be appreciated instead of reviled.

Van Dyke was caught in a contradictory relationship which posited that civilization would result in the destruction of the object of appreciation and yet was necessary for aesthetic appreciation.39 Van Dyke was of this contradictory opinion for good reason. For him the desert was not “merely a sea of sand,” but a land that contained all the features of most countries such as mountains, plains and valleys, arroyos and mesas but was distinguished from other lands by its significant lack of water.40 This lack of water resulted in the sparse vegetation previous generations of travelers had lamented.

Van Dyke goes on to discuss the exposed nature of the desert land, “all told there is hardly enough covering to hide the anatomy of the earth.” The desert is “bare and bony,” rocks that “loom up harsh and sharp” like “vertebrae showing-elbows and shoulders protruding through the yellow byssus of sand.” 41 This nakedness attracted Van Dyke because it allowed him to focus on color instead of shape.

The Salton Basin, the subject of an entire chapter, the “bottom of the bowl,” dry at this point in time, delighted Van Dyke.42 This hollow of the desert “has the most wonderful light, air, and color imaginable… You are below sea-level, but instead of the ground about you sloping up and out, it apparently slopes down and away on every side.”43 He goes on to describe the basin as “the most decorative landscape in the world, a landscape all color, a dream landscape” where he sees incomparable examples of color,

39 Van Dyke, 57. 40 Van Dyke, 23-24. 41 Van Dyke, 28. 42 Van Dyke, 51. 43 Van Dyke, 55.

24 portrayed on nearby sand dunes, such as “air-blue, reflecting the sky overhead” in the early morning, “dazzling orange-colored light, waving and undulating” at noon, “rose or mauve” at sunset, and “under a blue moonlight [the dunes] shine white as icebergs in the northern seas.”44 Van Dyke considered his ability to observe color in such a pure environment to be of great value to the artist as “the great struggle of the modern landscapist is to get on with the least possible form and to suggest everything by tones of color, shades of light, drifts of air” because those “are the most sensuous qualities in nature and in art.”45

Van Dyke’s opportunity to appreciate the Salton Basin was short lived. The basin, as he saw it, fell prey to the destructive forces of human civilization shortly after his book, The Desert, was published in 1901. And while Van Dyke’s book may have reached only a small contemporary audience and therefore have been only slightly responsible for creating “desert appreciation,” it does provide core elements of the new

American aesthetic of the early twentieth century.

George Wharton James was “a former Methodist minister defrocked because of a sensational divorce” who took refuge in the desert.”46 Like John Van Dyke, James was also caught up in a fundamental contradiction. James was equally committed to “an appreciation for nature and an appreciation for American enterprise.”47 Like Smythe

James wanted to make the desert man’s friend through the subjugation of its water resources and thereby turn parts of the desert into fertile land that would support hundreds of settlers. Unlike Van Dyke, James was an actual witness to the rebirth of the

44 Van Dyke, 53, 56. 45 Van Dyke, 56. 46 Limerick, 118. 47 Hyde, 220; Limerick, 113, 126.

Salton Sea in 1905, when the Colorado River flooded and filled the Salton Basin, which had been dry since 1891. The severity of the flooding in 1905-1906 led James to fear that the forces of the Colorado would obliterate the agricultural potential of the entire

Imperial Valley by continuing to pour its waters into the basin.48 Among the many books

James wrote, one of them, Reclaiming the Arid West: The Story of the United States

Reclamation Service, celebrates the irrigation projects implemented by the United States government.49

At the same time that he advocated reclamation, James wanted to introduce people to the American West and engender in them an appreciation for this unique landscape. Most of James’s other works are essentially extremely detailed guidebooks illustrated with both drawings made by the author and photographs. Two books of his books are of particular interest to this case study: The Wonders of the Colorado Desert

(Southern California): Its Rivers and its Mountains, its Canyon and its Springs, its Life and its History, Pictured and Described Including an Account of a Recent Journey Made

Down the Overflow of the Colorado River to the Mysterious Salton Sea, originally published in two volumes in 1906 and 1907, and The Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe in the

High Sierras of California and Nevada: Its History, Indians, Discovery by Fremont,

Legendary Lore, Various Namings, Physical Characteristics, Glacial Phenomena,

Geology, Single Outlet, Automobile Routes, Historic Towns, Early Mining Excitements,

Steamer Ride, Mineral Springs, Mountain and Lake Resorts, Trail and Camping Out

48 George Wharton James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (Southern California): Its Rivers and its Mountains, its Canyon and its Springs, its Life and its History, Pictured and Described Including an Account of a Recent Journey Made Down the Overflow of the Colorado River to the Mysterious Salton Sea (Boston: Little & Brown, 1911), 503-518; deBuys, 65. 49 George Wharton James, Reclaiming the Arid West: The Story of the United States Reclamation Service (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1917).

Trips, Summer Residences, Fishing, Hunting, Flowers, Birds, Animals, Trees and

Chapparal, with a Full Account of the Tahoe National Forest, the Public Use of the

Water of Lake Tahoe and Much Other Interesting Matter, published in 1915.50 Seeing the entirety of the title for Lake of the Sky gives the reader an indication of the breadth of subjects covered in James’s books. Additional topics covered in Wonders of the

Colorado Desert include irrigation and reclamation, date-palm horticulture, “what the desert offers to the invalid,” and finally, a chapter entitled “The Lure of the Desert.”51 It is interesting to note that no such explanatory chapter of the aesthetic value of the given landscape apparently needed to be included in James’s book on Lake Tahoe.

Limerick considers James “a crucial figure in the transformation of attitudes: from the vulnerability of the overland travelers to the complacency of twentieth-century desert residents.” She states that this “transition required a considerable readjustment of the mechanisms of popular thought” and that James was preeminent in “realigning the relationship between Americans and deserts.”52 Hyde claims that, “James went to great lengths to make the desert seem attractive to tourists…Playing on the new pride

Americans had gradually developed in the distinctive appearance of their landscape, he claimed the desert was ‘strange, wonderful, and beautiful.’”53 She continues that, “James used a new method of description that relied on color, shape, geology, and analogies to ordinary objects.” James encouraged visitors “to look for surprises rather than objects that seemed familiar” and frequently cast the things travelers would see in religious

50 James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert (Southern California); James, The Lake of the Sky: Lake Tahoe in the High Sierras of California and Nevada. 51 James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, 271-276, 353-396, 519-520, 527-535. 52 Limerick, 124. 53 Hyde, 220.

27 terms. The yucca plant, for example, that when in bloom “needs little stretch of the imagination to see it as a glorious golden candlestick flaming before the hillside altar of

God’s majesty.”54

In 1952, The Desert Year was published by another intellectual, misanthrope, and

Eastern transplant, Joseph Wood Krutch. Like Van Dyke, Krutch appreciated the desert for its aesthetic qualities, but he considered immersion in the desert to be a crucial part to understanding this landscape. As he puts it, “no matter how often I looked at something I did no more than look. It was only a view or a sight. It threatened to become familiar without being really known and I realized that what I wanted was not to look at but to live with this thing whose fascination I did not understand.”55 According to Limerick,

Krutch had always felt alienated from society, he had difficulty relating to the concept of home when growing up in Tennessee, did not share other intellectuals’ infatuation with communism in the 1930s, and had detailed his despair with the human world in his book

The Modern Temper in 1929. Limerick states that, “for many nineteenth-century

Americans, traveling into the desert meant traveling into doubt and despair. Joseph

Wood Krutch reversed the sequence. Solidly committed to pessimism long before he saw a desert, Krutch found that the desert provided him with a route of escape from the ‘pit’ of ‘skepticism’ and ‘alienation.’”56 Krutch finds in the desert what he calls “gladness,” a sensation he attempts to define as a combination of physical well-being, aesthetic pleasure, but, most importantly, after all, an undefinable spiritual element. He describes this element as, “nature’s way here, her process and her moods, correspond to some

54 Hyde, 220. 55 Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2010), 8. 56 Limerick, 127.

28 mood which I find in myself” or alternatively, “something in myself can be projected upon the visible forms which nature assumes here.”57 These statements encapsulate the unquantifiable sensations, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that some people experience that make them prefer one landscape over another. Krutch is crucial to this analysis because he is one of the few people who gives voice to these unquantifiable sensations and thereby provides an example of what attracts others to the desert landscape.

Throughout the book Krutch discussed common subjects such as the flora and fauna of the desert, its native occupants throughout history, the impact of rainfall, the availability of space, the changing of the seasons, and the different types of desert of the

American West. Every one of these discussions is at the same time observation of his surroundings as well as philosophy on its meaning to human culture and nature. First and foremost, Krutch advocates awareness of one’s surroundings. He writes, “what one finds, after one has come to take for granted the grand general simplicity, will be what one takes the trouble to look for–the brilliant little flower springing improbably out of the bare, packed sand, the lizard scuttling with incredible speed from cactus clump to spiny bush, the sudden flash of a bright-colored bird.”58 Similarly he discusses standing on a mountaintop looking for “the answer” to be whispered into his ear by some deity or higher being. This does not come to pass so Krutch begins to deliberate on the scientific, spiritual, and sociologic considerations of being and in the end, after long deliberation,

57 Krutch, 11. 58 Krutch, 20, 38.

29 comes to the conclusion that the mountaintop revealed two realities: himself and a purple sunset.59

The entirety of The Desert Year is an attempt to answer the question posed in the introduction as to why he was so fascinated by the desert landscape. By the end of the book he still does not seem to have found an explanation. Trying to define what it is about a landscape that attracts or repulses us can be an extremely difficult undertaking.

Surely not all the people who embrace Slab City for its freedoms from dependence and oversight enjoy the 105-degree summer average temperature or the dust storms. Yet there must be something that makes up for the inconveniences and irritations that makes them chose this particular place of freedom over any other.

A composite answer to this question arises from the works discussed above. The people who continue to inhabit desert environments generally do so for a complex variety of reasons. For some of them it is simply a place in which they make a living from mining or agriculture, but even these people who look at the landscape from a purely utilitarian perspective may find in the desert landscape and environment elements that they would not want to leave behind in favor of a different place. The problem is that these people may not be able to enunciate the intangible aspects of the landscape that attract them. Others can define why they chose to reside in the desert even if they do not have an immediate connection to the land itself. They live in the desert because of the climate, the open spaces, or the sense of freedom. The problem in defining these people lies in range of desert living. Palm Springs is located in the desert, but it has a completely different environment than Victorville, a dusty, dilapidated town in the

59 Krutch, 123-136.

30 middle of the Mojave. In Palm Springs there are dozens of golf courses and parks, every street seems to be lined with trees, and every house has a lawn and a swimming pool.

The question is, does this environment still qualify as desert even though it is located in the desert at large? The answer is no. This environment encapsulates the transference of the European aesthetic into the desert landscape, the same endeavor that was attempted at the Salton Sea. This is the desert that most people want to live in. The real, unaltered desert is home to a minority of desert aesthetes and residents of convenience, those who would rather live anywhere else but are held in this place by work, poverty, or attachments not related to the landscape.

History of the Desert Aesthetic from the Perspective of Tourism and Recreation

The following section will briefly outline the evolution of the American aesthetic as it developed from a purely European landscape aesthetic to include an appreciation of uniquely American landscapes as can be found in the American West. The desert aesthetic, described through the works of several authors in the previous section, is a major component of this particularly American landscape aesthetic, in part because there is no significant European counterpart. The history of the evolution of the American desert aesthetic is crucial to my argument about people’s preference for one kind of landscape over another in that it demonstrates the long struggle for the desert landscape to be recognized as a landscape of value that is even remotely comparable to that of a pastoral landscape in the eyes of beholders. The following history aims to provide a chronological account of the development of the desert aesthetic by using diverse perspectives such as histories of western settlement, histories of tourism, and

31 representations of the desert experience by several “desert” writers. It also aims to demonstrate that the concept of value is flexible; a landscape that was valued at one time only for its timber resources can become a landscape where the resource “exploited” is its very aesthetic instead of a more tangible resource. It is also possible for these two, as well as additional, states of value to coexist at the same time.

As Roderick Nash recounts, in the early years of American colonization many settlers feared the “wilderness” they encountered on the new continent. Being accustomed to a landscape that had long been subjected to agricultural modifications they were intimidated by the natural landscape they encountered. At this time wilderness was described as “the gigantic quagmire that stretched some forty miles from Virginia into

North Caroline” or the dense forests that harbored potentially aggressive Native populations.60 As Anglo-American civilization domesticated the eastern United States this definition of wilderness became obsolete; yet an equally if not more intimidating and dangerous “wilderness” was encountered as Americans pushed further into the territory of the West. This wilderness was not the claustrophobic constriction of dense forest and swamp, but of wide open expanse. The “American West” is a migrating concept proceeding across the continent as explorers and settlers moved further and further westward.

At one point, the “West” was not so far from the East. John Mack Faragher describes the struggle for agricultural success in the prairie plains in his book Sugar

Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. He states that “the early immigrants…found the

60 John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 25-26; Nash, 23-31.

32 prairies an unfamiliar and hostile environment. Trained by experience for a life in the woods, pioneers repeated stories and tall tales of the dangers that accompanied travel across the shadeless expanses.” According to these tales men would succumb to the heat and exit a patch of tall grasses covered in rattlesnakes. Faragher goes on to quote Caleb

Atwater, who described the lack of aesthetic features to be found in the prairie landscape, when he commented on the lack of hills, waterways, and forests. Yet the true problem of agriculture in this area was the appearance of infertility based on vegetation as well as the farmers’ inability to break through the prairie soil because of the dense root structure of the native grasses.61 All of this describes the Illinois prairie, which still has the benefit of reliable precipitation and, despite Atwater’s complaint, the presence of considerable woodlands–to the edges of which settlers flocked when establishing their homesteads.62

As exploration and settlement proceeded westward the landscape was the wide open expanse that Henry Nash Smith refers to as the Great American Desert. Smith explains that “the existence of an uninhabitable desert east of the Rocky Mountains had first been announced to the American public in 1810” by Zebulon Pike. This western

“desert” landscape began at approximately the ninety-sixth meridian in eastern Kansas and Nebraska. What was really described by the term “Great American Desert” were the short grass prairies of the central states, which, while fertile, did not receive enough consistent rainfall to guarantee predictable agriculture. According to Smith it was not until drought resistant seeds and special cultivation methods were developed that

61 John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986), 82-83. 62 Faragher, 64-66.

33 permanent, reliable settlement of the drier regions to the west of the ninety-sixth meridian was possible.63

At the same time that there was one West in the Midwest there was also the West of California, where many people were drawn by gold as well as the land’s agricultural potential. In order to get to California, Oregon, and Washington these people had to cross the “real” deserts of America in which they found a new kind of wilderness that seemed not to offer even the hard-work success of prairie cultivation. As Limerick states,

“given a chance, the region of the Plains could vindicate itself. This was not a desert: at the worst, this was grazing land, and, at the best, this was land for dry farming.” Instead, as Limerick says, the real deserts are “regions with less than ten inches a year of rainfall, with sparse vegetation,” places where one can see “the ‘skeleton’ of the earth.”64

In Desert Passages, Limerick observes that if pioneers hated the wilderness because of the “lost ‘security of vision’” they encountered in forested areas, as Nash claims, then “the pioneers should have felt very good indeed when they reached the deserts.”65 Yet this has not proven true–the desert has probably accumulated a larger negative commentary than any forest or jungle. The reason behind this may lie in the basic perceptions of space common to all human beings that Yi-Fu Tuan outlines in his work, Space and Place. As briefly discussed above, Tuan states that spaciousness and

63 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970), 174-175; Limerick, 3. William E. Smythe states in The Conquest of Arid America that the dividing line between East and West is the ninety-seventh meridian. The 100th meridian is frequently cited as the dividing line because it coincides with a drop in annual precipitation to below ten inches per year. Limerick describes the western American desert as being composed of eastern Oregon and Washington, part of Idaho, most of Nevada and western and southern Utah, southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico, while other authors will include places such as Wyoming and Colorado. 64 Limerick, 3-5. 65 Limerick, 8.

34 crowding are antithetical feelings, but that it is difficult to determine why one person experiences these sensations under completely different circumstance than another person would. Tuan says, that these kinds of feelings, such as, “how much space a man needs to live comfortably,” are largely dependent on a culture’s conception of space as a resource.

Desert space appears to generally exceed the space necessary for a man to be comfortable with himself and his surroundings accounting for negative reactions to the desert landscape. 66

Tuan specifically addresses the attraction of the desert for what he calls the

“ascetic temperament.” He states that “a preference for the stark environment, bare as the desert or the monk’s cell, is contrary to the normal human desire for ease and abundance.

Yet people are known to have sought, repeatedly, the wilderness to escape…The yearning for simplicity, when it transcends social norms and requires the sacrifice of worldly goods…cannot be explained solely by the cultural values of the time.”67 As the history of the Salton Sea will demonstrate, it is an environment that in its present state is attractive to those living outside the “social norm”; but this does not account for its unsustainability when “ease and abundance” were a possibility.

A generally negative perception of the value of the western American landscape, particularly the desert landscape, influenced American travel and tourism until the late

1880s.68 According to John Sears “tourism had become well established in Europe, and particularly in England, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century.” In America, on the other hand, tourism did not become a popular pastime until the 1820s and 1830s. The

66 Tuan, Space and Place, 51, 57. 67 Tuan, Topophilia, 51-52. 68 Hyde, 191-243; Limerick, 91-94. Both authors describe the change in perception from negative to positive over time, but both assert that it took a considerable period of time for perception to change.

35 reasons for this delay are that, “tourism requires a population with money and the leisure to travel, an adequate means of transportation, and conditions of reasonable safety and comfort at the places people got to visit. It also demands a body of images and descriptions of those places–a mythology of unusual things to see–to excite people’s imaginations and induce them to travel.”69 Despite these conditions, which were resolved over time and across the continent, there was significant motivation for the pursuit of tourism for as Sears puts it, “tourism played a powerful role in America’s invention of itself as a culture. According to Sears the concepts of culture and landscape had been so closely associated with each other through the works of authors such as William

Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, as to be considered identical. Americans had always sought their identity in relationship to the land and he, therefore, considers it inevitable that “when they set out to establish a national culture…they would turn to the landscape of America as the basis of that culture.”70

Crucial to this development of a national culture was Americans’ desire to match

European standards and “to develop a distinct national image.”71 For several decades, while Americans came to appreciate such eastern features as Niagara Falls and the pastoral landscape of the Connecticut and Hudson river valleys, the western landscape was not yet recognized and valued for its own unique nature.72 Tourists in this time period were seeking a visible cultural history represented through architecture and art as well as beautiful or sublime scenery, health benefits, comfortable accommodations, and entertainment. Until the last decades of the nineteenth century average Americans, rather

69 Sears, 3. 70 Sears, 4. 71 Sears, 4. 72 Sears, 12-30, 49-71.

36 than discovering the new in the New World, continued to seek the Old World in the new.73 In California, Americans recognized Italy, the Riviera, Palestine, Naples, and

Greece. The Rocky Mountains were compared to the Swiss Alps, “Pikes Peak to Mont

Blanc,” and Colorado to Switzerland.74 As Earl Pomeroy puts it, “the tourists of the post-

Civil War generation seemed in the main to demand of the American West that it correspond closely to standards that were Eastern [and European] rather than Western.”75

This is not to say that people did not travel throughout the American West in great numbers, but they did so primarily for reasons that excluded aesthetics. The West was traversed by explorers who sought to collect information about landforms and waterways among other things. It was populated by Spanish settlers who had come north from

Mexico and remained after the land was ceded to the United States and by settlers crossing the desert regions on the Overland Trail to reach the fertile lands of California,

Oregon, and Washington in order to establish agricultural settlements and ranches. It was populated by Mormons who sought land and freedom in Utah and by miners who sought gold and silver in the mountains of California and Nevada. To claim that the West was an empty land as the term desert may imply would be incorrect, but the fact remains that initially only a small minority of these people came west to observe the region’s natural features for leisure and aesthetic purposes.

As tourism migrated westward, along the tracks of the 1870’s Transcontinental

Railroad, into uniquely American landscapes such as the Rocky Mountains and the western states, developers and travelers continued to seek out landscapes and build

73 Pomeroy, 32. 74 Pomeroy, 32-34; Hyde, 135-137 75 Pomeroy, 73.

37 resorts that reminded them of Europe.76 An example of such a destination is Colorado

Springs founded by General William J. Palmer in 1871. At this location in “the

Switzerland of America” Palmer intended to provide American tourists familiar with

European standards of travel a place that would provide luxury, comfort, scenery, climate, health, and historical association to European precedent. As Hyde noted, “when he dreamed up the concept of the neighboring resorts of Colorado Springs and Manitou, he intended to create a European spa in an American setting, with the addition of proper scenery to make it authentic.”77

While Colorado Springs capitalized on its resemblance to the Alps, the Hotel Del

Monte in Monterey capitalized on California’s similarities to the Mediterranean environment. Again a healthful climate and luxurious accommodations were central attractions to this location in the “New Italy”. Lacking in both sites were historical features comparable “to the buried cities of Greece, the Renaissance heritage of Italy, and the ruined castles and cathedrals of France, Germany, and England.”78 Since historical features could not simply be created this gap was filled through the promotion of natural, but spectacular, landscape features such as the Rocky Mountains, Echo Canyon, and the

Sierra Nevada by a variety of promoters. Chief among these promoters were Union and

Central Pacific railroads; writers such as Horace Greeley and Mark Twain; artists and photographers such as Albert Bierstadt and Carleton E. Watkins; and not least, a large

76 Hyde, 53-54. 77 Hyde, 148. 78 Hyde, 163.

38 quantity of guidebooks describing the beauties and remarkable features of select parts of the American West.79

Despite this range of promotional efforts highlighting the exceptional geographical features and the unique scenery of the American West its vast desert expanses continued to be a problem when it came to advertising the region from an aesthetic perspective. Hyde quotes the writer Grace Greenwood, who “found a landscape without atmosphere, verdure, or inspiration quite threatening. ‘The great brown hills seemed to me,’ she wrote, ‘not only utterly denuded, but flayed, stripped of all covering of nature, and gashed and scarred and marred and maltreated in every way.’”80 A particular hatred for “the ubiquitous presence of the sagebrush” permeated the writings of many travelers.81 In response to the vast “waste,” “barrenness,” and “nakedness” several guidebooks and tourist accounts recommended drawing the shades of one’s train compartment and spending the passage through the desert with the distractions offered by the Pullman car appointments or simply in sleep.82 The relief experienced when the train reached the Sierra Nevada is palpable when one reads the descriptions of this event collected by Hyde. She again quotes author Grace Greenwood, this time describing the comfort she experienced seeing “wooded hillsides again,” while another writer described that “his feeling upon seeing the wooded slopes of the Sierra would be to quote Dante’s

Inferno at the moment the protagonist left Hell for the ‘bright world.’”

Hyde goes on the describe the delight travelers took in “cool greenery and mountain snow” by citing comments such as “the day is not far when the fame and

79 Hyde, 53-146. 80 Hyde, 139. 81 Hyde, 138. 82 Hyde, 119, 128, 138-139; Pomeroy, 61-62, 66.

39 influence of the Sierra Nevada Mountains…will not only rank with but eclipse even that of the Alps…” and “European tourists that we converse with say that the Alps do not produce anything so grand, or so much of it, as do these Nevada ranges.”83 These complimentary statements about the Sierra Nevada imply a fundamental preference of most travelers for the mountainous and verdant environment offered by this geographical area, despite the fact that “many writers found parts of the trip across the Sierra a disappointment, mostly because of the unfortunate location of the new track” which, naturally, “avoided the highest peaks of the Rockies and the Sierra.”84 This continued attraction to a landscape that conforms to the parameters of a European sense of aesthetics but is adapted to a western American environment explains much about the popularity of and fascination with Lake Tahoe. Even during the years when the Tahoe

Basin’s forests had been clear-cut and little of the rousing scenery described early on by the likes of Mark Twain remained, people continued to come to Lake Tahoe as a travel destination.85

Hyde states that, “this scenery challenged the notions of many Americans that they could control the landscape, that they could make the deserts bloom.”86 Despite the fact that most travelers were discouraged by the forbidding environment of the desert, it had already proved refuge to one group who found in the desert the freedom that later desert dwellers have characterized as one of its chief attractions. Mormon settlement in the Utah Territory in 1847 was the first Anglo-American occupation of the desert

83 Hyde 135. 84 Hyde 104. 85 Peter Goin and C. Elizabeth Raymond, Stopping Time: A Rephotographic Survey of Lake Tahoe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 15. 86 Hyde, 138.

40 landscape on a large scale and, despite opposition and hardship, it thrived largely because of its institution of desert irrigation. By the time the transcontinental railroad connected with Salt Lake City in 1870, the area provided the traveler “with the aesthetic relief of fertile fields as well as the spectacle of interesting marital associations.”87 In 1900, an infrastructure project to rival that of the Mormon irrigation system was initiated by a group of men under the title of the California Development Company. This company would ultimately be responsible for the blooming of the agricultural empire of western

America, the Imperial Valley as well as the accidental creation of the current iteration of the Salton Sea in 1905-1906.88

While Utah provided the Mormon settlers with a “Promised Land” that allowed them to express their religious beliefs as well as shape the desert, “irrigation crusader”

William E. Smythe believed that “the arid regions of the American West would be both the location and cause of the nation’s redemption” by providing all the “surplus man” with the same opportunity.89 At the turn of the 19th century Smythe offered middle class

Americans, displaced by the growth of corporations, “an alternative environment in which they could recover control of their lives.”90 For Smythe this control would be provided through desert reclamation in two ways. On the one hand, desert reclamation would provide the “surplus man” with the opportunity to become economically independent through the intense cultivation of the “small-farm unit” by means of irrigation.91 On the other hand, the “surplus man” would become a warrior for God, who

87 Pomeroy, 64. 88 deBuys, 76. 89 Limerick, 80-81. 90 Limerick, 80. 91 Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1905), 43-46.

41 would finish shaping the desert environment, that God had only partially created, into fertile land.92 This appeal to a religious motivation for desert appreciation recalls John

Sears explanation of the construction of an American cultural identity through “their relationship to the land they had settled.” Sears cites an article by Patrick McGreevy which compares Americans’ travels to Niagara Falls to the pilgrimages of the Middle

Ages. Sears states that, the “destination was a waterfall rather than a cathedral, but as one of God’s grandest, if not the grandest of His creations, Niagara revealed to the nineteenth-century tourist His power and glory.”93 So while the desert might not yet be a cathedral in the eyes of most of its visitors, Smythe envisioned its transformation by means of irrigation into just such an environment which could appeal to all who saw it.

The efforts of Mormon settlers, the California Development Company, and irrigation enthusiasts such as Smythe created one vision of how the desert should look and how it should be utilized in order to be useful and to qualify as a valuable resource on an economic as well as an aesthetic level.

As already briefly mentioned, a great variety of people traversed the American

West for a great number of reasons. In his book In Search of the Golden West: the

Tourist in Western America, Earl Pomeroy discusses several types of desert users who, in his interpretation, originated from and existed simultaneously with the western tourist.

One of these was the sportsman, whom Pomeroy describes as a man who “often…frankly was not interested primarily in the climactic thrill of bagging the game but in the life outdoors.”94 These sportsmen frequently became western residents establishing ranches

92 Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (1905), 41-48, 327-331. 93 Sears, 4-6. 94 Pomeroy, 82.

42 and becoming stock raisers.95 Another significant early appreciator of the western environment, both desert and mountain, was the naturalist, who journeyed “simply for pleasure, and to study the ways of birds, beasts, and fishes.”96 These people contributed the element of independent exploration and the desire for recreation, not just sightseeing, to western American tourism. Pomeroy states that in the early years Easterners and foreigners far outnumbered Californians in the Yosemite Valley; he says, “those who had fought the elements across the continent for a home were relatively less interested in climbing mountains for amusement.”97

Both Hyde and Pomeroy date the beginning of what can be termed “desert appreciation” to approximately the 1890s. Pomeroy explains this development as the result of an increase in outdoor recreation that went beyond hunting to include such pastimes such as canoeing, bicycling, and mountaineering. Pomeroy states that, “the indoor American, sedentary and dyspeptic of disposition, as he had seemed in the seventies, was giving way to a new American whose taste for outdoor amusements made

Englishmen compare him to the Parisian and the Viennese.”98 Similarly Hyde cites several tourists who relished their immersion in “western wilderness” by describing the visceral feelings of being removed from “the trappings of civilization” and experiencing the “sense of utter freedom and independence.”99

This evolution of the outdoor American was facilitated by the extension of railroad services that made access to such places as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and

95 Pomeroy, 78-79. 96 Pomeroy, 88. 97 Pomeroy, 88-89. 98 Pomery, 145. 99 Hyde, 217.

Lake Tahoe possible. The subsequent availability of the automobile, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, increased this mobility even more, making it possible to travel on an individual schedule and, depending on the resilience of the vehicle and the availability of rudimentary roads, to reach places of ever increasing remoteness.

Pomeroy quotes from both Outing and Sunset to demonstrate the benefits of automobile travel as “to possess a car is to become possessed of a desire to go far afield” and it enables the man “who thrills in elemental contact with the reality of nature…” to access a far greater range of destinations.100 Pomeroy does not limit his observations to the logistical. He also notes that “a visitor to the Grand Canyon early in the century recalled that ‘people stopped between two trains, stopped, looked and listened, marveled at the scene or complained of the cost… Some looked on speechless until they fainted or prayed; the rest ran away to buy post-card pictures of it and inscribe them with cant phrases of approval’” while “ten years later the tourist seemed more appreciative and intelligent; a stay of a week or two had become more normal.”101 Hyde describes this change as being the results of the fact that “too many places had no resemblance to

European scenes but still had spectacular qualities” and that a combination of access to and description of the “variety and distinctive beauty” of the American West, “in addition to a growing national self-confidence, provided the language and tools necessary to create a distinct American aesthetic.”102

Major contributors to the development of the American aesthetic were the already mentioned surveyors of the West such as John C. Frémont and Clarence King as well as

100 Hyde, 297; Pomeroy, 146-147. 101 Pomeroy, 152. 102 Hyde, 190-191.

44 writers, promoters, photographers, and painters such as Horace Greeley, Mark Twain,

William E. Smythe, Albert Bierstadt, and Carleton E. Watkins. While these men laid the foundation of understanding and appreciation of the American West as a whole, the appreciation of the desert for the desert’s sake comes from the work of a number of other contributors. A significant part of the desert appreciation that developed at the end of the

19th century was the realization that America did have a significant history, as well as an accessible pre-history, that could compete with the historical offerings of Europe.

According to Hyde, “tourists, infatuated with the idea of ancient history in the United

States, now sought out the very Indians they had so long avoided.”103 Anthropologists and ethnologists had begun to discover the deserts of the Southwest as historically fertile places in the late 1880s with events such as the discovery of Mesa Verde in 1888. 104

Tourists followed these discoveries because of the publicity and appreciation the areas received from writers and artists such as Charles Lummis, George Wharton James, John

Van Dyke, Joseph Wood Krutch, Mary Hunter Austin, and Bert Phillips.105

These writers had a completely different attitude towards the desert than Grace

Greenwood and the other writers who recommended drawing the blinds when traversing the desert or those, like Smythe, who advocated reshaping the desert into a garden. They were no longer afraid of the desert because of its potential for suffering and death or its apparent barrenness, instead they were attracted by “the stark, harsh quality that had repelled an earlier generation.” To these writers and artists the desert seemed like a last

103 Hyde, 214. 104 Peter Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1982), 123. 105 Pomeroy, 160; Limerick, 95-126; Hyde, 213, 216.

45 refuge in a world that had been cultivated toward convenience and comfort.106 Van Dyke saw the desert from an artistic perspective that embraced its colors and its purity. He said in his 1901 book, The Desert, “the weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love.”107 James styled himself as an artist, writer, and promoter. In 1906 when he wrote his book about the Colorado desert he described it as a contradictory place. He wrote, “the desert calls with insistent voice to many and diverse minds. It has a fascination, a charm that grows more potent the more one is subject to its influence. To average persons this attractiveness is a mystery,—the desert to them is everything but attractive” and yet “the preacher has not yet appeared on earth who can speak to the human heart as forcefully as the desert speaks.”108 Krutch saw the desert from yet another perspective-that of the philosopher who attributes to the desert a certain anthropomorphism. In 1952 Krutch wrote, “the desert lies peaceful in the sun and repeats with tireless satisfaction its two themes–either cactus, paloverde, mesquite, and sand, or yucca, agave, and ocotillo. It has discovered its modes and it sticks to them; content to do what it can do, indifferent to your attention or lack of it. Love me or hate me, the desert seems to say, this is what I am and this is what I shall remain” and take it, embrace it, for what it was Krutch did.109

Through just these few statements this new generation of writers illustrates a fundamental shift in how some people now saw the desert, but this should by no means imply that all people’s perceptions of the desert landscape changed to one of unconditional appreciation.

106 Pomeroy, 160 107 Van Dyke, 19. 108 James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, 527-528. 109 Krutch, 20.

Hyde attributes great importance to the work of James and artists such as Thomas

Moran and Frederic Remington because their new styles allowed “Americans [to] see the desert with new eyes.”110 According to Hyde, as these artists provided new ways of seeing the American Southwest, travel promoters such as railroad officials and guidebook publishers altered their presentation of this area accordingly. Instead of drawing one’s blinds as the train travels through the southwestern desert, Hyde quotes one journalist as recommending, “the route of the Atlantic and Pacific Railway, noting that on its line a passenger would see ‘active civilization, much Mexican passivity, strange rock scenery and stranger vegetation, and enough Indians of all kinds to quite satisfy his curiosity.’”111

The recognition of the Southwest’s Native American and Spanish heritage became central to the early 20th century’s assessment of aesthetic value of the region.

Previously ignored Native American cultures now became central attractions for travelers as “the folklore, religion, fine arts, and architecture of the southwestern Indians demonstrated that North America did offer a rich historical tradition and one that differed greatly from the Old World culture admired by white Americans.”112

This desire to encounter a more authentic or at least more uniquely American landscape is apparent in the change in architecture that tourist destinations underwent.

When William Palmer founded his resort in Colorado Springs in 1871 he aimed to replicate Switzerland in the Rocky Mountains, but when Robert Reamer was hired to design a new hotel for Yellowstone National Park in 1902, he conceptualized a structure

110 Hyde, 227. 111 Hyde. 223. 112 Hyde, 234.

47 that was undoubtedly grand, but one that also complemented its setting.113 Instead of drawing on the Victorian precedents of hotels such as the Del Monte in Monterey,

Reamer created a structure, that “appeared as if it had been spawned by the same forces of nature that had created Yellowstone,” whose rough stone and huge logs “suggested a forceful and primeval permanence, while the gnarled and twisted branches used as exterior trim and porch railing demonstrated the same malevolent forces that had tortured the earth in the thermal basins.”114 A similar change in architectural trends in visible in the 1905 design of the El Tovar hotel on the rim of the Grand Canyon and the subsequent construction of the adjacent Hopi House, which served as a demonstration site for local

Native American culture and crafts.115 Aggressive promotion of the Grand Canyon destination led one 1916 tourist, quoted by Hyde, to declare that the area had become “a resort, rather than merely a stopping place.”116

Beginning in the 1930s a number of large scale infrastructure projects, primarily in the form of dams, were constructed which greatly added to the recreational potential of the Southwest. Two examples are the construction of Hoover and Parker dams in 1931 to 1936 and 1934 to 1938 respectively, which resulted in the creation of Lake Mead and

Lake Havasu respectively. The reason for the building of the dams lies in a combination of electricity generation and water management, but the creation of the reservoirs resulted

113 Hyde, 148, 255. 114 Hyde, 256. 115 Hyde, 276-277. 116 Hyde, 279.

48 in sizable, stable bodies of water in the middle of the desert which would prove to be attractive places of recreation for residents and tourists alike.117

The concept of continual change in perception and appreciation provides the baseline of my interpretation of one landscape’s “success” over another. Essentially my thesis represents a qualification of the claim, made by Earl Pomeroy in In Search of the

Golden West and Anne Hyde in An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and

National Culture, 1820-1920, that American landscape sentiment underwent a conversion in favor of the desert aesthetic. Hyde claims that “a combination of scientific effort and growing national confidence allowed Americans to see the far western landscape for what it was: a treasure trove of symbols for a powerful national culture, one that combined ideals developed in the East with realities presented by the West.”118 It is my claim that the development of a desert aesthetic described above is a far more specific, or individually oriented, and considerably less lasting phenomenon than Hyde and Pomeroy describe, as the case of the Salton Sea demonstrates. The Salton Sea environment requires a predisposition among its inhabitants towards this “desert aesthetic.” When reshaping the desert environment into a place with lush lawns, palm trees, and golf courses–a desert oasis–proved impossible because of the lack of the “critical mass of economic activity” William deBuys considers necessary for the creation of the Salton

Riviera it failed.119 Too small percentage of people proved to possess the desert aesthetic

117 Anthony F. Arrigo, Imaging Hoover Dam: The Making of a Cultural Icon (Reno: U of Nevada P, 2014), 220, 232-235. 118 Hyde, 304. 119 deBuys, 212. DeBuys states that, “clearly, what the place [Salton City] needed was more people, enough to generate the critical mass of economic activity that would pay for services and amenities, as well as prop up land values.” The question remains, why did so few of the hundreds of people that bought land actually establish residences in Salton City?

49 necessary to appreciate the landscape without alteration. The contrasting continuous popularity of Lake Tahoe the surrounding environment illustrates the underlying landscape aesthetic preference of the majority.

Based on this understanding of the limited attraction of the desert aesthetic and the continuing prominence of the European landscape aesthetic, I contend that the Salton

Sea could only have flourished if environmental and economic conditions had favored the reshaping of the landscape into the “Palm Springs-by-the-Sea” that promoters promised it would become.120 Despite Hyde and Pomeroy’s claim of the ascendance of a desert aesthetic, Americans still cling to the European aesthetic and attempt to make the desert bloom by raising plants, commercially and residentially, that are unsustainable in the environment of the West. Doing so diverts critical environmental resources towards these reshaping projects and ends up further damaging these environments, obliviously reinforcing the rejection of the desert aesthetic. Ultimately, I suggest, Americans continue to perceive the desert as a landscape of little intrinsic value.

120 “Salton Riviera,” advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1961, 42.

Chapter 2: The Palm and the Pine - Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe was always perceived as being useful, with the only change over the years being what aspect of the lake was useful. It was seen by the Native American population as a seasonally important part of their subsistence culture. As Anglo-

Americans settled the area, it was seen as a perpetual supporting resource for the thriving

Nevada mining industry. Once these resources proved exhaustible, the previously recognized beauty of the region was perceived as the backbone of a growing recreational industry within the Tahoe Basin. It has been the goal of a number of local, state, and federal agencies as well as business and private stakeholders to find a balance between the need for growth, economic and developmental, for the financial well-being of the area with the need to mitigate environmental change so that Lake Tahoe will continue to thrive on its aesthetic qualities and not become a victim of its own success.

“With Mr. Preuss, I ascended to-day the highest peak to the right; from which we had a beautiful view of a mountain lake at our feet, about fifteen miles in length, and so entirely surrounded by mountains that we could not discover an outlet,” writes John C.

Frémont in the February 14th, 1844 entry of his report of his 1843-44 expeditions to

Oregon and northern California.121 With such brevity, and from fairly far away, describes Frémont his first and only recorded glimpse of a lake that would take on legendary dimensions in the American landscape because of its clarity and bright blue color.

121 Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence, eds. The Expeditions of John Charles Frémont: Volume 1 Travels from 1838 to 1844 (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1970), 635.

According to Donald Jackson, editor of the writings of Frémont, the lake seen so briefly was called Mountain Lake on the maps of early editions of A Report of the

Exploring Expeditions to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44, until it was renamed Lake Bonpland by 1848. In 1853 the lake was renamed Lake Bigler, a change that did not last long as the popularity of John Bigler, then governor of California, declined. In 1862 the U.S. General Land Office changed the lake’s name to Lake Tahoe, a change that did not take official effect until 1945, due to California continuing to call it

Lake Bigler.122 Regardless of official appellation, Lake Tahoe was described as the “gem of the Sierras” by George M. Wheeler in 1889, a title that has transformed over the years into the phrase “jewel of the Sierra” in many descriptive essays and other promotional materials.123

Mark Twain had considerably more to say about Lake Tahoe, describing it in prose:

The forest about us was dense and cool, the sky above us was cloudless and brilliant with sunshine, the broad lake before us was glassy and clear, or rippled and breezy, or black and storm-tossed, according to Nature’s mood; scarred with land-slides, cloven by canyons and valleys, and helmeted with glittering snow, fitly framed and finished the noble picture. The view was always fascinating, bewitching, entrancing. The eye was never tired of gazing, night or day, in calm or storm; it suffered but one grief, and that was that it could not look always, but must close sometimes in sleep.124

122 Jackson, 635; Makley, A Short History of Lake Tahoe, 18-19. 123 George M. Wheeler, Report upon United States Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 103; sources for the phrase “Jewel of the Sierra” are diverse ranging from postcards such as this one on Ebay (https://tinyurl.com/yc9d3jmt) to a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tx6MtLYOEo) to a range of articles in magazines and websites such as MotorHome, Sunnyscope, and Forbes). 124 Mark Twain, Roughing It (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1972), 167.

He continued on to describe the water of Lake Tahoe as being, “So singularly clear…that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air!”125

The use of Lake Tahoe by Twain and the other newer, non-Native American, settlers was as an economic resource by providing the lumber required by the thriving mining industry in Nevada. The prevailing notion was that these resources were limitless and this further reinforced the perception of the natural resources at the lake as an economic resource. Following false reports of a silver strike in the mountains around

Lake Tahoe, entrepreneurs sought wealth at the Lake, were encouraged by the passage, in

1862, of the Pacific Railway Act and, in 1878, of the Timber and Stone Act. Both acts authorized selling public lands for small fees. Mining had become a lumber-intensive industry following the 1860 adoption of Phillipp Deidesheimer’s square-set mining supports in Virginia City silver mines. Lumber also supplied the railroad industry with significant quantities of wood in the form of building materials and fuel.

Lake Tahoe was initially seen as a necessary resource for industries more important to the country’s economic well-being rather than as an environment of any intrinsic value. Lake Tahoe’s intrinsic, aesthetic, and cultural values were generally not recognized until after its resources had been harvested and the environment substantially , if temporarily, altered. This habit of use and concomitant change became a pattern for

Lake Tahoe Basin administration, but an equally important habit became the preservation and conservation efforts enacted, often by the same parties such as businesses and landowners.

125 Twain, 168.

Duane L. Bliss provides an excellent example of this perception of the Lake

Tahoe region. He was the president of the Carson and Tahoe Lumber Fluming Company

(CTFLC), a company founded in 1873 by Bliss, Henry M. Yerington, and Darius Ogden

Mills, in order to take advantage of the abundant timber in the area. At one point the company owned and logged upwards of fifty thousand acres of land around Lake Tahoe.

Originally the company logged the east side of the lake but expanded to the south and west side of the lake as they logged all of the easily available timber in their original acreage. By the 1890s, the lumber industry on the lake declined as the easily accessible timber in the region had been logged and the mines of the Comstock Lode became unproductive. Over half a million cords of wood and 750 million board feet of lumber were taken from the Lake Tahoe area at the end of the lumber industry on the lake126.

Logging destroyed a significant portion of the new growth trees as well. The slash left over from logging further hindered the growth of any new trees and erosion brought sediment into the lake. Sawdust left over from the lumber mills also flowed into the waterways. The destruction of the forest in the area was so immense that even Bliss himself acknowledged the denuded state in which they left the area noting that “we have cleaned off not only what was fit for logs but what would make wood.”127 The destruction of the environment was acknowledged in newspapers of the time, especially as during this period it was generally believed that negative changes in precipitation were connected to the destruction of forests.128 Despite this prevailing belief, the importance of the environment in and around Lake Tahoe was considered secondary to the Comstock

126 Edward B. Scott, The Saga of Lake Tahoe (San Francisco: The Filmer Bros. Press, 1957), 289. 127 Makley, A Short History of Lake Tahoe, 35; Douglas H. Strong, Tahoe: An Environmental History (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1984), 24-30. 128 John Ise, The United States Forest Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1920), 33.

Lode’s importance for the country’s economy.129 On September 14, 1881 the Reno

Evening Gazette warned that:

There is occasionally found a man who believes that the timber on the Truckee is about exhausted, and such items find their way into careless newspapers frequently. A study of the country will convince the most careless observer that the ocean of timber bounded on the west by the Summit, on the east by the sage brush valleys of Washoe Lake and the Carson on the north by Sierra Valley, and on the south by Lake Tahoe, has hardly been tapped. It is true that many hillsides have been denuded by wood choppers, and large patches cleaned out by sawmills…it is within the truth that the great canyon of the Truckee and its tributaries would stand a similar draft for fifty years to come…A city like San Francisco could be built out of such a body of timber and it would never be noticed.130

The Truckee Republican went further in an article from February 2, 1887, asking the question:

“Preserve our forests for future generations,” say the writers. Why? How do we know that future generations will require these forests? The science of the future may condemn as false our notions as to the necessities of coming generations. Besides, the future generations would not thank us for thinking of them, and if they did, their gratitude would avail us nothing—we would be dead. Let us take care of ourselves first…The wants of the people must be supplied and at as little cost as possible.131

The perception was that the beauty of the land was important but the economic benefits of using the land’s resources was vital.

The logging industry was not the only one to damage the early Lake Tahoe environment. In order to feed workers in the lumber and mining industry and, later, to supply restaurants in San Francisco and beyond; and due to a growth in sport fishing at the resorts, fishermen overfished Lake Tahoe. The first commercial fishing operation

129 Donald J. Pisani, “Lost Parkland: Lumbering & Park Proposals in the Tahoe-Truckee Basin,” Journal of Forest History 21(1), 1977, 10. 130 “Truckee Timber. The Supply in the Basin of the Truckee and its Tributaries. Careful Estimates of the Quantities that Can be Brought into the Market,” Reno Evening Gazette, September 14, 1881, p. 3 131 Truckee Republican, February 2, 1887, p.2

55 was established on the lake in 1859 and, three years later, several tons of fish were being taken out of the lake. At the hotels, an average catch from one of the small boats that ferried guests out on the lake was approximately twenty per hour for a novice fisherman and more for experienced fisherman. Trout catches on the lake were not limited and trout tallies on each boat was measured by the hundreds daily.132 The overall feeling towards the resources on and around the lake was one of unending plenty. An 1881 article in a local paper, the “Tahoe Tattler,” gives a good example of this view of the fish (and other resources) on the lake:

Fishing for silver trout has now been going on in Lake Tahoe for more than twenty years, but the old fisherman and residents of the vicinity say there never has been a season when more have been taken than in this, hence, we may safely argue that they grow faster than they can be taken out, and the supply is practically inexhaustible so long as no other means than the hook is resorted to for taking them.133

Overfishing on the lake was in itself not the major reason for the decline of the native fish population though it did play a deciding factor in their eventual extinction.

The major contributing factor to the extinction of the cutthroat trout on Lake Tahoe was the disruption caused by the damming of the lake’s outlet to the Truckee River in order to use Lake Tahoe as a storage reservoir for U.S. Bureau of Reclamation irrigation projects.134 The dam interrupted the migration of the trout from Pyramid Lake to Lake

Tahoe to spawn. The lack of a sustainable spawning population on the lake, combined with the added pressure of commercial and recreational fishing, decreased the trout

132 Scott, 155-157. 133 Tahoe Tattler, July 20, 1881, 1. 134 Donald J. Pisani, “Conflict over Conservation: The Reclamation Service and the Tahoe Contract,” Western Historical Quarterly 10, no.2 (April 1979), 173.

56 population to the point that, by the 1920s the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout was declared extinct on the lake135.

Other agricultural industries, such as raising cattle and especially sheep, further damaged the surrounding land that had been stripped of its trees. The slash from clear- cutting inhibited growth of new trees but not of grasses, which were destroyed instead by the sheep. Sheepherders were also blamed for a series of intentional fires set in the area in order to encourage the growth of swift-growing forage for their sheep. This practice destroyed any young trees that had managed to survive logging and the fires made their way into timber stands that were too inaccessible to be economically logged.

Additionally, sheep overgrazed the new growth, exposing the land to erosion.136

E. A. Sterling, an assistant in the U.S. Bureau of Forestry, toured the Tahoe Basin in 1904. Sterling advocated action by the federal government to protect Lake Tahoe but he did not think it was possible without a federal land ownership on the lake and laws to regulate industries on Lake Tahoe. He concluded that there was little hope for saving the forests surrounding Lake Tahoe, not because it could not be done, but because the local population would oppose and resist any laws enacted to save Lake Tahoe.137 This pattern of local resistance to regulation would reassert itself repeatedly throughout the twentieth century and continues in the twenty first century.

Another industry on the lake began to ascend as the lumber companies’ profitability declined—tourism. By 1888, Lake Tahoe hosted a few thousand visitors annually, and by the end of the 19th century the number of visitors had doubled. By the

135 California Department of Fish and Game, Region II, A Report on Lake Tahoe and its Tributaries, Fisheries Management vs. Trial and Error (Sacramento, California: Office of State Printing, 1957), p. 4-5. 136 Strong, 31-32. 137 Strong, 30-32.

57 early years of the 20th century, over twenty sizeable resort hotels operated on the shores of Lake Tahoe, primarily serving well-to-do guests who could afford the train trip (via a narrow gauge railroad built by the Bliss family that connected Truckee to Tahoe City) to the lake and the high costs of the resorts.138

In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt signed the Newlands Reclamation Act. This act, which established the U.S. Reclamation Service, sought to reclaim water from rivers and lakes for agricultural use in desert areas. Engineers for the U.S. Reclamation Service sought to use the half of the flow of the Truckee River in order to supply over 200,000 acres in the Carson Sink with the necessary irrigation for farming.139 The U.S.

Reclamation Service attempted to purchase access to the water of Lake Tahoe but a power company, the Truckee River General Electric Company (soon acquired by Stone-

Webster and Company), already owned the dam required to control Lake Tahoe’s water.

The power company agreed to divert water for the Reclamation Service’s project as long as the federal government allowed them to use Lake Tahoe as a storage area for their own business purpose, which was to produce a steady supply of hydroelectrically-generated power to towns in Nevada.

Business and property owners on the lake began to worry about how artificially induced changes in the water levels of Lake Tahoe would affect the tourism industry in the area. In 1905 property owners on the lake filed an injunction to prevent the federal government constructing a new dam, arguing that it would result in property damage and hamper the recreational potential in the area due to flooding caused by holding back

138 Warriner, J and Ricky Warriner, Lake Tahoe: An Illustrated Guide and History (San Francisco: Fearon Publishers, 1958), 50-51. 139 Pisani, “Conflict over Conservation,” 167-168.

58 water in the spring and the drop in water levels due to release of the water during the summer for agriculture.140 Perceptions about the lake’s use varied widely depending upon the group. Local businesses began to see the importance of maintaining the water level of the lake even if they could not yet conceive of the importance of maintaining its ecology. The Truckee River General Electric Company saw the lake only as a storage system for potential energy to be created for towns in Nevada. The U.S. Reclamation

Service looked at the lake only as a means of making desert land fertile for agriculture.

These varying perspectives on Lake Tahoe’s value resulted in the first in a long series of private, state, and federal lawsuits and legislative edicts by the states of California and

Nevada over the future of the lake.141

The first lawsuit to preserve the lake was brought in 1912 by William Kent, an ex-

US congressman and property owner at Lake Tahoe, in response to a leak of the contract between the federal government and Stone and Webster to the press.142 The leaked agreement proposed the federal government would control the water outlet, including using any stored water for irrigation projects. In exchange, Stone and Webster would receive a guaranteed flow for their generators and the right to construct a water tunnel from the lake to western Nevada. Kent, working with other Tahoe landowners, enlisted the aid of the National Conservation Association to defeat the agreement between Stone-

Webster and Company and the U.S. Reclamation Service. The plaintiffs were able to defeat the agreement; but prior to the lawsuit, in 1911, the California Legislature passed an act specifically with Lake Tahoe in mind that prohibited the transportation of water

140 Pisani, “Conflict over Conservation,” 173-174. 141 Michael J. Makley, Saving Lake Tahoe: an environmental history of a national treasure (Reno, NV: U of Nevada P, 2014), 46-59. 142 Pisani, “Conflict over Conservation,” 179.

59 from California into any other state. After a water shortage in 1912, Nevada responded the following year with an act that gave the federal government its consent to use the waters of Lake Tahoe as it saw fit. In 1913, Kent and the other property owners formed the Lake Tahoe Protection Association, a group tasked with preserving the beauty of

Lake Tahoe. One of the prominent members of the organization, William S. Bliss, was a son of Duane Bliss, one of the men who helped to denude the forests around Lake Tahoe.

In 1915, the federal government acquired the dam on Lake Tahoe and reached a settlement with the Lake Tahoe Protection Association and the Stone-Webster Company.

The government acquired the right to four feet of water in Lake Tahoe to be held by the dam and used as needed. The power company received the promise of a predictable rate of flow in the Truckee River for its purposes; and, for the property owners, the government agreed not to deepen the channel at the rim of the lake.143 The legacy of this lawsuit was one of mistrust towards the federal government on the part of property owners on the lake while officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation felt that what was happening at the lake manifested “selfish interest on the part of a few wealthy men, as opposed to the good of the community.”144

Shortly after the U.S. Reclamation Service began to attempt to assert control over the waters of Lake Tahoe, the Forest Service began to gain a measure of control over the lands surrounding Lake Tahoe, but for a completely different reason and purpose. In

1907, continuing the process begun by the federal government with the 1899 establishment of the Lake Tahoe Forest Reserve, the Forest Service began withdrawing

143 Strong, 98-103. 144 Pisani, “Conflict over Conservation,” 186-187.

60 large areas of land acquired via purchase, negotiation, or donation from landholders of the land surrounding the lake, such as the Bliss Family and William Kent, who fought with the U.S. Reclamation Service over water rights. Eventually the Forest Service would control more than fifty percent of the land in the Tahoe Basin, but only seven percent of the land directly abutting Lake Tahoe.145 The directive of the Forest Service was to protect the Tahoe Basin watershed by controlling the rapid run-off caused by mismanagement of the land by lumber and agricultural concerns, as well as making the

Tahoe Basin’s natural features accessible to the general public. This last directive encouraged landowners to transfer tracts of land to the U.S. Forest Service so they could be used by the public and to preserve the experience of the lake. In 1919 the Forest

Service acquired lakeside property from William Kent on the condition that the Forest

Service would construct and maintain a free campground for the public.146 The idea of protecting the lake and its environs became a public concern. Members of the public were beginning to see that the lake needed to be protected and somewhat controlled by state and federal government to avoid a repetition of events like extreme timber harvests and the extinction of the cutthroat trout. A 1935 notice in the Tahoe Tattler describes the actions of one private party on behalf of preservation effort for the public good:

In a public spirited move to have the Rubicon Point tract placed at the disposal of the thousands of visitors who come to Tahoe annually, and to preserve its rugged charm for all time, the new park site was donated to the citizens of the Sierra Region and the State of California by the Bliss Estate in memory of the lake’s leading pioneers.147

145 Paul F. Mackey, “Evolution of Land Use: Patterns in the Lake Tahoe Basin with Emphasis on the Spatial Patterns Resulting from Early Transportation and Mining Development,” in Geographical Studies in the Lake Tahoe Area, California and Nevada, Annual Field Trip Guidebook of the Geological Society of Sacramento (Sacramento: California Office of State Printing, 1968), 77-79. 146 “Campgrounds at Lake Tahoe,” The Truckee Republican, November 20, 1919, 1. 147 “C.C.C. Boys Put Rubicon Park in Shape,” Tahoe Tattler, June 28, 1935, 2

These opposing viewpoints would, in the 1960s, set up an inevitable conflict between local forces that wanted to expand in the area and the Forest Service whose charge it was to balance preserving the environment with preserving the critical mass that drives the economy of the area. Groups that once railed against the federal government over their destruction of the recreational potential of the region now fought against the federal government’s attempts to preserve the “rugged charm” of Lake Tahoe because they conflicted with their own economic interests. The Forest Service now sought to protect the Tahoe Basin from local expansion that endangered the environment that business interests mythologized in their promotion of the lake. Some of the “rugged charm” of the Lake Tahoe of the pioneers is a fictional construct as this no longer exists, replaced by a simulacrum advertised as the real thing in order to fuel the new tourist industry. The rugged charm was not preserved—rather it was replaced by another that was perceived as the real thing by a population that had not been around to experience the original environment. The pines removed to supply the mining industry were supplanted by faster growing fire-prone fir trees, which crowded out majority of the slower growing pine trees of the lake. An even-aged second growth forest with a solid canopy replaced the multi-layered canopy of the original old growth forest.148

The California and Nevada Fish and Game Commissions replaced the original cutthroat trout population with other species of cutthroat trout with varying degrees of success; though a recent discovery of Lahontan Cutthroat Trout in Pilot Peak Creek near

148 Vincent J. Angle, “Scenic Quality Factors in the Lake Tahoe Basin” (master’s thesis, University of Nevada Reno, 2005), 10-11.

62 the Nevada-Utah border has the potential for the return of the species to the lake.149

Likewise, many of the commercial ventures at Lake Tahoe, such as golf courses and ski resorts, appear natural at first but are really a disruptive influence on the natural environment, due to effluents and processes that damage the environment.150 The point is not to argue that Lake Tahoe should, or could, be a static environment, even without human presence this is impossible. Rather the intention is to illustrate that if Lake Tahoe, as an entire ecosystem ranging from the geographical to the aesthetic manifestations, is the area’s resource then this resource must be managed so that its use does not destroy it.

The agreement in 1915 between the Bureau of Reclamation, California, and

Nevada began to unravel after a series of drought years (1929-1934) reduced the water level at Lake Tahoe. The Bureau of Reclamation and the states of California and Nevada became involved again in lawsuits over the control of Lake Tahoe water. In 1934, a settlement between California and Nevada, known as the Truckee River Agreement, made arrangements between the states, the federal government, and the power company, now the Sierra Pacific Power Company; but did not consult the property owners on Lake

Tahoe, who formed another association, the Save Lake Tahoe Association. The Save

Lake Tahoe Association argued that Lake Tahoe’s beauty had a value of its own and that preserving this beauty for property owners and tourism on the lake was antithetical to the perception of the lake espoused by agricultural interests and the power company. The

Truckee River Agreement did not last long as soon the states were once again arguing

149 Mike Wolterbeek, “Thought to be Extinct, Lahontan Cutthroat Trout Rediscovered,” Reno Gazette Journal, https://www.rgj.com/story/news/local/leader-courier/2018/04/18/thought-extinct-lahontan- cutthroat-trout-rediscovered/529629002/ (accessed October 18, 2018). 150 Susanne Bentley, “Lake Stories: An Exploration of the Impact of Humans on the Environment in the Lake Tahoe Basin” (master’s thesis, University of Nevada Reno, 1997), 8-10.

63 over water rights and the federal government was unable to mitigate the disagreements between the two states.151

In 1955, congressional action created the California-Nevada Interstate Compact

Commission. The purpose of the commission was to make a final determination as to the allocation of the waters of Lake Tahoe between the two states. While the federal government once again took steps to allocate the lake’s water, local groups began to take notice of environmental issues at the lake and created the first organization to look at the quality of the lake, the Lake Tahoe Area Council (LTAC). The LTAC was created in

1958 and tasked with promoting “the preservation and long-range development of the

Lake Tahoe Basin.”152 The LTAC took an interest in sewage disposal on the lake due to direct sewage effluent disposal and septic-system leakage.153 The LTAC organized a sewage study of the entire Lake Tahoe Basin whose recommendation led to the collection and export of Lake Tahoe sewage to a treatment plant, built in 1964, where it was treated and then pumped to treatment plants at Indian Creek Reservoir and the Truckee River.154

While the LTAC was busy with its sewage study, a group of environmental concerns formed the League to Save Lake Tahoe (LTSLT). The LTSLT was concerned with controlling the unrestrained development at the lake which, following the adoption of the LTAC’s sewage treatment regime, accelerated and produced further environmental problems at the Lake. In Placer County, officials gave approval for Blackwood Creek to be mined for construction gravel, which resulted in the ongoing release of large amounts

151 Strong, 106-107. 152 Charles R. Goldman, “Lake Tahoe: Preserving a Fragile Ecosystem,” Environment 13, no. 7 (1989), 8. 153 Angle, 34. 154 Goldman, 8.; Harlan E. Moyer, “The South Lake Tahoe Reclamation Project,” Public Works (December 1968), 88.

64 of sediment and debris into the lake. So much sediment was released into the lake that adjoining beaches were covered. The silt that did not settle on the beaches settled on the lake bottom, bringing nutrients that would feed algal blooms. As of 1989, the U.S. Forest

Service had spent $250,000 to reduce further erosion of the Blackwood Creek watershed, which continued to release sediment into the lake.155 Building development on the North

Shore and in other locations around the lake, especially at the southern end of the lake, which due to early development practices has become the most heavily populated area around the lake, added new vectors for eroded organic matter to enter the lake.156

Beginning in 1959, an important Lake Tahoe wetland, the Rowlands Marsh (also known as the Truckee Marsh), was developed by the Dillingham Corporation over the next decade into a real estate development known as the Tahoe Keys. This fifteen square mile wetland was composed of fields of grasses, shrubs, and trees which filtered silt out of water entering Lake Tahoe from the Upper Truckee watershed. These wetlands were dredged and shaped into a series of small islands and peninsulas upon which sat houses with docks for mooring boats and whose canals empty directly into the lake. The Upper

Truckee was shaped as well by the developers, who turned it into a five-foot-deep, two- thousand-foot canal draining directly into Lake Tahoe, bringing with it more sediment.

The sediment in the Tahoe Keys fed the growth of Eurasian watermilfoil and other invasive algal species introduced into the lake by boats.157 Ironically, in the early 1950s, the U.S. Forest Service had turned down a prior offer to purchase the Rowlands Marsh as

Forest Service officials considered the wetlands to be “worthless swamp,” whose

155 Goldman, 8. 156 Bentley, 25. 157 Bentley, 11, 88-90.

65 acquisition was considered unnecessary to their mission of preserving the Lake Tahoe

Basin.158

In 1965, the same year that the first high-rise hotel-casino was opened at Lake

Tahoe, the LTAC and the LTSLT lobbied the California and Nevada legislatures to address these environmental issues (and others to come as discussed later).159 Adding to the acronymic alphabet soup of organizations, the California-Nevada Interstate Compact

Commission recommended the creation of the Tahoe Regional Planning Association

(TRPA). The purpose of TRPA would be to control growth and development on the lake.

Formation of this bi-state organization to guide the development of Lake Tahoe and to protect its future was ratified by Congress in 1968, but the compact was not approved by

California and Nevada until 1971. In 1967, while both sides were negotiating the

California-Nevada Interstate Compact to give full life to TRPA, California and Nevada each created their own planning associations, whose goals were often in conflict with one another: the Nevada Tahoe Regional Planning Association (NTRPA) and the California

Tahoe Regional Planning Association (CTRPA). The creation of the two separate state planning associations was an advance response to the creation of the joint Tahoe

Regional Planning Association (TRPA) in 1969. In 1970, the creation of TRPA was approved by the federal government and in 1980 it was ratified by Congress.

TRPA as it was created did not have much power to effectively control growth on the lake because it required a majority vote by the representatives of both California and

Nevada. Any proposals brought before the TRPA voting members that were not

158 Strong, 83. 159 Goldman, 8-9; Goin, 18.

66 approved within two months were automatically given approval whether or not a consensus had been reached by the California and Nevada representatives. Due to the diametrically opposed viewpoints of the California and Nevada representatives, TRPA could not effectively control expansion on the lake. California tended towards restricting growth in order to mitigate environmental impact; but Nevada representatives, ever mindful of the needs of casinos on the Nevada side of the lake, tended to be in favor of expanding development. Because of the default approval loophole in the creation of

TRPA, a good number of potentially damaging projects were approved by default. At the time, this was the best structure that California and Nevada could come up with to direct growth at the lake.

While the federal government approved of the TRPA, they disapproved of the

California-Nevada Interstate Compact. The United States Secretary of the Interior,

Walter Hickel, disapproved of the compact because it ignored water rights for Native

Americans at Pyramid lake and, in 1971, Congress withdrew its support of the compact.

While all three governments were arguing over who had rights to the water and what to do about the lake, Charles Goldman, a UC Davis limnologist, who had been performing research at Lake Tahoe since the 1950’s, reported that the clarity of the water at Lake

Tahoe was being seriously impacted by continued development. Increasing use of the lake basin had resulted in increased deposition of minerals and nutrients into the lake.160

Goldman began research on eutrophication, the build-up of nutrients and minerals, at Lake Tahoe in 1959. By 1967, he created the Tahoe Research Group to better study this build-up in the lake. Seven years later, in 1974, he reported that Lake

160 Makley, Saving Lake Tahoe, 33-34, 54-56.

Tahoe had lost a quarter of its clarity during the years since he began taking measurements of the lake. His reports culminated in an EPA report on Lake Tahoe that was at odds with the expansionist aims of the Nevada and local California TRPA representatives. The decrease of Lake Tahoe’s water clarity came not from a lack of interest on the part of the representatives. Rather, it stemmed from an emphasis on seeing the lake as a means of generating income from recreation.161

Recreation provides an enticing backdrop for the gaming industry at Tahoe, projecting the image of an American Monte Carlo, in which the lake provides for wholesome, yet glamorous, activities in unsullied nature during the day while the night is meant for the indoor attractions at the casinos, that provide the gaming industry with the majority of its profit. On the Nevada side of the lake, Lake Tahoe serves as the background for other more lucrative activities, while on the California side of the lake the natural attractions are promoted, which explains some of the vastly different perspectives between the California and Nevada TRPA representatives. At the same time as the casinos promote Lake Tahoe as a beautiful, natural location in which to enjoy gambling after a day of healthful activity and relaxation, they were exempted from many of the regulations passed to protect the lake from environmental damage. Now, with the lessening economic importance of gaming due to increased competition from Native

American casinos, the shift is moving more towards perceiving Lake Tahoe as an important location for activities outside of the casinos by both the California and Nevada sides of the lake.162

161 Makley, Saving Lake Tahoe, 90-95. 162 Makley, Saving Lake Tahoe, 90-95.

Recent emphasis on recreational activities on the lake and its environs places more stress on the lake’s ecosystem. Increased anthropogenic damage to the lake results from increased erosion filling the lake with sediment, decreases in air and noise quality due to population increases, and road expansion leading to more traffic and a corresponding increase in air pollution. Lake Tahoe is “increasingly imperiled by its own success, by the environmental pressures of large numbers of tourists, and the growing population that exists at least in part to supply them.”163

This detrimental relationship can be seen in the physical development of properties, both commercial and residential, in the land surrounding the lake. Initially large portions of Lake Tahoe were undeveloped as easy access to lands surrounding the lake was limited by the extent of railroads and passable roads. Recreation on the lake tended to take place within the radius of the large hotels. For example, in 1918, a 6-hole golf course, the Tahoe City Golf Course, was built in proximity to the Tahoe Tavern to provide an alternative to activity on the lake. The logging roads were long abandoned and no paved automobile route circled the lake until 1934, so Lake Tahoe, despite its ever-growing popularity, remained relatively undeveloped.

This was to change with the emergence of the Automobile Age. Through the

1920s and 1930s older roads were paved and new roads were built, increasing access to all portions of the lake and opening it up to the middle class. Increased access to the lake for recreation also coincided with the purchase of large holdings on the lake by real estate developers seeking to subdivide the areas into smaller holdings for middle class purchases. New communities developed on the lake and older communities were

163 Goin, 18.

69 reinvigorated by this growth; but the real impetus behind growth around Lake Tahoe occurred following World War II. It came not from summer recreation but as a result of the establishment of large ski resorts, as well as from the notoriety gained by hosting the

1960 Winter Olympics. Lake Tahoe was no longer a location only for summer recreation; the region was now open to recreation throughout the year. The Tahoe City

Golf Course was upgraded to a 9-hole course and, in 1960, the Tahoe Paradise Golf

Course, an 18-hole golf course, was opened for business.164 With Lake Tahoe’s new emphasis on unlimited recreation, larger casinos were established on the Nevada side of the lake, providing nightly entertainment for customers who enjoyed the lake and its environs by day. Gambling on the lake became an industry second only to outdoor recreation at the lake and heavily influenced the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe for years to come. The successful promotion of Lake Tahoe as a year-round recreational area, with activities on the slopes in the winter and on the lake the rest of the year, spurred further development to meet tourist demands and supply housing for workers in the tourist industry.165

Since the 1970s the situation at Lake Tahoe has not improved. In 2017 the average clarity level was recorded as the lowest since official measurements began in

1968.166 TRPA, after a series of lawsuits and arguing back and forth between the states, was reorganized in 1980 so that projects presented to TRPA for approval do not go

164 Mark McLaughlin, “Tahoe’s Historic Golf Courses,” Tahoe Weekly, https://thetahoeweekly.com/2017/06/tahoes-historic-golf-courses/ (accessed November 11, 2018). 165 Strong, 22-28; Sessions S. Wheeler, Tahoe Heritage: The Bliss Family of Glenbrook, Nevada (Reno, NV: U of Nevada P, 1992), 119-121; Makley, A Short History of Lake Tahoe, 86-93; Makley, Saving Lake Tahoe, 144-145. 166 Molly Sullivan, “Water Clarity in Lake Tahoe Sinks to an All-time Low, Report Finds,” Sacramento Bee, https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article213100689.html (accessed October 18, 2018).

70 forward if a consensus cannot be reached.167 The casino industry on the lake has slightly decreased their expansionist goals due to increased competition but other development is still urged at the lake despite the damage being done to the environment. The developmental chain reaction around Lake Tahoe threatens the preservation of the unique beauty of the lake that was its earliest promotable element.

167 Makley, Saving Lake Tahoe, 111-113.

Chapter 3: Of Pupfish and Cutthroat - The Salton Sea

The history of perception of the Salton Sea differs from Lake Tahoe. This area was only of marginal interest to the Native American tribes. The mountains enclosing the area held more useful resources while other areas surrounding the Salton Sink held religious significance or importance for subsistence hunting and gathering. The Salton

Sink only held a population of any size during the periods of flooding when tribes adjusted their settlements to follow the water into the area. White settlers were also few, as the area was considered useless for agriculture and suitable only for supplying low quality salt for industrial purposes. Following the 1905 flood, when the Salton Sink became the Salton Sea, the salt mines were covered by water and the area’s only perceived use to industry ended. For the next 50 years, the Salton Sea area was primarily utilized by the federal government for military purposes; by the State of California in an attempt to create a recreational fishing area; and by adjoining industries, primarily agriculture, and cities as a sewage dump.

The short-lived postwar real estate boom, simultaneously marketed the area to middle class Angelinos as the most beautiful and luxurious area they could afford and as an investment opportunity, but failed to fully materialize as the infrastructure necessary to the viability of the area existed only on paper. Environmentally, the area continued to degrade due to increasing salinity and toxicity from agricultural runoff from the more

“useful” area to the south, making it less enticing for human settlement. While the area was becoming less livable for people, it began to serve as habitat for migratory and endangered species pushed out by development in southern California. As the ecological problems worsened, the Salton Sea area was now seen as a potential ecological disaster,

72 endangering not only the Salton Sea but Los Angeles and the more affluent community of

Palm Springs to the north. The current perception of the Salton Sea is that it is a growing health concern as the shrinking sea is exposing a century’s worth of toxic dust to the winds. This is a problem that needs to be addressed but there is little will to face the financial burden to fix the problems associated with an area of little perceived value.

Prior to the arrival of American settlers, the Salton Sea, then the Salton Trough

(alternately called the Salton Sink and the Colorado Desert), was periodically occupied by three Native American tribes: the Cahuilla, the Cocopah, and the Kumeyaay. The

Colorado Desert held little significance to any of the three Native American tribes that lived in the area. The mountains beyond the Colorado Desert on the east and west side were important for primary subsistence gathering for the Kumeyaay. The Cahuilla gathered to the north of the Colorado Desert and their areas of religious significance were also to the north of the area. The Cahuillas primarily lived in the area to the south, between the Colorado Desert and the Gulf of California. Any occupation of the Salton

Trough by these three tribes is believed to have been only as a means of secondary subsistence when more permanent regional subsistence practices were disrupted by flooding of the Colorado River and shifted them towards one of the series of temporary lakes that formed. This is especially true for the Cahuilla who were largely dependent upon the Colorado River.

While evidence of settlements in the Salton Trough have been found by archaeologists, these habitations are believed to be remnants of seasonal encampments on

Lake Cahuilla, the lake that periodically formed when the Colorado River overflowed.

Before the 1905 flood it had last formed in 1891 and, although it was 60 miles in length and 30 miles wide, it had dried up in the intervening 14 years. Archaeologists suggest that Lake Cahuilla became a less frequent part of a seasonal subsistence patterns as it dried up, until it was only used as a location for gathering obsidian and for harvesting salt for consumption and trade.168 The regions surrounding the Colorado Desert held importance to the Native American tribes but the central area was of less interest to their peoples.

Compared to his brief, but complimentary statement about Lake Tahoe, John C.

Frémont had little positive to say about deserts in general. Limerick states that, “he preferred mountains and plains–the mountains for their greater scenic interests, the plains for their animation.”169 Generally Frémont described deserts as “most sterile and repulsive” or “desolate and revolting.”170 He disliked deserts for their temperature, either too high or too low; their geology; their lack of civilization; and, most importantly, their lack of water. He did give grudging admiration to the desert’s diverse flora as he frequently discussed new plants in his report, but even this had its limits. For example, he discussed yucca trees, “which gave a strange and southern character to the country, and suited well with the dry and desert region,” but went on to say that, when “associated

168 George M. Wheeler, Annual report on the geographical surveys west of the one-hundredth meridian, in California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana: Appendix JJ, Annual Report of the Chief of Engineers for 1876 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), 162-165; Edward F. Castetter and Willis H. Bell, Yuma Indian agriculture: Primitive subsistence on the Lower Colorado and Gila Rivers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico P, 1951), 52-55; Jerry Schaefer, Late prehistoric adaptations during the final recessions of Lake Cahuilla: Fish camps and quarries on West Mesa, Imperial County, California (San Diego: Mooney-Levine and Associates, San Diego, 1986), 12. 169 Limerick, 29. 170 Jackson, 683, 688.

74 with the idea of barren sands, their stiff and ungraceful form makes them to the traveler the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.”171

Unlike Frémont, John C. Van Dyke was one of the earliest appreciators of the desert for desert’s sake and of, perhaps, one of the most forbidding locations in the

Colorado Desert, the Salton Sink. Approaching the Imperial Valley and the Salton Sink from the northwest through the San Gorgonio Mountains in 1898, Van Dyke painted a very different picture of the desert. Within the first four pages of his book, The Desert:

Further Studies in Natural Appearances, Van Dyke already defined one of the most significant differences between the desert and any other environment. What he observed is the light of the desert which he described immediately with exuberant expressions such as, “That beam of light! Was there ever anything so beautiful! How it flashes its color through shadow, how it gilds the tops of the mountains and gleams white on the dunes of the desert! In any land what is there more glorious than sunlight!”172

John Van Dyke saw the desert from the perspective of the artistic intellectual. His appreciation of light in the desert permeates most, if not all, of his observations. He was possibly the first to provide a description of the Salton Sink prior to its flooding in 1905-

1906 in terms that are more literary than scientific. In The Desert he described the recession of the Gulf of California which once “extended as far north as the San

Bernardino Range and as far west as the Pass of San Gorgonio,” leaving behind a prehistoric lake in the Salton Trough.173 This lake was called Lake Cahuilla for all of its iterations until the most current. By the time Van Dyke traversed the desert in search of

171 Jackson, 670. The editors of this volume, Donald Jackson and Mary Lee Spence, note that Frémont is actually talking about Joshua trees. 172 Van Dyke, 4. 173 Van Dyke, 44-47.

75 beauty the latest iteration of Lake Cahuilla, created by the surfacing of ground water related to Colorado River flooding and heavy rains in 1891, had already disappeared again.174 What Van Dyke saw was “the Bottom of the Bowl.”175 This “bowl” is an enormous basin measuring approximately 370 square miles, 35 miles from north to south and 15 miles from east to west.176 This bowl, Van Dyke describds as “more deserted than the desert itself.”177 In Van Dyke’s mind this was not a bad thing:

From a picturesque point of view it has the most wonderful light, air, and color imaginable. You will not think so until you see them blended in that strange illusion known as mirage. And here is the one place in all the world where the water-mirage appears to perfection… Only one other scene is comparable to it, and that the southern seas at sunset when the calm ocean reflects and melts into the color-glory of the sky. It is the same kind of beauty.178

Van Dyke was not the only person to appreciate at least some aspects of the desert environment. In 1901, Jose (Josie) Huddleston, one of the earliest settlers in the Imperial

Valley, described the Imperial Valley in a similar fashion to Van Dyke. Huddleston, the proprietor of a tent restaurant, looked towards the surrounding desert skyline and fancifully saw “a full-rigged battleship…so plainly that even the portholes were visible.

Again we have seen the ocean and watched the breakers sweeping over the sands, and could see the spray from the rolling waves.”179 This perception of the Colorado Desert, as an area with a beauty of its own that stands apart, is a minority viewpoint during this

174 deBuys, 65.; Until the creation of the current lake, each body of water occupying the Salton Sink has been called Lake Cahuilla. The longest known iteration of Lake Cahuilla was from approximately 1000- 1600 C.E. Recorded floods that re-created Lake Cahuilla occurred in 1840, 1849, 1852, 1859, 1867, and 1891. Only the latest iteration has the name of Salton Sea. 175 Van Dyke, 51. 176 Stringfellow, 6. 177 Van Dyke, 52. 178 Van Dyke, 55-57. 179 Finis C. Farr, The History of Imperial County, California (Berkeley: Elm and Franks, 1918), 25.

76 period, with Fremont’s view of the desert as a “sterile and desolate” region predominating in most accounts of the region. The early settlers of the Imperial Valley envisioned the Colorado Desert as the green ideal, the garden, once water could effectively be diverted into the area to bring life to it rather than celebrating the life that already existed in the area. In 1901, there was a great celebration for the first tree planted in the Imperial Valley, the beginnings of the triumph of the green over the greys and browns of the desert.180 That much of the beauty of this region is dependent upon imagination rather than an aesthetic judgment of beauty (even Huddleston attributed a good amount of value to a small, green patch of sorghum growing outside her tent), plays an important role in the perception and the usage of the lands immediately north of the

Colorado River.

John Van Dyke has already been introduced as a misanthrope, so it comes as no surprise that he would lament the intrusion into this desert of economic and reclamationist enterprise. “Here is more beauty destined to destruction,” he lamented, regarding the efforts by the California Development Company to divert the Colorado

River in order to irrigate the agricultural settlement of the Imperial Valley.181 In truth,

Van Dyke’s lamentations disregarded already existing invasions of the desert environment in the form of mining enterprises. Most of these mines would have been on the periphery of his observations in the Salton Sink, being located in the surrounding mountain ranges; but one “mine” was located directly in the Salton Sink. It is probable

180 deBuys, 88. 181 Van Dyke, 57; deBuys, 76.

77 that given the sink’s size, Van Dyke may never have come near enough to become aware of already existing defacement of the beauty of his bowl in the form of salt mining.182

The influence of the imagination plays an important role in the change in perception of the desert from a barren wasteland into rich agricultural region during the early 20th century. Settlement of the Imperial Valley began in 1900 with several small family groups from Arizona even before a consistent water source for irrigation had been established. The nutrient rich soil of the Imperial Valley inspired John C. Beatty, an entrepreneur interested in diverting water from the Colorado River for agriculture, to reform the desert through reclamation in the fashion of James Ellsworth Smythe. Beatty hired an engineer with the U.S. Reclamation Service, Charles Rockwood, and founded the California Irrigation Company. The Panic of 1893 bankrupted the California

Irrigation Company (CIC) as Beatty could not secure enough financing for his land reclamation project. In 1893, Rockwood sued Beatty for unpaid wages amounting to

$3500 and, in exchange, received all of CIC’s data, including all maps and records.183

Rockwood continued Beatty’s dreams, intending to turn the Imperial Valley into the “Nile Valley of the West” by diverting the Colorado River.184 Much like the federal government’s diversion of water from Lake Tahoe into the Carson Sink in order to fuel a vision of farmers using land in western Nevada that was fertile yet useless from a lack of water, Rockwood sought to use Colorado River water to irrigate the Imperial Valley, south of the Salton Sink. While the Imperial Valley was considered an area of high

182 I assume that Van Dyke never came near Dubrow’s salt mining venture as he makes no mention of it The Desert. Dubrow’s salt mine was located near the inflow of the Colorado River at the south end of the Salton Sink. 183 Laflin, 12-13. 184 H. T. Cory. The Imperial Valley and the Salton Sink (San Francisco: John J. Newbegin, 1915), 22.

78 agricultural promise, the Salton Sink itself, due to ancient salt deposits from prior floods and periodic salt deposits from geothermal mud volcanoes, was considered useless for agriculture. Its only value was from salt mining to supply San Francisco’s tanneries.

Rockwood’s analogy between the Nile and the Colorado was quite appropriate; the suspended sediment load of the Colorado and the Nile Rivers are comparable, but the sediment load of the Colorado River is actually higher than that of the Nile. The Imperial

Valley was predisposed to be even more verdant and productive than the Nile River Delta provided it could be supplied with enough water to permit growth.185 Rockwood intended to take advantage of the periodic flooding of the Colorado River. Re- engineering the overflow of the river to serve farming in the Imperial Valley, he believed would allow agriculture on a scale comparable to the Nile Valley.

In order to fund this project, Rockwood needed to secure the investment that eluded Beatty. Rockwood incorporated the California Development Company (CDC) in

1896 but was unable to obtain funding until, in 1900, George Chaffey, a Canadian entrepreneur who developed irrigation colonies in the Los Angeles Basin and the

Australian interior, decided to invest in the company. Their agreement gave Chaffey a minority interest in the company along with the position of chief engineer but with proxy control over the remaining shares of the company for five years. The first business activity for this new company was to encourage more settlers to come to the Colorado

Desert despite the fact that no consistent irrigation system had yet been established. Such settlement was promoted by the Imperial Land Company, a company founded by George

185 John N. Holeman, “The sediment yield of major rivers in the world,” Water Resources Research 4, no. 4 (August 1968), 738.

Chaffey in 1901 for commercial promotion of the Colorado Desert, to acquire additional funds prior to actual development. The rebranding of the Colorado Desert began when

Chaffey’s company renamed the valley Imperial after his newly created company instead of referring to it as the Salton Sink or the Colorado Desert. By 1902 the number of settlers had reached nearly two thousand.186

Chaffey modified Rockwood’s original plans for the irrigation head-gate, moving it from a location west of Yuma, Arizona to Potholes, an abandoned mining camp four miles northeast of Bard, California. This move took advantage of the Alamo River bed as a natural canal for the project in order to cut costs. As a further cost-cutting measure,

Chaffey built the main canal intake five feet higher than was specified in the engineering reports from CIC’s original plans. Additionally, as the project progressed, Chaffey never replaced the temporary head-gate with a more permanent structure. Due to the height of the main canal intake, the velocity of water running through the canal was insufficient to keep sediment from settling out of the running water so the portion of the new canal that followed the Colorado River began to fill with silt and limit the amount of water available for farming. This sedimentation reduced water flows so much that settlers who were paying the company for water began suing the company for not delivering on its contractual obligations.187

Adding to these problems was a power struggle between Chaffey and Rockwood over control of the company. By 1903, Chaffey had lost control of the CDC and sold his shares of stock. Rockwood compounded Chaffey’s earlier errors by enacting further cost

186 deBuys, 77, 87, 90; Laflin, 15.; J. A. Alexander, The Life of George Chaffey: A Story of Irrigation Beginnings in California and Australia (New York: MacMillan, 1928), 283-287. 187 deBuys, 93.

80 cutting measures such as not deepening the canal’s irrigation cut. In addition he diverted water from the Colorado to the Imperial Valley using several existing waterways such as the bed of the Alamo River supplemented by newly created bypass canals that were little more than earthen ditches that lacked their own head-gates and were simply blocked with sandbags when the level of the water rose. Rockwood’s measures were inadequate for the Colorado River diversion under the best of circumstances, but by 1905 the Colorado

River was due for one of the periodic course changes that historically fed its waters into the Salton Sink.188

Floodwaters tore away the head gate structure and water from the Colorado River entered the diversion channels unimpeded. Through the winter and spring of 1905, the

Colorado River flooded three times, flowing through the bypass canals and filling the

Salton Sink. Due to this continued flooding, the CDC decided to close the bypass canals earlier than usual. Twice the company attempted to close the bypass canal with a brush- and-earth dam but the Colorado River continued to overflow the dam, sweeping away both the dam and an ever-increasing portion of the bypass canal, gradually increasing its width from 50 to 160 feet. Eventually the Colorado River flowed directly into the bypass canal, overflowed the connecting Imperial Canal, and continued on into the Salton Sink.

For over two years the flooding of the Colorado River defeated efforts at controlling the flooding by the CDC and, later, the Southern Pacific Railroad. In June 1907, a summer flood was finally halted by a series of dikes and dams.189 The Salton Sink, that Van Dyke

188 George Kennan, The Salton Sea: An Account of Harriman’s Fight with the Colorado River (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 23-25, 38; deBuys, 82, 93; James, The Wonders of the Colorado Desert, 536. 189 The Colorado River is subject to flooding throughout all four seasons. Flooding in the winter and spring months is due to precipitation and snowmelt while in the summer and fall flooding comes from monsoon storms.

81 had described with such eloquence, became the Salton Sea when the flood waters created a 76-foot-deep, 35-mile-long, and 15-mile-wide lake that has survived until today.190

In the period between the 1905-1907 floods and the late 1950s land boom, the primary users of the Salton Sea were federal, international, and state governments. Their perception of the Salton Sea was that it was largely a useless body of water surrounded by equally worthless desert land. The most optimistic view of the newly created Salton

Sea was held by the state of California. The state acted on the belief that the Salton Sea are could eventually be developed into a more productive region by reinventing the flood lake as a leisure attraction. It created the Salton Sea Recreation area in 1951 to promote recreational uses, primarily sport fishing. The idea was that the Salton Sea could be converted into a location for tourism and that viable industries, and, eventually, cities, would give value to this land. This idea was supported by the examples of other manmade lakes in the desert such as Lake Mead, Lake Havasu, and Lake Powell, that became recreational attractions. Several species were introduced into the Salton Sea, including sea lions,191 but for the first 50 years state and local attempts at stocking the Salton Sea were abject failures as the introduced species were unable to thrive in its saline waters.

Finally, in the mid 1950s, the California Department of Fish and Game successfully introduced three species of saltwater fish into the Salton Sea: orangemouth corvina, Gulf

190 Thurston Clarke, California Fault: Searching for the Spirit of State along the San Andreas, (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 393; deBuys, 110-111, 120; George Wharton James, “The overflow of the Colorado River and the Salton Sea.-II.,” Scientific American 94, no. 16 (April 21, 1906), 328. 191 Allegedly the sea lions were introduced into the Salton Sea by local businessman, Captain Charles E. Davis. Davis was one of the original settlers in the Salton Sea area. His original campsite on a volcanic butte became an island, named Mullet Island, following the flood. Undeterred, in 1908 Davis built a café, dance hall, and boat landing, collectively known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The sea lions were meant to attract visitors but mostly attracted the attention of local farmers who claimed the sea lions were carrying off their pigs. Ultimately, the sea lions perished as a sustainable fish population was not to be established on the Salton Sea until much later. Stringfellow, 10-12.

82 croaker, and sargo.192 Until the establishment of a viable fish population in the Salton

Sea, the development of the area as a location for sport fishing and the development of public and private lands by developers never came to fruition.193

Meanwhile the federal government was less interested in developing the Salton

Sea as a recreational destination than in taking advantage of its remoteness. In 1876,

1891, and again in 1909 the federal government set aside lands at the northwest side of the Salton Sea to establish the Torres-Martinez Reservation. Almost half of this land was inundated in the 1905-1907 flood making it unusable for farming.194 Originally the northeast corner of the Salton Sea alternately was used as a target range for seaplanes, jet testing, ballistic tests, and as a site for preliminary nuclear bomb testing before moving some of their activities to Tonopah, Nevada in 1961. The Naval Auxiliary Air Station was relocated from the northeast to a much larger base in the southwest corner of the

Salton Sea in 1946. The navy also brought non-native species into the Salton Sea area, inadvertently introducing the acorn barnacle, an invasive species found along the shoreline of the Salton Sea with an especially high distribution at the northwestern end of the lake.195 In 1924, the federal government designated the Salton Sea as an agricultural

192 Of these three fish species, none are presently found in the Salton Sea. The dominant species of sport fish found in the Salton Sea is the Mozambique Tilapia, accidentally introduced to the Salton Sea. The other main fish species in the Salton Sea is the Desert Pupfish, a species found at the margins of the Salton Sea and the surrounding canals in the Colorado River Delta. The Desert Pupfish is an extremophile, an organism adapted to live in extreme environmental conditions. The salinity level of the Salton Sea, currently at 44 g/L, increases at approximately .4 g/L every year. Mozambique Tilapia populations decline at salinity levels of 50 g/L and Desert Pupfish at 70 g/L. 193 Stringfellow, 12; Michael A. Patten, Guy McCaskie, and Philip Unitt, Birds of the Salton Sea: Status, biogeography, and ecology (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003), 7. 194 deBuys, 127 195 Stringfellow, 15; Patten, 15.

83 drainage reservoir, serving as a sump for the agricultural concerns that surrounded the lake.196

The few established towns to the south of the Salton Sea also had little interest in the area. The city of Mexicali in Mexico and its sister city Calexico in the United States, as well as El Centro and the other towns within the Imperial Valley looked towards the

Salton Sea as a convenient location for dumping their untreated sewage from 1911 through the early 1990s via the Alamo and the New River. Additionally, farms in the

Imperial Valley used the Salton Sea as a repository for the salts that naturally occurred within the soil of the region and accumulated on their farmland from evaporation of the saline Colorado River water. The annual cleaning of topsoil that drew out salt from the farmland also brought pesticides, fertilizers, and other contaminants with it into the irrigation canal. These all eventually made their way into the Salton Sea. Local residents of the area saw the Salton Sea as a convenient location for disposing of trash and other waste for the first 50 years of its existence.

Finally, in the mid 1950s the efforts of the California Department of Fish and

Game paid off and an alternative view of the Salton Sea as a region that not only could sustain life, but could prove valuable to people, began to take hold. Shortly after the successful introduction of the orangemouth corvina, one of the three successful species introduced into the Salton Sea by the California Department of Fish and Game, land developers began to promote the lake as a tourist destination. Development of the Salton

Sea has all the markers of American optimism–making something positive out of a negative while making money from the experience. Much like Chaffey’s advertisements

196 Reese, 205.

84 comparing the Imperial Valley to the Nile Valley, a new breed of entrepreneurs in the

1950s compared the Salton Sea to the French Riviera.197 In addition to promoting the fishing industry created by the state, developers began to advertise the Salton Sea as a location for boating and waterskiing, inviting celebrities to boat races and encouraging publicity stunts on the lake (this aspect will be further discussed in the next chapter).

Eager developers began to sell the Salton Sea as an area with the qualities of the

Mediterranean Sea, but located just a short distance from the Los Angeles Metropolitan

Area.

Marion Penn Phillips was the most prominent of these businessmen. Phillips had already made a name for himself developing the towns of Azusa and Vista, satellite communities tied to Compton and Palm Springs, as well as reinvigorating Ensenada,

Mexico and Coos Bay, Oregon.198 In 1958, his company, the M. Penn Phillips Company, purchased nearly 20,000 acres of land on the Salton Sea, mapping out several communities on the shore. The largest community, Salton City, was a resort development of over 25,000 residential lots planned by Albert Frey, a well-known architect identified with the progressive modernist structures he designed in neighboring

Palm Springs.199 Frey’s designs included schools, churches, and the largest marina in

California alongside a luxury hotel with adjoining yacht club, private airstrip, and championship golf course, as well as the infrastructure needed to support the theoretical

197 Karen Piper, Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 117. 198 deBuys, 206. 199 Levenkron, 57-58; Time Magazine, “The Desert Song,” Time Magazine 73, no. 9 (March 2, 1959), 45.

85 community.200 Phillips advertised Salton City as the “crown jewel of the Salton

Riviera.”201

Phillips’s approach to selling the Salton Sea was similar to previous real estate ventures, depending on the greed of investors much like the Florida land boom of the

1920’s. One of his advertisements stressed the investment potential in Salton City, openly stating that, “it may well be that this entirely new resort area—bigger than Capri and Monaco and Palm Beach combined—will become the most valuable piece of resort property on earth.”202 Real estate was often shown to couples from an airplane, with the salesman pointing out the attractive features of a lot far above the arid reality closer to the ground.203 Potential buyers rarely saw the land they purchased but they were already sold on visions of wealth and prosperity by Phillips.

Phillips brought in celebrities such as Frank Sinatra to watch other celebrities, like

Guy Lombardo, take part in boat races while his salesmen plied potential clients with the line that Salton City will make “the high life of Palm Springs available to people of ordinary means.”204 One of his sales brochures played up the importance of the “Salton

Riviera” in the lives of everyday people looking to build an affordable community as opulent as neighboring Palm Springs but at a price anyone could afford. It implicitly responded to another one of the company’s slogans, “Who can afford to buy property in

California?”205 All of this promise was available at the low price of $3500 per lot. On

200 “The Desert Song,” 45. 201 deBuys, 206. 202 deBuys, 207. 203 Chris Metzger and Jeff Springer, Plagues and pleasures on the Salton Sea, DVD, directed by Chris Metzger and Jeff Springer (Century City: Docurama, 2004). 204 deBuys, 207. 205 deBuys , 208-209.

May 21, 1958, the first day his company began selling lots it made almost $4.5 million dollars and land continued selling briskly for quite some time. Phillips’s company sold off portions of its holdings to other developers while other companies seeking to reproduce Phillips’s success purchased another 10,000 acres of land. In 1961, when

Phillips, fell afoul of the state in an earlier real estate venture in Hesperia and lost his license to sell real estate, he sold his interest to other developers. By then over 30,000 acres had been purchased for development purposes around the Salton Sea. Yet, only

200 of the 25,000 proposed residential homes had been built in Salton City by 1966, less than 1% of the projected number.

An interesting aspect of the image of the Salton Sea area during this period is that, on a local level, it was tightly controlled by companies such as M. Penn Phillips and the

Holly Corporation. Development companies through advertising campaigns, promised much in the way of improvements but never actually delivered on their hyperbolic claims. Local organizations in the Salton Sea area were often headed by employees or the spouses of employees in the real estate/development business, or other individuals whose livelihood depended upon the perception of the Salton Sea area as an up and coming area for recreation and business activities. This is especially apparent when following the social activities that were heavily promoted in newspapers during this period, creating the impression of a much livelier region than the depressing reality of life on the Salton Sea.

Although the ever-worsening ecological condition of the Salton Sea began to work against the development of communities around it this did not, at first, deter developers. The Holly Corporation, a Dallas company with ties to the oil and gas

87 industry, bought out the Phillips’s company and continued the string of promises made by

Phillips, eventually building a 9-hole golf course in Salton City. Other issues began to make the Salton Sea less attractive to investors looking to turn over a quick profit and homeowners looking for a piece of the good life at an attractive rate. The first of the series of fish die-offs began in 1956 and the hydrogen sulfide smell from the fish and the algal blooms in the Salton Sea began to make themselves known.206 The Holly

Corporation began to look beyond tourism to sell the Salton Sea and, in 1964, they were able to convince the Atlas Plastics Corporation to build a plant near Salton City. The company closed down the plant in 1968 however, and the bottom fell out of the Salton

Sea real estate industry.

One more attempt was made at revitalizing the area when David Levenkron and other retired scientists and engineers attempted to establish a research institute on the east side of the Salton Sea in1967.207 Curiously enough, this attempt to bring industry to the area failed because of a lack of faith in the project by the Holly Corporation. By the early

1970s, perception of the area as a lost cause had come even to the one industry that continued to promote the Salton Sea region, real estate. In 1976, the Colorado River flooded again and water flowed into the New River and the Alamo River, temporarily raising the water level of the Salton Sea, flooding Salton City and the other small towns that clung to life on the shores of the Salton Sea. The yacht club built by Phillips was destroyed by the flood as well as the golf course, eliminating the last major commercial structure from the boom era of the Salton Sea.

206 deBuys, 213; Barry Costa-Pierce, Fish and Fisheries of the Salton Sea (Sacramento, CA: California Department of Fish and Game, 1999), 3, 7. 207 Levenkron, 149.

One perception of the Salton Sea that has changed is its ecological value. Due to the need to expand habitable land to the west of the Salton Sea, the majority of the natural wetlands around Los Angeles and San Diego were drained. The Colorado River Delta has also been reduced considerably as a result of the upstream allocation of Colorado

River water for human and agricultural use.208 By treaty, the water allotted to Mexico is

1.5 million acre-feet, about one tenth of the total flow of the river. The United States controlled the waters of the Colorado River so that Mexico received only the water allocated to them by treaty and nothing additional flowed to the natural wetlands in the

Colorado River Delta.209 Land on the Mexican side of the border is irrigated with half the water that is supplied to the Imperial Valley and, additionally, this water is shared with the cities of Mexicali and Tijuana.210 As a result of an over-allocation of the

Colorado Rivers waters and its explicit application for human and agricultural use in the southern California and northern Mexico area, the Salton Sea has now become the de facto wetlands in the region and is therefore an important stop in the migration of bird and butterflies. It is the home to several endangered species, including a severely endangered species of fish, the desert pupfish. Despite the change in perception that resulted from recognizing the ecological importance of the Salton Sea, little has been done in order to stabilize the waters of the sea.

In 1905, the original composition of Salton Sea water was slightly more saline than Colorado River water but this was soon to change. Shortly after its creation, due to natural loss of water from evaporation and as agricultural runoff and discharged sewage

208 deBuys , 145. 209 deBuys, 145. 210 deBuys, 144.

89 from Mexicali reached the Salton Sea via the Alamo River, the New River, and the

Whitewater River (north of the Coachella Valley) the salinity of the Salton Sea increased by an average of .4g/liter per year.211 The current salinity of the Salton Sea is 44 g/L

(4.4% salt) which makes it more saline than the Pacific Ocean (35 g/L or 3.5% salt).212

The Imperial Valley Irrigation District, in negotiation with the state of California, has largely cut the flow of irrigation runoff into the sea, which previously maintained its water levels, in order to divert this water towards metropolitan areas such as San Diego.

The 2003 agreement between California and the Imperial Valley Irrigation District included a stipulation that California to devise a plan to save the Salton Sea because, if it dries up and reverts to its natural state, not only will it prove highly detrimental to many animal species, but it will also expose Palm Springs to the north to dust storms consisting of over a century’s worth of alkali dust and chemical deposits that have gathered in the basin.

An example of a similar scenario can be seen in neighboring Owens Valley.

Owens Lake was one of the bodies of water that was drained to provide water for the city of Los Angeles. The region suffers from periodic alkali dust storms and Owens Lake has been identified as the largest single source of PM10 emissions in the United States for a number of years. These dust storms contain known carcinogens (including arsenic, cadmium, and nickel), and other dangerous substances (Chromium 6, lead, and mercury) that negatively impact the health of the 25,000 residents of the Owens Valley, a largely

211 Larry C. Oglesby, The Salton Sea: Geology, History, Potential Problems, Politics, and Possible Futures of an Unnatural Desert Salt Lake, (Claremont, CA: Southern California Academy of Science, 2005), 34; Clarke, 393. 212 Khaled M. Bali, “Salton Sea salinity and saline water,” University of California Cooperative Extension Imperial County, http://ceimperial.ucanr.edu/Custom_Program275/Salton_Sea_and_Salinity/ (accessed October 18, 2018).

90 low-income rural area that includes the Big Pine Paiute Tribe. The main difference between the dust storms in the Owens Valley and the Salton Sea region is that the main recipients of the dust storms in the Salton Sea region would be affluent areas such as

Palm Springs, the entirety of the Imperial Valley, and eastern Riverside county. As it is, the current dust storms in the Salton Sea area are believed to contribute to the highest asthma-hospitalization rate in California.213

The Salton Sea is still perceived as worthless as it was before the water filled it over 100 years ago and is a problem that is ignored in the delusional hope that it will eventually go away. Environmentalists are torn between wanting to see the Salton Sea dry up as part of the natural process of ebb and flow that characterizes the area and realizing the enormity of the ecological disaster that would occur. The State of

California, despite its assurances to aid the area, continues to ignore the problem.214 A number of proposals for saving the Salton Sea have been developed over the years, including maintaining a smaller lake, but none has proceeded beyond the assessment stage. The Salton Sea appears to have become so large a problem that saps all attempts by the political will to solve it.

In 1971, when responding to the efforts by California Congressman John Tunney to save Lake Tahoe, California State Assemblyman Eugene Chappie reprimanded, that

213 Allison Harvey Turner and Barry Gold, “Solving the Salton Sea Crisis,” The San Diego Tribune http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/sd-utbg-salton-sea-crisis-20161012- story.html (accessed October 18, 2018); Piper, 19-24; Kleinfelder East, Inc., Screening level ecological risk assessment of select dust control measures being applied at Owens Lake, Keeler, Inyo County, California (Windsor, CT: Kleinfelder East, 2007), 13-18. 214 Sammy Roth, “IID, Imperial County want $3B to restore Salton Sea.” The Desert Sun. http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2015/07/29/iid-imperial-county-want-billion- salton-sea/30811085/ (accessed 4/13/16).

California “should take care of the Salton Sea where 500,000 gallons of raw sewage are pumped daily from Mexicali, and leave Tahoe alone.”215 The current proposed future for the Salton Sea is to construct 30,000 acres of wetlands, which, similar to Mono Lake, will not be able to support anything larger than brine flies. The sea would no longer serve as a stopover for migratory species of birds dependent upon fish, such as pelicans and cormorants. Sixty thousand acres of dry lake bed would still remain exposed to the wind.

The range of exposure to the dust is expected to range as far east as Phoenix, as far south as Mexicali, and possibly as far west as Los Angeles.216

The purpose of the preceding chapters recounting the environmental and economic histories of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea is to illustrate changing nature of the value of a landscape. Elements of value change in proportion to each other over the course of time. In the mid-nineteenth century Lake Tahoe may have been primarily valued for its natural resource, but this did not preclude that it was also value for its aesthetic resources, albeit in a smaller proportion. Now in early twenty-first century

Lake Tahoe relies on these aesthetic resources as a new natural resource which is inextricably related to the area’s environmental wellbeing and economic development.

The value of the Salton Sea has also shifted over time. The focus of this study is the time period between 1958 and 1976 when effort to develop the Salton Sea into a recreational oasis were underway. These efforts were an attempt to reshape the desert landscape in order to endow it with value in the eyes of most people in accordance with the European aesthetic. When these efforts to reshape the desert failed, the economic value of the land

215 Makley, 76. 216 Jim Steinberg, “California’s new Salton Sea plan won’t stop environmental disaster, Redlands expert says,” San Bernardino Sun, https://www.sbsun.com/2017/11/08/californias-modified-salton-sea-plan- wont-stop-environmental-disaster-redlands-expert-says/ (accessed August 24, 2018).

92 declined, but, as a result of changing circumstances in Southern California, the Salton Sea gained value in environmental terms. Yet, despite its environmental importance to the area the Salton Sea continues to generally be perceived as a “wasteland” rather than as a resource and the efforts to preserve it have been unproductive. The lack of economic development is reciprocally related to the lack of interest in preservation. At the basis for this lies the preference of the European aesthetic over the desert aesthetic.

Chapter 4: Welcome to Insert Name Here

This final chapter provides the most focused comparison between Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea by comparing specific examples of promotion of each location. The promotional materials presented in this chapter give no hint in the 1950s that the Salton

Sea would not rival places like Palm Springs and Lake Tahoe in its popularity and potential. A side-by-side of several kinds of promotional materials demonstrates that the

Salton Sea was the subject of substantial advertising and promotional campaigns, beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing until the late 1960s, that exceeded the efforts of Lake Tahoe promoters. This analysis reveals not only similarities, but also crucial differences between the promotional campaigns of both places that provide insight into their success and failure within the historical context provided by the preceding chapters.

Analysis of Salton Sea promotional materials reveals that promoters did their best, amidst unsuitable economic and environmental conditions, to create an aesthetic based on

European ideals that aimed to emulate the example of Palm Springs on a budget. These materials reveal that Salton Sea promoters were never able to adjust their own vision, as well as the perception of their land buyers, to embrace a desert aesthetic that would have allowed development of the area despite its failure to conform to a European aesthetic.

Real Estate

Large-scale development of the Salton Sea area began in 1958. At the northern end of the sea was the North Shore Motel and the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club

94 while Salton City was established on the southwestern side.217 Salton City was a planned development from the ground up initiated by the M. Penn Phillips Company. It was advertised as a complete community system that would include infrastructure such as roads, sewers, and fresh water, services such as schools, airports, and hospitals, housing, and amenities such as shopping malls and golf courses. Salton City was frequently advertised as the Salton Riviera, a name that was meant to evoke the luxury and romance of the European Riviera.218 As a result of its far longer history and its different environment Lake Tahoe did not find it necessary to make such comparisons in its promotional material.

In the advertisement below promoting land sales at Tahoe Paradise buyers are encouraged not just to fly to Lake Tahoe, but to buy land as an investment. The advertisement describes how land values in this subdivision grew from $995 for an average lot in 1955 to $7,300 in 1968. Tahoe Paradise was described as having an 18- hole golf course, a motel complex, a liberal arts college, and an airport. Readers were encouraged to fly to South Lake Tahoe and participate in “unparalleled investments” with monthly payments as low as $85.29 for real estate that “can take you sky high.” The act of flying alone already implies the wealth expected of Lake Tahoe visitors and therefore the advertisement invites these wealthy people not just to visit, but also to invest in land on which they could build and then visit at any time in the future.

217 Laflin, 39. 218 Levenkron, 41-93.

Image 2 - “Salton Riviera,” advertisement, Image 1 - “Tahoe Paradise,” advertisement, The Los The Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1961, Angeles Times, October 13, 1968, 292. 15.

Image 2 is an advertisement for M. Penn Phillips’ “Salton Rivera.” The advertisement touts the Salton Sea as the “last seacoast you can afford,” explaining that beach front property in Balboa runs $60,000 and in Santa Barbara $45,000. This advertisement does not go into details about pricing, but several others that do, announce prices around $20,000 with monthly payments of only $29, making the Salton Sea a seacoast within reach of the middle-class American.219 While several advertisements outline the attractions of Salton City such as the new golf course, the availability of

219 “Paid Insurance Protects Every Land Purchase,” advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1962, 20; “Sea-in-the-Desert,” advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1963, 25.

96 fishing, boating, swimming, dining at the local Salton Bay Yacht Club, and, perhaps the most significant amenity, air conditioning; this advertisement like the one for Lake Tahoe also stresses the investment potential of buying lake-front property at the Salton Sea.220

In an appealing parallel both advertisements are headed with maps, but in the case of Tahoe Paradise the map is very localized, depicting Tahoe Paradise’s placement in

South Lake Tahoe and showing a foreshortened image of the lake itself. The map of

Salton City on the other hand is broad, depicting the state of California north to Fresno in relation to the location of the Salton Sea. This map includes lines indicating the available freeway access to the Salton Sea and prominently displays Los Angeles in the middle of the left side of the image. The significance of this placement is that much of the Salton

Sea development was directed toward the Los Angeles middle-class who could not afford

Pacific beachfront nor Palm Springs property.221

While it was the intention of the Salton City developers to build an airport, it did not yet exist in 1961, and therefore the advertisement ensures that the prospective buyer knows how to find his way in several manners. Not only does the header image provide the freeway connections, a smaller inset image shows a close-up of the Salton Sea and its northern and southern road connections that allow drivers from the Los Angeles as well as the San Diego areas access to the sea. The third way in which the Salton City advertisement overcomes its access limitations is that it offers “free transportation” by bus and later plane for prospective buyers to come out to the sea and view available lots.

This method of drawing in prospective buyers not only included transportation to the sea

220 “Sea-in-the-Desert,” advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1963, 25. 221 “Salton Riviera,” advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1961, 15; “Salton Riviera,” advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, August 20, 1961, 96.

97 itself starting in 1958, but also helicopter rides so that people could view available lots and buy from the sky.222

Development

Image 3 – B. A. Land, Sr., “Aerial View of Desert Image 4 – “Aerial view of Tahoe Keys Marina, South Shores, California,” photograph, in Mildred de Lake Tahoe, CA,” postcard, undated, North Lake Stanley, The Salton Sea: Yesterday and Today (Los Tahoe Historical Society. Angeles: Triumph Press, 1967), 87.

Not only the coastal lands around the Salton Sea and Lake Tahoe were developed; some development reached into the lakes themselves in the form of marinas. These marinas were engineered coastlands that allowed housing developments to have direct water access. Beginning in the late 1950s every Salton Sea community established a marina to facilitate lake access for boat traffic. Among these are the Salton City Marina, the North Shore Marina, and the Desert Shores Marina (Image 3). These marinas altered parts of the landscape of the sea from a natural into an engineered coastline, but had comparatively little environmental impact. The marinas were a crucial element in fulfilling the promises of promotional materials that the Salton Sea was a recreation

222 deBuys, 210.

98 haven in the desert. The Salton Sea marinas encountered problems when, in the early1970s, the Salton Sea’s level rose as a result of flooding.223

Lake Tahoe and its marinas, on the other hand, were not at risk of flooding because of the agreed upon lake depth level maintained by the Lake Tahoe Dam and the agreement between the Lake Tahoe Protection Association and the federal government to maintain a steady water level between 6,223 and 6,229 feet.224 The construction of marinas as opposed to docks on Lake Tahoe appears to be limited to the Tahoe Keys

Marina, a massive development of South Lake Tahoe’s marshland that began in 1959.

While Salton Sea marinas simply altered the sea’s coastline Tahoe Keys Marina was built in an area of sensitive marshland that served as a filter for the waters of the Upper

Truckee River. Instead of continuing to capture silt and other impurities and thereby maintain the purity of the lake, the marshlands were filled in for development and an elaborate marina system was created for the project’s residents. This artificial structure can be seen in Image 4.

As important as the marinas in the foreground of Images 3 and 4 are the backgrounds. The mountainous silhouettes would be remarkably alike if not for the fact that the first is approached through a flat expanse of desert spotted with small shrubs, while the slopes of Lake Tahoe’s mountains are covered with extensive, green forests.

This contrasting environment is also seen in Images 5 and 6. These two images are more promotional materials encouraging investment in their respective locales, but each makes

223 Levenkron, 113-114. 224 Strong, 105.

99 very specific use of visual elements to entice the prospective buyer to invest in its landscape and, in the case of Lake Tahoe, the associated European aesthetic.

Image 5 – “Salton Sea Vista,” advertisement, https://blogs.voanews.com/tedlandphai Image 6 – “Lake Tahoe,” advertisement, The Los Angeles rsamerica/2012/06/05/the-incredible- Times, July 10, 1966, 271. saga-of-the-salton-sea/ (accessed September 26, 2018).

In Image 5 we see an illustration of the desert landscape that presents a composite of several of the attractions of the Salton Sea. In the foreground is the sea peopled with a sailboat as well as a motorboat towing a water skier, demonstrating just two of the many recreational opportunities available at the Salton Sea. In the middle distance we see the shore and a depiction of the Salton Bay Yacht Club showing the viewer the potential development of the area and demonstrating the amenities an investor could experience.

In the background we see the mountain ranges on the western side of the sea. These mountains are gently undulating, rounded hillocks under a bright blue sky as opposed to

100 the rather jagged and steep mountains depicted in Image 3. The hand-drawn nature of

Image 5 attempts to portray the Salton Sea and the surrounding desert as a far more gentle and civilized environment than a photograph would be able to.

In contrast, Image 6, an advertisement for Lake Tahoe, measuring no more than 4 by 6 inches in the original newspaper, utilizes only a small inset photograph of Lake

Tahoe. Yet this photograph tells the viewer all he needs to know by showing a tree- framed view of the lake with the mountains of the opposite shore in the distance covered in what might or might not be some snow on their slopes. The text complements this image by calling Lake Tahoe, “this scenic, majestic year-round wonderland.” It would appear that Lake Tahoe speaks for itself and that the deliberate treatment the desert landscape encountered at the hands of the advertising artist is completely unnecessary for its well-known environment. In the case of Lake Tahoe it might actually be a detraction to depict development such as clubs and marinas, as this would remind the potential investor that he is not buying unspoiled wilderness, but a heavily used landscape. In the case of the Salton Sea however, it is important to remind the investor that he is not looking at unimproved land in the middle of the desert. The conclusion that can be drawn is that Salton Sea promoters were unsure of the attraction of an unadulterated desert landscape. This reinforces the idea that the desert aesthetic was not as pervasive as its scholarly proponents suggest, while the European aesthetic of Lake Tahoe appeals even when it is unadorned by manifestations of civilization.

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Promotion

Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea were promoted through a variety of materials ranging from postcards, pamphlets, and flyers to newspaper advertisements for their respective amenities. There were event announcements as well as memorabilia items and films.225

A comparison of sample postcards from the two locations reveals some similarities. Images 7 and 8 are two postcards, the former of the Salton Sea at Desert

Shores, and the latter from Lake Tahoe. These postcards are very similar in their layout; each is composed of two horizontal images divided by a horizontal banner that alternately states, “Greetings from Salton Sea, Desert Shores” and “Greetings from Lake Tahoe.”

This text is printed in red ink and is set in an ornamental font. The bottom images in each postcard are very similar depicting a beach at each location peopled with swimmers, sunbathers, and large beach umbrellas. Each image contains a boat or a dock on, what is in each case, very blue water and a distant mountain topped by blue sky. The mountains in the distance give some indication of the lake’s surrounding environment as those of the

Salton Sea image are a dark brown fronted by a strip of light brown, while those of Lake

Tahoe are more of a brown-green implying vegetation. It is the second set of images at the top of each card that reveal or conceal the surrounding environment. In case of the

Lake Tahoe postcard this upper image is an aerial view of Emerald Bay showing Fannette

Island in the midst of blue water extending out into the lake itself, all of which is edged

225 Surprisingly no articles about either location were found in popular magazines such as Desert Magazine or Sunset during the timeframe of this inquiry. Such articles seem to start in the 1970s.

102 by green forests and distant mountain ranges, also of a greenish hue. The upper Salton

Sea image on the other hand hides more than it reveals of the area’s landscape.

Image 7 - “Greetings from the Salton Sea, Image 8 - “Greetings from Lake Tahoe,” postcard, Desert Shores,” postcard, http://www.ebay.com/itm/Greetings-from-LAKE- http://www.composingdigitalmedia.org TAHOE-California-CA-Beach-Emerald-Bay-1963- /f14_dmtp/webs/cmil/saltonsea.html Postcard-/291996022196 (accessed March 19, (accessed March 19, 2017). 2017).

The image depicts a car park and several buildings which may be part of the Desert

Shores Marina. Behind the buildings several individual trees can be seen, most of which are palms, giving a strong indication of the local climate. In the far background the viewer sees the same brown mountain range as in the lower image, topped by yet another brilliantly blue sky. In a manner reminiscent of Image 5, the Salton Sea Vista advertisement, this postcard seems to want to dress up the desert with the amenities of civilization and to avoid confronting its viewer with the vast unoccupied distances.

A more complete visual introduction to the environments of the Salton Sea and

Lake Tahoe were supplied by a number of pamphlets and multi-page newspaper inserts.

These pamphlets were heavily illustrated with photographs, maps, and drawings and generally covered a range of topics such as the area’s history, its development, and its

103 recreational potential, although some pamphlets limited themselves to specific subcategories such as fishing and boating.

John and Ricky Warriner’s Lake Tahoe: An Illustrated Guide and History is the only example of this type of publication representative of Lake Tahoe created during the time-frame of this analysis. Published in 1958 it is notable for its color photograph cover, certain to attract the attention of the reader when compared to the monochrome covers of the Salton Sea pamphlets. The pamphlet discusses all possible modes of recreation at the lake with the notable exception of snow skiing. All pages are illustrated with black and white photographs of activities or locations. The textual content is matter- of-fact, providing background on the history of particular places and well as access and use information. Also discussed are the history of Lake Tahoe; side trips to Virginia City and Reno among others, as well as the available resorts, campgrounds, and marinas at the lake.

The Salton Sea was advertised by at least three pamphlets and two newspaper specials.226 All three pamphlets are rather ordinary publications, the most attractive of which is Helen Burns’s Salton Sea Story, published in 1952, whose cover is shown in

Image 10 next to that of Warriner’s Lake Tahoe guide.

226 One of these was cited by Levenkron to be in the February 1959 issue of The Reader’s Digest, pg. 67, but I was unable to locate the advertorial and cannot verify its existence. The other is an 12 page supplement to the Los Angeles Times entitled “The North Shore Beach Story,” The Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1962, 1-12.

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Image 9 - John Warriner and Ricky Warriner, Lake Image 10 - Helen Burns, Salton Sea Story (Palm Tahoe: An Illustrated Guide and History (San Francisco: Desert, CA: Desert Magazine Press, 1952), Fearon Publishers, 1958), front cover. front cover.

Burns’s work is a cross between guidebook and history. Particularly interesting is that she devotes a brief section to the impressions a visitor to the Salton Sea will have. In these few paragraphs she describes the colors of the desert sky and how the visitor will breath “deeply of the clean salt air, [delight] in the gentle breezes” and will return time after time.227 Well illustrated with historical photographs Salton Sea Story provides a fairly detailed account of Imperial Valley settlement and the creation of the Salton Sea.

The remainder of its content is devoted to a discussion of recreational opportunities, a calendar of local events, a list of places of interest, and an appendix on facts and figures.

227 Helen Burns, Salton Sea Story (Palm Desert, CA: Desert Magazine Press, 1952), 6.

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Mildred de Stanley’s publication, The Salton Sea: Yesterday and Today, published in 1966, is very similar to Burns’s, although more than four times as long. It provides historical context and recreation advice, but also documents the development that has taken place since 1958. This she does in her section, “The Salton Sea Today,” which provides an account of the establishment of Salton City, its yacht club, golf course, airport, several hotels and motels, and industrial plant.228

V. Lee Oertle takes a slightly different approach in his publication, the Salton Sea

Recreation Guide, published in 1964. Oertle’s work also provides a brief section on the history of the Salton Sea, but focuses primarily on recreation as the title implies. The majority of the publication is devoted to fishing, hunting, and boating. The author discusses traversing the sea by boat to reach a number of sites such as a collection of buttes “clustered in the south east corner of the Salton Sea” that may be the remains of five extinct volcanoes, the ancient mud pots that bubble on the eastern side of the lake,

Mullet Island, and the Salton Sea State Park.229 In both his fishing and hunting sections

Oertle discusses the large variety of animals to be caught and provides instructions as to where and how to search for them. Of particular interest is his section on fishing, which includes a subsection devoted to the future of Salton Sea recreation where he discusses the “precarious balance of nature’s forces” at work in the Salton Sea. Oertle describes the effect of the increasing salinity of the sea as well as the problems of the influx of chemicals from farmland drainage. The author quotes a professor from the University of

California who, prior to 1964, already predicted the dire consequences of lack of control

228 Mildred de Stanley, The Salton Sea: Yesterday and Today (Los Angeles: Triumph Press, 1966), 62-72. 229 V. Lee Oertle, Salton Sea Recreation Guide (Palm Desert, CA: Desert-Southwest Publications, 1964), 1- 4, 50-51.

106 over the problems of the Salton Sea. Oertle closes this section by mentioning two methods of control; one being desalination by means of dikes, the other dilution by bringing in water from the Gulf of California.230

As early as the initial promotional period of the Salton Sea, before actual construction had even begun, celebrities came to the sea. In his book, Sand and Rubble,

David Levenkron lists Linda Darnell, Bob Cummings, Victor Jory, Jack Dempsey as among the celebrity attendants of first day of Salton Riviera land sales, May 21, 1958.231

Other celebrities attended events such a golf championships, the Salton Sea 500 boat race, and performed in the area’s clubs throughout the years.

Salton City and the North Shore certainly did their best to draw celebrity performers to their clubs to entertain their new residents who, frequently coming from large metropolitan areas around Los Angeles, were used to having access to quality entertainment. Image 12 is an advertisement at the North Shore Beach Yacht Club announcing Ginny Simms and Ish Kabibble.232 Image 11, an advertisement for the Cal-

Neva Biltmore/Cal-Neva Lodge, on the other hand features Ving Merlin, Jack Durant, and Spike Jones. The implication of this pair of advertisements is inherent in the fact that

230 Oertle, 22-24 231 Levenkron, 41, 51, 63. 232 Ish Kabibble, real name Merwyn Bogue, was a comedian and vocalist best known for his years with the Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge and his time with Spike Jones and his City Slickers. Following his retirement from show business Ish Kabibble sold real estate in the Palm Springs area. Ish Kabibble frequently performed with Ginny Simms at the North Shore Beach Yacht Club because of his local connection and friendship with his former bandmate who was married to Yacht Club owner, Don Eastvold.

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Image 11 - “North Shore Beach Yacht Image 12 - “Cal-Neva Line-up,” advertisement, Nevada State Club Line-up,” advertisement, The Journal, July 24, 1953, 3. Desert Sun, February 24, 1961, 3.

Ish Kabibble was a member of Spike Jones’s band for a brief period of time.233 This indicates that while the Salton Sea venues did occasionally land a major act like the

Beach Boys during the 1960s, it did not have the pull of Lake Tahoe which was able to

233 Ish Kabibble, real name Merwyn Bogue, was better known for his association with bandleader Kay Kyser, from 1931 to 1951, though he was a member of Spike Jones’s band. More important to know is that Merwyn was a long time friend of Ginny Simms, also a member of Kay Kyser’s band from 1934 to 1941. In the early 1960’s Ginny Simms married Donald Eastvold Sr in Palm Springs and had her reception at the North Shore Yacht Club. Donald was a real estate developer who, along with Texas oilman Ray Ryan, had built the North Shore Yacht Club and other projects that stretched from Palm Springs to the Salton Sea. During the early 1960’s, Merwyn was selling real estate in the Palm Springs area, including properties along the Salton Sea, while occasionally performing as a comedian/singer/instrumentalist.

108 present performers like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and

Patti Page, to name just a few.234

Image 14 - “Barney’s Casino,” Image 13 - “Salton Bay Yacht Club Casino,” image, in David advertisement, San Mateo Times, February Levenkron, Sand and Rubble: The Salton City Story (Los 28, 1963, 27. Angeles: Justice Publishers, 1982), 223.

Similarly, the Salton Sea area could not compete in the field of another major form of entertainment: gambling. Two Salton City establishments styled themselves as casinos in the mid-1970s. These were the Salton Bay Yacht Club, which advertised Lo-

Ball, Pan, and Draw Poker as its available games of chance (Image 13) and the Desser

House Casino, which offered the same fare.235 Compared to Lake Tahoe’s gambling venues these Salton Sea offerings can only be labeled as minute. The fact that gambling

234 “North Shore Yacht Club,” Past Pleasures at the Salton Sea, DVD, directed by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer (San Francisco: Tilapia Film, 2008).

109 was legal in Nevada since 1931 gave several Lake Tahoe establishments quite a long time-frame to develop into a major industry with which a newly established location such as Salton City, by 1976 in general decline, could not compete.236 Image 14 depicts an advertisement for Barney’s Casino located at Lake Tahoe’s South Shore. Based on a comparison of Lake Tahoe casino advertisements it appears that Barney’s was actually a fairly small operation. Barney’s ads never seem to tout the celebrity performances, the available hotel rooms, the dining options that large venues such as Harvey’s, Harrah’s, the Cal-Neva, and the Sahara include in most of their advertisements. What is interesting about this particular Barney’s ad, though, is the parallel it presents to early the Salton Sea land promotions which offered “free transportation” to potential investors (see Image 2).

Instead of free transportation, Barney’s offers free cash to the potential gambler and even if a single dollar is not a large sum, even in the days of penny-slots, it is still an appealing enticement to convince a traveler of his destination.

The real strength for Salton Sea promotion lay in its recreational opportunities which have already been briefly described in the section about promotional pamphlets.

Several of the following images are excerpts from these pamphlets and are used here to demonstrate the parallels between specific forms of recreation in the two locations. One limitation applies to this comparison, while both Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea offer year-around recreation, their seasonal offerings differ considerably because of their divergent environments. While the Salton Sea offered swimming, boating, fishing, even sunbathing in summer and in winter, Lake Tahoe’s offerings changed with the seasons.

235 Levenkron, 220. 236 Makley, A Short History of Lake Tahoe, 88.

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Snow in the mountains and ice on smaller bodies of water brought an end to swimming and sunbathing, but made skiing, skating, and snowshoeing possible.

Sport fishing is discussed in great detail in V. Lee Oertle’s pamphlet, the Salton

Sea Recreation Guide. He states that, “the man-made sportfishery established at Salton

Sea seems little short of miraculous. In the brief period 1950 to 1956, Salton Sea emerged from obscurity into perhaps the most fantastic ‘fish story’ ever told.”237 Oertle states that as early as 1929 attempts were made to introduce a “tackle-buster” into the lake in the form of the striped bass. This introduction as well as several subsequent ones were unsuccessful. In 1950 a broader approach to species introduction began and proved successful with the establishment of orangemouth corvina, a saltwater fish able to tolerate the increasing salinity of the sea. 238 A later inadvertent introduction of tilapia was also successful and this species is, as of 2018, the most prevalent species of fish in the Salton

Sea, but even the hardy tilapia are having problems with the still degrading environment.239 The only other survivor is the desert pupfish which can tolerate extreme salinity and temperatures, but even these fish, the only species native to the Salton Sea, are reaching their breaking point.240

In the 1950s the future of Salton Sea fishing appeared to be bright. Oertle comments that, “Salton Sea is undoubtedly the most popular inland lake in the state.

Literally thousands of people visit it each weekend… It is my belief the sportfishery has been one of the two great reasons. Fishing is second only to boating as Salton Sea

237 Oertle, 11. 238 Oertle, 11; de Stanley, 51-52. 239 deBuys, 231-232. 240 deBuys, 204.

111 recreation.”241 Oertle attributes to sportfishing the potential to “materially improve the economic growth of the entire surrounding desert region,” and that because of it, “land development programs held more appeal.”242

Image 15 - Fred Main, “11 lb. Cutthroat,” Image 16 - “Girl with Fish,” photograph, in Mildred photograph, in John Warriner, Lake Tahoe: An de Stanley, The Salton Sea: Yesterday and Today (Los Illustrated Guide and History (San Francisco: Angeles: Triumph Press, 1967), 53. Fearon Publishers, 1958), 31.

Recreational fishing at Lake Tahoe also has a troubled past. As early as 1859

Lake Tahoe developed a commercial fishing industry during the summer months which took thousands of native cutthroat trout from the lake for local consumption and distribution to Carson Valley and Virginia City. Eventually markets were developed as far away as San Francisco and Chicago.243 Sportfishing at this time was unregulated and recreational fishermen took as many fish as they wanted in a single day. In the 1860s the

241 Oertle, 12. 242 Oertle, 12. 243 Strong, 21.

112 fish supply, both native and later supplemented with the introduction of brook trout and mackinaw as well as the establishment of several hatcheries at the lake, seemed inexhaustible. By the 1930s, however, the cutthroat trout population verged on extinction. In the case of Lake Tahoe the problems were the result of overfishing as well as the disturbance of spawning routes through the construction of dams. Through the implementation of fishing regulations such as the banning of commercial fishing in 1917 and restrictions placed on recreational fishing the introduced fish species were able to recover to the point that by the 1950s and 60s Lake Tahoe could once again claim sportfishing as one of its recreational attractions. 244 In his pamphlet, John Warriner particularly recommends fishing in the rivers surrounding the lake and taking day trips into the Desolation Valley Wild Area whose lakes are well stocked by the U. S. Forest

Service.245

Images 15 and 16 are virtually interchangeable since little background can be discerned in either image. The fact that two fairly small girls are holding enormous fish reinforces the idea that both Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea hold fish of a size worthy of any fisherman. Also implied is that fishing is not just a man’s sport, but can be fun for the entire family.

244 Strong, 22. In another unexpected twist, researchers recently found a small population of Lahontan Cutthroat Trout in an out of the way site which they hope to be able to use to reestablish the species in Lake Tahoe. 245 Warriner, 30-31.

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Image 17 - Norman Phillips, “The Salton Sea Image 18 - “Lake Tahoe Mile-High Regatta,” 500,” photograph, in Mildred de Stanley, The photograph, in John Warriner, Lake Tahoe: An Salton Sea: Yesterday and Today (Los Angeles: Illustrated Guide and History (San Francisco: Fearon Triumph Press, 1967), 84. Publishers, 1958), 26.

Both Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea offered spectator sports to their visitors in the form of boat races. In her pamphlet The Salton Sea: Yesterday and Today, Mildred de Stanley describes the alternately named, Salton Sea 500 or Salton City 500 mile boat race, which began in 1961 as a publicity draw sponsored by one of the city’s developers, the Holly Corporation (see Image 17).246

Lake Tahoe, on the other hand, had the Lake Tahoe Mile-High Regatta beginning in 1953, depicted in Image 18. This race featured several different classes of boats culminating with a hydroplane race for the Mapes Gold Cup and significant prize money.247 The Lake Tahoe race course measured 30 miles while the Salton Sea course ran the titular 500 miles, which according to one race participant was a rather unrealistic expectation as only seven of the 189 entered boats finished the race.248 Successful

246 de Stanley, 85; Levenkron, 104, 106. 247 Warriner, 26. 248 Borrego Sun, “Salton City 500 Winner – Cream Puff,” Borrego Sun, https://www.borregosun.com/story/2016/08/01/news/salton-city-500-winner-cream-puff/2666.html (accessed September 30, 2018).

114 completion of the race may have been less important though than the fact that the Salton

Sea 500 became an annual even for several years drawing crowds up to 60,000.249

Image 19 - “Pretty Jimmie Bernard,” photograph, The Image 20 - “Tahoe Keys,” advertisement, Reno Desert Sun, February 6, 1959, 18. Gazette Journal, May 11, 1960, 3.

Like swimming and boating, waterskiing was a popular pastime. A large number of Salton Sea real estate promotional materials feature photographs or drawings depicting, predominantly, women waterskiing the sea’s expanse. There are several articles that are essentially announcements for the openings of the various marinas and boating clubs, featuring photographs of both male and female water skiers. The woman in Image 19 was named “Miss North Shore Beach” and this photograph and announcement was placed on the same page as a prominent real estate advertisement for

“North Shore Beach, Salton Sea’s ‘Bel-Aire,’ a 1000-acre residential community.”250

249 de Stanley, 85. 250 “North Shore Beach,” advertisement, The Desert Sun, February 6, 1959, 18.

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The advertisement for Tahoe Keys in Image 20 provides a very similar message to the composite description of the Salton Sea water skier promotional set. In this advertisement water skiing and real estate are combined, with the waterskiing girl in the foreground and an illustration of the Tahoe Keys Marina in the background. The text component of the advertisement emphasizes how at Tahoe Keys, “your own private beach will give you protected lagoon access to majestic Lake Tahoe. Fishing, boating, water-sports…all can easily become a regular part of your daily family life!” The text also touts Tahoe Keys as, “a masterpiece of land and waterways planning,” a statement that is undeniably true, but also ironic because of the development’s major contribution to lack of lake clarity.251

Swimming is perhaps the easiest pastime, requiring no special equipment, after sunbathing when one is next to a body of water; but in places such as the “Gem of the

Sierra” and “California’s largest inland body of water” it is not surprising that swimming, too, would become a competition. The two newspaper accounts in Images 21 and 22 are examples of the compulsion to “conquer” these lakes. The article “School Girl Conquers

Lake Tahoe” actually discusses not only the crossing made by Glenda Ortlip from Meeks

Bay to Cave Rock, but also the upcoming attempt by one Jose Cortinas, a professional swimmer, to swim from King’s Beach to Stateline. Cortinas was swimming not just for fame but for a $1000 purse in this publicity race sanctioned by both the Coast Guard and the Tahoe-Sierra Chamber of Commerce.

251 As recently as September 13, 2018 an announcement to reengineer the Upper Truckee River access point into Lake Tahoe was reported by SouthTahoeNow.com. “2019 project to reroute Upper Truckee River through South Lake Tahoe marsh,” SouthTahoeNow.com http://southtahoenow.com/story/09/13/2018/2019-project-reroute-upper-truckee-river-through-south- lake-tahoe-marsh (accessed October 18, 2018).

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Image 22 - “L. B. Housewives Break Record for Image 21 - “School Girl Conquers Lake Tahoe,” article, 10-Mile Salton Sea Swim,” article, November Reno Evening Gazette, August 15, 1954, 11. 14, 1954, 21.

Image 22 describes the record-setting, cross-Salton Sea swim of Mrs. Amy Hiland and Mrs. Daisy Murchie from Long Beach. These women swam a 10-mile course in a little over 6 hours, but they were by no means the only ones to test themselves against the

Salton Sea. On October 11, 1961 it was announced in The Desert Sun that 53-year-old physician, Dr. Willard W. Siegler, would attempt to swim a 40-mile route in 20 hours.

While no reward appears to have been involved in either of these two races, both served to promote the Salton Sea and its waters as an appealing challenge.

One other form of recreation that both the Salton Sea area and Lake Tahoe offered its residents and visitors was golf. A parallel can be drawn between what is considered

“proper” development and the existence of a golf course. From the beginning of Salton

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City’s development a luxurious golf course was part of the plan, as no place that wanted to be a “Palm Springs-by-the-Sea” would be complete without one.252

Image 23 - “The Gem of the Desert,” in Kim Image 24 - “Ninth hole at Tahoe City,” Stringfellow, Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and photograph, in John Warriner, Lake Tahoe: An Intervention in the southern California Landscape, Illustrated Guide and History (San Francisco: 1905-2005 (Santa Fe: Center for American Places, Fearon Publishers, 1958), 33. 2005), 88-89.

Advertised as “the Gem of the Desert,” the Salton City 18-hole golf course covered more than 140 acres in “velvet smooth greens” among the desert landscape and hosted an annual $2500 Pro-Am Tournament. In contrast, Lake Tahoe golf courses were nestled among the mountains and trees providing a much different atmosphere. In 1958 there were four golf courses in the Lake Tahoe area located at Glenbrook, Brockway,

Tahoe City, and Bijou.253 While the Salton City golf course had, “a view of the Sea from practically the entire course” and was placed “against the spectacular backdrop of the

Santa Rosa and the Chocolate Mountains,” the Glenbrook golf course’s ninth tee

252 “Salton Riviera,” The Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1961, 42. 253 Warriner, 33.

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“perched high on the hillside … with its fairway far below bending among giant pine trees to a green near the lake [and] offered a picturesque view.”254

As Carol Jensen points out in her 2015 book, Lake Tahoe through Time, water is a precious resource even in a place that seems to have so much of it. Jensen states that,

“contemporary Tahoe City golfers are likely to find their course returning to its original

1917 rough, brown links with nine green holes as Tahoe suffers from a multiyear drought.”255 The difficulty of maintaining a smooth grass surface in such a hot and dry environment as the Salton Sea area can be imagined. The watering system sustaining the

Salton City golf course must have rivaled the water and sewer systems of the city itself; and when, by the 1970s, demand for golf dwindled it became unsustainable and returned to the desert from which it had been reclaimed.256 For a brief span of years the Salton

City golf course created in the desert an oasis of green that provided not only recreation, but a familiar aesthetic and comfort to its occupants. Golf courses were one of the key institutions promised by Salton Sea promoters in order to provide their prospects with one fundamental element of a European aesthetic, namely a large expanse of greenery.

Film Promotion

Both Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea were promoted in films. The earliest Salton

Sea promotional film is a 1960 production by the M. Penn Phillips Company, which developed Salton City.257 Called A City is Born, the film begins with an aerial shot of

254 Wheeler, Tahoe Heritage, 119. 255 Carol A. Jensen, Lake Tahoe through Time, (Charleston, S.C.: Fonthill Media, 2015), 18. 256 Levenkron, 130. 257 M. Penn Phillips Company, “A City is Born,” Past Pleasures at the Salton Sea, DVD, directed by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer (San Francisco: Tilapia Film, 2008).

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Los Angeles that clearly shows the city’s density, then explains how people migrated outward into the desert, first to Palm Springs, then through the towns of the Imperial

Valley, and finally to the Salton Sea. The film’s primary focus is to celebrate the potential of the Salton Sea and to advertise its investment potential. The narrator is not shy in his use of hyperbole, calling the Salton Sea, “sportsman’s paradise. The new recreational capital of the world” and claiming, “here is the greatest combination of all- sea, desert, and mountains, and setting it all off like a jewel in the desert, Salton Sea,” all in just 26 seconds.

The film features extensive footage of boat racing, sun bathing, swimming, and water skiing; but about a third of the way in, it shifts to in-depth coverage of the construction of Salton City. The film dwells on the exactness of the company’s road, sewer system, and home construction, almost as if warding off potential complaints of sloppy workmanship. In these scenes the viewer sees large earth-moving equipment change the face of the desert by bulldozing the native plants, replacing them with roads, house frames, marinas, and golf courses. The film emphasizes that in addition to the early car and bus transport available, now there is also an airport. Another point of particular attention is the developer’s effort to bring fresh water to Salton City. This is depicted through an early shot of the All-American Canal, the laying of water pipes, and recurring mention of the importance of water to the civilized development of the desert into a place with swimming pools and golf courses as an updated version of William

Ellsworth Smythe’s garden in the desert. A City is Born is a cross between tourism advertisement and industrial film, highlighting the recreational opportunities that the human struggle against nature has allowed to blossom in the desert.

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Two other promotional films about the Salton Sea area are available. These are an untitled sales film from the early 1960s about “the recreational community of North

Shore Beach,” and the 1968 Holly Corporation production Miracle in the Desert.258

North Shore Beach and its central focus, the North Shore Beach Yacht Club, were developed in 1959. The promotional film about North Shore Beach focuses almost exclusively on the offerings of the yacht club depicting its architecture and setting with interior and exterior shots. One reason for this is that while the club was built in 1959, little of the planned surrounding estate development actually existed at time of filming and could therefore not be included. Based on present-day aerial views of the North

Shore Beach area this location was only slightly more successful in actually generating home construction than Salton City. The purpose of the film was to convince potential investors of the wisdom of buying and building at North Shore Beach.259

The film discusses the entertainment and recreation that can be found at the yacht club such as meeting and party space, a cocktail lounge overlooking the sea, the game room and other lounge areas, a dining area, a swimming pool overlooking the sea, and, of course, the club’s marina. The film emphasizes the ease of access both to the yacht club and within its confines by means of spaciously engineered roads. Again, recreation such as water skiing, boating, fishing, and swimming are advertised through numerous scenes of outdoor recreation. The film concludes in equally hyperbolic fashion to the narrator of

A City is Born, full of positivity and enthusiasm for “sailing and water skiing in the midst of the desert, in the playground of America.”

258 “North Shore Yacht Club,” Past Pleasures at the Salton Sea, DVD, directed by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer (San Francisco: Tilapia Film, 2008); Holly Corporation, “Miracle in the Desert,” Past Pleasures at the Salton Sea, DVD, directed by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer (San Francisco: Tilapia Film, 2008). 259 See Appendix B.

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Miracle in the Desert, a late production in the promotional history of the Salton

Sea, has the advantage of being able to show off the development successes of earlier promoters. A key point made by this film is the increase in land values that has taken place in just a few years as well as the population growth of Southern California. This film emphasizes the need for a place the average Los Angelino can expand into that is more affordable than Palm Springs. In a manner very similar to A City is Born, the film works its way down from Los Angeles through the Coachella Valley to the Salton Sea. It depicts the Salton Sea in several scenes as a fisher’s paradise, a beachgoer’s heaven, and a water skier’s Alps. The narrator is not shy about claiming that, “here is truly a miracle in the desert. A whole new outlet for the crowded millions in big cities, a Palm Springs with water.” He goes on to declare, “here is where you can find the good life in the sun.

Today the Salton Riviera, beside the blue Salton Sea, is the place for you to take charge of your future. At the Salton Riviera there is never a let-up in progress, this unusual city has a date with destiny.”

While the earlier films focused more on investment and development potential, this film repeatedly emphasizes the smog-free air and healthful environment. It refers to the now present amenities such as service stations, grocery stores, the post office, the chamber of commerce, delicatessens and laundromats, “light, smog-free industry,” mobile home parks, motels, and restaurants. Many of the scenic city shots include the

Salton Bay Yacht Club and the Holly House Hotel, which acted as Salton City’s community hubs. Also emphasized are the existence of social services such as police and fire departments, an elementary school, and a bank. The film concludes by appealing to investors based on the American Dream of land ownership and the opportunity to “enjoy

122 the great outdoors.” It closes by stating that, “by investing in your own land you can give yourself and your family and future generations the chance to take advantage of a heritage you might otherwise miss.”

Image 25 - Holly Corporation, “Miracle in the Desert,” Image 26 - Tahoe Paradise Homes, “Tahoe Past Pleasures at the Salton Sea, DVD, directed by Paradise,” YouTube Web site, 17:53, Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer (San Francisco: Tilapia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOgZKZrj0N Film, 2008). w (accessed October 2, 2018).

In Tahoe Paradise Lake Tahoe is promoted in much the same manner as the

Salton Sea is depicted in A City is Born and Miracle in the Desert. Tahoe Paradise is a sales film by Tahoe Paradise Homes, the estate’s developer. No specific date is available for the film, but it is described as having been made in the 1950s.260 Tahoe Paradise uses the framing device of a family, the Hansons, on vacation at their mountain home to show the viewer around Lake Tahoe. The featured residence is a large cabin on lightly forested slopes with the snow-capped mountains in the background. The story begins with the family waiting for the wife’s parents at the local airport, thereby highlighting the possibility of access to Lake Tahoe by plane. From there the group drives to their cabin home where, upon arrival, the father starts to expound on the value of his land while

260 The problem with dating the film by searching for “Tahoe Paradise” is that, while the film states that the development is located in Tahoe Valley, so far no further information could be found.

123 scenes of green forests and meadows as well as snowy mountains pass on the screen. Mr.

Hanson, the narrator, discusses how they bought their land four years ago and finally built on it the year before, but, he says, “what’s four years, when you have a lifetime to enjoy this magnificent country. A heritage that will really be a permanent part of our families future.”

In the next scene, Mr. Hanson sits on his porch and talks about how he feels like a pioneer for four years ago there was nothing there. Now, he proudly states, he has neighbors, his home has been built, there are streets, “changes, progress all around us.”

In a manner identical to the scenes in A City is Born, in which the concept drawings of the proposed marina development are shown, here drawings of a mountain lodge compound are discussed.

The next day the film opens on a river flowing through the development where

Mr. Hanson goes to fish with his father-in-law while enumerating the fishing opportunities and recreational development of the community. The film follows the family as they visit historical attractions, view the new development of a shopping center, and go to Emerald Bay, which the narrator claims is the greatest natural beauty in the world. Next the family visits Pope Beach, from which they witness the recreations possible on the lake such as boating, water skiing, swimming, and sun bathing. From the natural setting they proceed to South Shore and Stateline at which point the available entertainment and gambling is depicted with shots of neon signs and marquees.

With the beginning of yet another day the film enters another chapter of promotion. At this time the range of available non-water specific recreations such as horseback riding, golfing, and hiking are discussed. Two members of the family visit

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Tahoe Paradise’s water tank and we see heavy equipment grading forest land for the building of more streets and houses, something the narrator considers a further sign of progress. Repeatedly Mr. Henson mentions how it is impossible to have worries when at

Lake Tahoe and he closes his narrative by stating that whether one is a resident or visitor,

“there is one feeling we mutually share. That feeling of completeness that will bring us back again and again.”

The snow-capped mountains, seen in the background of many of the scenes in

Tahoe Paradise, as well as a final statement about skiing and hunting as the seasons change remind the viewer that Lake Tahoe has a great variety of recreational opportunities. While the Salton Sea offers water-based recreation year around because of its mild climate, the Lake Tahoe area’s change in temperature facilitates the pursuit of recreations such as skiing, sledding, and snow-shoeing not available in the desert. These winter recreations are discussed in great detail in a promotional film about the Edelweiss

Ski Resort made in the 1950s. The entire twenty-five-minute film is devoted to the resort, its amenities, and its slopes. Much of the narrative is devoted to a discussion of the engineered nature of the slopes, the chairlift, and the instructors and is accompanied by an almost endless array of different skiers descending mountain after mountain with varying levels of success. The resort was located near Twin Bridges, California. It apparently ceased operation sometime in the 1960s.261

The Edelweiss Ski Resort film definitely preceded the 1960 Winter Olympics in

Squaw Valley of which it makes no mention. But it is significant to note that the 1960

261 “Edelweiss Ski Area/Strawberry Ski Hut,” https://www.facebook.com/EdelweissSkiAreaStrawberrySkiHut/ (accessed November 29, 2018).

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Olympics provided Lake Tahoe with enormous amounts of promotion for its winter recreation opportunities as well as the lake’s access system and amenities. Beginning in the late 1920s winter recreation at Lake Tahoe developed with construction of a ski jump near Tahoe Tavern and the implementation of the “Snowball Special,” a train running from Truckee to Tahoe City during the winter months.262 Yet winter infrastructure development and recreation remained fairly limited until the 1960 Winter Olympics, which were orchestrated by Walt Disney and televised nation-wide, “exposed millions of viewers to the area’s beauty, establishing it as a world-class destination” in both summer and winter.263

In a pattern already seen in the discussion about newspaper and pamphlet advertising there appear to be more general promotional films of the Salton Sea area than of Lake Tahoe, yet Lake Tahoe as a whole benefitted from more targeted productions by advertisers such as resorts and casinos. The similarity in the style of the films as well as their content is not surprising. The director’s use of aerial shots to showcase the expanse and beauty of the given landscapes creates in the viewer the impression of floating above the land and choosing their part of the future of this land like a god. The use of color stock in these films was instrumental to their success as it would be impossible to convey to the viewer the unique aesthetic qualities of each place through black and white footage.

262 Makley, A Short History of Lake Tahoe, 59. 263 Makley, A Short History of Lake Tahoe, 105; Michael Weinreb, “How the Olympics got Disneyfied,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/how-the-olympics-got- disneyfied/552659/ (accessed October 2, 2018).

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Image 28 - “Lake Tahoe,” postcard, Image 27 - “Salton Sea Ashtray,” object, 1960s, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jassy- author’s collection. 50/4144751057 (accessed September 26, 2018).

Ephemera and souvenirs were also used to promote both locations. Items like match books, stationary, flyers, maps, banners, pins and patches, can openers, pens, beer tokens, cups and mugs, lighters, and ashtrays were adorned with business or community logos. Occasional items, such as the Salton Sea ashtray in Image 27, were general representations, promoting the entire area rather than advertising one particular business or entity. In case of Lake Tahoe items, it was possible to locate a lighter adorned with scenes of the lake, but interestingly, no ashtrays in its shape. Although most Lake Tahoe casinos used personalized ashtrays not one, it would appear, decided to represent the lake.

Perhaps this speaks to their high esteem of Lake Tahoe or it indicates that none of the

127 businesses conceived of the idea. As a counterpoint to the Salton Sea ashtray Image 28 presents an ornamental Lake Tahoe postcard which uses the outline of the lake to determine its content and shape. It is undeniable that this item is far more engaging than the ashtray despite the fact that both serve the same purpose-to outline their respective lakes and the surrounding communities. The color contrast between the yellow edge and the blue of the lake of the postcard is very vibrant and the yellow rim provides an ideal background to the location specific images associated with each town. On the Nevada side depictions of gambling are prevalent in King’s Beach and Stateline while natural features such as Cave Rock are featured along with recreational pursuits such as fishing, sunbathing, bathing, golfing, and volley ball around all parts of the lake. Included also are depictions of the Tahoe Tavern and the Cal-Neva to mark other communities of significant size. Even the center of the card where the lake is located is densely populated with depictions of swimmers, boaters, water skiiers, and fish as well as a message of greeting printed in the center that requires only the signature of the card’s sender.

The Salton Sea ashtray is actually one of two versions. The other version contains a location marker only for North Shore, implying that perhaps it was produced by the North Shore Beach Yacht Club. It also incorporates a directional compass in the center of the lake and two distance markers on the west shore labeled as “Palm Springs

20 miles” with an arrow pointing north and “Mexico 70 miles” with an arrow point south.264 A difference between the North Shore ashtray and the Salton Sea ashtray in

264 “North Shore Salton Sea Ashtray,” object, https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/old-salton-sea- ashtray-palm-springs-north-shore (accessed September 28, 2018).

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Image 27 is that the indentations for a cigarette are white like the remainder of the rim in the North Shore model while they are blue in the Salton Sea version, leading to the interpretation that these might be points of water in- or outflow. This is not the case, however, as water enters the Salton Sea only from the north and south. Given the elaborate nature of many of the Salton Sea real estate promotions it is surprising that the ashtray’s designers did not opt to adorn it with small representations of the available recreational opportunities and amenities (see Appendix A). This would have made this souvenir more representative and engaging.

All of these publications and promotional materials have one thing in common– they all see a bright future for the Salton Sea and for Lake Tahoe. As Marcella Fitch puts it in her 1961 thesis, entitled History of the Economic Development of the Salton Sea

Area, “much has been spent in the field of advertising to cause ‘Salton Sea consciousness’ in the minds of the potential home owners.265 Lake Tahoe on the other hand appears to have had little need to create a “Lake Tahoe consciousness” in the 1950s and 60s because this consciousness already existed as a result of the lake’s long history of settlement and recreation.

Another way of phrasing this is that considerable effort was put into creating an image of the Salton Sea area that endowed the landscape, its environment, and its development with value in the eyes of a broad audience. This attempt to create a thriving community in the desert initially failed because of the rejection of the desert aesthetic and the developer’s inability to implement a European aesthetic. This initial rejection fuels

265 Marcella Karen Erickson Fitch, “History of the Economic Development of the Salton Sea Area” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 1961), 259-260.

129 other conditions which further reinforce the rejection of the desert aesthetic. Because most land buyers did not subscribe to the desert aesthetic, few wanted to live there, which means that the critical mass needed for further development did not come about. Since few people wanted to live in the Salton Sea area without the amenities promised by the developers the area is still seen as a region with of little use and less value.266 As a result, practices that exacerbate environmental degradation continue and, even when the environmental degradation reaches the point that it can negatively impact other regions, regions with a recognized value such as Palm Springs, nothing is done. At this point any hope of development has ceased and the Salton Sea is primarily known for its negative qualities as a toxic or alien landscape. All of these factors feed back into the rejection of the desert aesthetic and reinforce this very rejection.

266 Unfortunately I have not found any accounts by people who bought land in Salton City or any of the other Salton Sea communities that did not settle there at least seasonally. One of my major sources, Levenkron, only discusses the fact that people failed to build and attributes this failure to the lack of infrastructural development. In her book, Portraits and Voices of the Salton Sea, Christina Lange collected the stories of 19 people “who live and/or work at the Salton Sea.” Many of these interviewees have been long-term residents of the area, but they cannot answer the question as to why others did and do not want to settle there because they themselves are the exception, the minority adherents of the desert aesthetic.

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Conclusion: What could have been…

Given all of the circumstances that led to the failure of the development of the

Salton Sea as a thriving tourist location, I have always wondered what prompted potential middle class investors to buy into the Salton Riviera dream. I imagine myself as a buyer, arriving by bus which deposits me near one of the circus tents that hosted real estate agents for the M. Penn Phillips Company, hastily dragging my family along with me following a loudspeaker announcement that the great man himself will soon be addressing the crowd. In his announcement Mr. Phillips sketches a picture of a

Mediterranean resort community, but one built on solid American foundations, and I mentally fill out his sketch with flourishes of schools, beaches, and other promised amenities in the desert. The atmosphere is one of unbridled promise and growth; the salesmen making me feel special by allowing me to purchase my own piece of this paradise. The fantasy continues as I look at available lots from an airplane or a helicopter. From up high, the entire development seems like piece of pointillist art. I cannot really see the details of the land and I can just vaguely make out the outlines of the lots as they are pointed out by a salesman, but they quickly fall out of focus as the overall picture of ease and prosperity comes into view. After circling over the development, I eventually select an unmarked lot slated to be the last house at the end of a cul-de-sac.

“Good choice, you don’t want a lot close to the intersection—too much noise once the roads are built” my salesman says. Soon the craft lands and the salesman and I head off to one of the tents to reserve my piece of the American Dream. A few minutes later, my family and I board one of the busses to head back to the smog and congestion of Los

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Angeles, knowing it will only be a short time before we will be living in the Salton

Riviera.

The purpose of my analysis is to explain the history of perception and the aesthetics of the American West, how the acceptance or rejection of the desert aesthetic played a major role in the decline of the Salton Sea and the concurrent ascendance of

Lake Tahoe, and the problems decline and success have brought to both areas. In the

1950’s and 60’s, the Salton Sea and Lake Tahoe regions were comparable in terms of the number of yearly visitors they received and were marketed similarly to the public.267 In spite of the large number of tourists visiting the Salton Sea, at its height drawing more yearly visitors than Yosemite National Park, the area remained largely undeveloped, unable to acquire a sufficient number of households in any of the new communities to even create enough water flow for a working sewer system, let alone a sustainable community. At Lake Tahoe, the opposite occurred. Development at Lake Tahoe outstripped the ability of any governing bodies to properly control the growth and prevent the environmental problems that continue to degrade water clarity at the lake. It is the rejection of the desert aesthetic and the continued embrace of the European or Alpine aesthetic that contributed to the inability for the Salton Sea communities to generate the

“critical mass” necessary to develop the area and make it the recreational haven promised by its promoters.

267 James E. Pepper and Robert E. Jorgensen, Influences on Wastewater management on Land Use: Tahoe Basin 1950-1972 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 1974), 18; Mac Taylor, The Salton Sea: A Status Update (Sacramento, CA: Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2018), 3.

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The first chapter outlines the history of the perception of the American West and the evolution of the desert aesthetic, using landscape theory and a history of tourism, which is heavily dependent upon perception of the landscape, in the West. While Eastern

American aesthetics were based to some extent on European standards, Western

American aesthetics appreciation was an acquired taste that had to be refined over the years as more of the West was discovered and put to different uses. Preference for one landscape over another is a value-based judgment, but it is a difficult undertaking to determine the exact nature of the factors that constitute value at a given time. I argue that the desert aesthetic is not as accepted as is argued by some scholars and that the desert landscape generally engenders negative reactions.

The desert claims few converts, but those very few rhapsodize as eloquently about the desert as do others about the forests. John Van Dyke and Joseph Wood Krutch proposed appreciation of the desert aesthetic on an intellectual and artistic level that was not accessible to most of their contemporaries and continues to be a sentiment expressed by only a small percentage of desert travelers and residents. Early in his book, The

Desert, John Van Dyke questions what makes the sailor love the sea and the Bedouin love the sand and provides the following answer,

there is a simplicity about large masses–simplicity in breadth, space and distance–that is inviting and ennobling. And there is something very restful about the horizontal line. Things that are flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them. Furthermore, the waste places of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts forsaken of men and given over to loneliness, have a peculiar attraction of their own. Their weird solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, are the very things with which every desert wanderer eventually falls in love. You think that very strange perhaps? Well, the beauty of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but to-day

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people admit its truth; and the grandeur of the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the desert gives it proof.268

The second chapter looks at a brief outline of the evolution of the perception of

Lake Tahoe. For non-Native Americans, Lake Tahoe was originally seen as an unending source of raw materials for ventures important to national and regional economic interests. While these resources were being depleted, some people began to perceive the lake differently and started to prepare to make other uses of the lake. Early Lake Tahoe lumber baron Duane L. Bliss provides an excellent example of multifaceted interest in the lake. Not only did he run one of the most expansive lumber companies in the basin, but he was also looking to a future of recreational use when he ordered his loggers to spare trees under fifteen inches in diameter and opted to preserve “particularly scenic locations” in their entirety. In 1893, after the need for lumber for the Comstock Lode dwindled, Duane Bliss developed his second Lake Tahoe empire by establishing a resort hotel at Tahoe City, a train connection between the hotel and Truckee, CA, and passenger transportation on the lake with a new steamer.269 While Bliss’s valuation of Lake Tahoe can be categorized as primarily of an economic nature, although of two distinct types, he can also be commended for being one of the first to recognize the lake’s inherent value as a unique attraction that would draw visitors for recreational and aesthetic reasons.

Lake Tahoe’s later history repeats this trend. As the Nevada-specific casino industry experienced a decline with the advent of Native American casinos closer to gamblers’ homes many promotional efforts were redirected to the aesthetic and recreational opportunities the Tahoe Basin offers as well as the need to preserve the

268 Van Dyke, 19. 269 Wheeler, Tahoe Heritage, 37, 48.

134 underlying conditions that make a positive value-based assessment of Lake Tahoe possible. At this point “promotional” encapsulates conservation and preservation as well as economic development, which are often at odds with each other as development and conservation strive for balance on the lake.

The third chapter examines the creation and perception of the Salton Sea. Before the Salton Sink flooded and became the Salton Sea, it was thought to be worthless desert, barely suitable for the area’s only industry, salt mining. Desert irrigators placed more importance on the Imperial Valley to the south, as water from the Colorado River was diverted in order to make the Imperial Valley an agricultural powerhouse. Following the

1905 flood that created the Salton Sea, problems were beginning to be identified with the reshaping of the land into a more useful form. As early as 1906 the scientific community was aware of the problem the diversion of the Colorado River to Imperial Valley agriculture would cause for the ecosystems of the Southwest, particularly for the

Colorado River delta. William deBuys cites a 1906 Scientific American article which states that, “if the Colorado River continues to flow through the channel which it has been occupying during the last six months, the geography of the Southwest must be radically changed…”270 At this time water was still increasing the size of the Salton Sea even as it was diverted to supply the agricultural needs of the Imperial Valley.

The problem for the Colorado River Delta was the fact that agricultural run-off was not redirected into the Colorado River bed, but went north to the Salton Sea through the Alamo and New Rivers. As a result the Colorado delta ecosystem suffered dramatically. At the same time as the diverted water deprived the Colorado River Delta,

270 deBuys, 110, 126.

135 the inflow from the Imperial Valley was incrementally destroying the environment of the

Salton Sea. The inflow brought with it toxic chemicals and ever-increasing salinity from agricultural runoff as well as sewage from neighboring towns on both sides of the border.

It is the destruction of the Colorado Delta and most Southern California wetland areas that makes the maintenance of a “healthy” Salton Sea such a crucial element in the present day because the sea is now one of the few places where sufficient food and breeding ground is found for large-scale, seasonal bird migration via the Mississippi

Americas and Pacific Americas Flyways. Despite the ever-increasing financial and environmental costs associated with reaching an environmental equilibrium at the Salton

Sea, nothing has been done to address the issue other than a consensus that something must be done about the problem. The failure of development in the Salton Sea feeds the perception that all areas surrounding the Salton Sea, the agricultural empire and the coastal cities, are more important than the body of water itself.271

The fourth chapter looks at a very specific time in the history of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea, the postwar period through the 1960’s as portrayed in promotional materials for both locations. Overall, there are many similarities in the promotional strategies for Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea. The minor differences between the promotional materials subtly identify the lack of development of critical mass in the

Salton Sea even as the large number of visitors to the Salton Sea would appear to deny this assertion by purchasing lots. Real estate advertisements for the Salton Sea touted the

271 The potential problems yet to face Southern California if the Salton Sea is allowed to dry up are illustrated in Karen Piper’s book, Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A. This history depicts the battle of Owens Valley constituents against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in their effort to contain the damaging dust-storms arising from the bed of the dried out Owens Lake.

136 area as “the last seacoast you can afford” marketing towards middle class Angelinos.

Advertisements for Lake Tahoe encouraged investors to buy land instead of flying to

Lake Tahoe, at a time before deregulation, when the costs of a flight were quite expensive, marketing for a more upwardly mobile investor than at the Salton Sea.

Another implicit sign of more critical mass generated at Lake Tahoe can be seen in the entertainment brought to the Salton Sea and Lake Tahoe. While Tahoe had sufficient residential and non-resident audiences to bring in a variety of entertainers for the venues around the lake, entertainers at the Salton Sea tended to have a local connection and, outside of appearances in connection with major events in the early promotional days at the sea, entertainers of the same caliber as Lake Tahoe did not appear within venues at the Salton Sea.

Throughout their histories perceptions of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea have been based on a complex interrelationship of a variety of factors such as aesthetic perception, recreational use, economic exploitation, infrastructure development, and environmental preservation. These are not distinct categories that uniquely define either lake’s value at a certain point in time. Assessments of value such as aesthetic, economic, and environmental perceptions and physical conditions are inextricably intertwined. In order for a place to become a thriving locale, in the sense that it is a desirable place to visit, all three conditions must be present to varying degrees. There is no formula that predicates an appropriate combination of these conditions, but a fundamental disinclination toward a landscape such as the desert will predispose people to demand more infrastructure development to reshape that landscape toward a more common ideal.

Given what occurred in both locations during the 1950s and 60s and their divergent

137 histories, the ultimate denial of the desert aesthetic plays an important role in these histories.

It must be understood that the perception of a landscape, while dependent on individual people, is also a cultural product. As Reyner Banham argues in his book,

Scenes in America Deserta:

Quite a few modern men are far from comfortable in this limitless immensity [of the desert]; and as one who enjoys it to the point of exultation, I have to wonder whether the inability to do so is cultural or temperamental… Temperament may enter fundamentally into attitudes toward the desert, but it seems to me that there is also, for many Europeans, a cultural tradition that blocks their ability to respond to the immensity of the American desert.272

The preceding statement may not only be applicable to Europeans, but also to many

Americans of European ancestry. Assuming a predisposition toward certain landscapes, especially those with plentiful natural resources and resultant infrastructure development, implies that people are more willing to perceive these landscapes as valuable. Resource valuable landscapes are not guaranteed to be aesthetically valuable landscapes. Some people may see beauty in the extractive landscape of Bingham Canyon, Utah, but these people are likely to be a small minority. The same applies to the desert in general, few people can appreciate it for what it is, and, as Banham asserts, live with it in its natural state.273 Most people seem to live in desert areas because it is where other parts of their lives are located and most aim to alter the desert where they reside to resemble a

European aesthetic landscape ideal. This alteration can take the form of agricultural reclamation, especially during early western settlement, or of the more residentially

272 Banham, 62. 273 Banham, 58.

138 oriented development of green spaces and lawns, copses and avenues, and flower beds, located in what are extremely demanding conditions for most traditional summer flowers.274

The prevailing European landscape aesthetic continued to be embraced at Lake

Tahoe, bringing more development and interest until sufficient critical mass accumulated in the area for it to prosper. The ultimate rejection of the desert aesthetic, especially by the majority of landowners that purchased real estate in the 50’s and 60’s, but failed to build residences and businesses, influenced development in the Salton Sea area. In her

1961 thesis, Marcella Fitch states:

Land increases or decreases in value because of what the purchaser does to it, what neighbors do to surrounding communities, supply or lack of supply of desirable property, availability of utilities, nearness to roads and general over-all activity of the area population-wise and business-wise. Land does not depreciate from use unless abused. Rather, its economic worth increases. Increase in value also comes about through demand because of greater population. In order to realize full value from land, there must be activity on and surrounding the property. These factors, taken into consideration, explain the reasons for the desirability of the Salton area.275

Based on the number of tourists that engaged in recreation on the sea during this period, many wanted to visit the Salton Sea, but no one wanted to live there. Perhaps Salton Sea real estate development was doomed from the start because it, like the Florida swamp land sales boom and bust of the 1920s, was built upon fantasy, greed, and speculation, rather than an actual desire to live in the area. On the other hand it is impossible to say whether successful development might not have lead to solutions for the sustainability of

274 I spent one year in Las Vegas in the early 2000s and it was amazing that if you got up early enough you could see an army of gardeners replacing the pansies that had wilted during the heat of the previous afternoon in the public areas of the casinos. 275 Fitch, 2-3.

139 the sea and the well being of the area’s environment. It is difficult to determine if this is not a chicken and the egg scenario: if development had succeeded would sea conservation efforts been more strongly pursued, or did the already tangible changes in the sea’s environment result in the lack of development despite what seemed like a bright future in the 1950s.

Image 29 - “Lake Tahoe in the cool evergreen Shangri- Image 30 - “’Miracle in the Desert’ Salton City!,” La of the Sierras,” advertisement, The Desert Sun, May advertisement, The Los Angeles Times, April 19, 20, 1954, 13. 1959, 175.

Among the many appellations that were used to describe both Lake Tahoe and the

Salton Sea, Shangri-La was one.276 These places were expected to become refuges that would allow the world-weary traveler a place to get away from it all and find peace and harmony in the remote landscape. Yet as history has progressed, neither the Salton Sea nor Lake Tahoe have been able to maintain the identity of this mythical place as they are

276 “Lake Tahoe in the cool evergreen Shangri-La of the Sierras,” advertisement, The Desert Sun, May 20, 1954,13; Levenkron, 50.

140 confronted by the realities of the rest of the world from which they cannot be disassociated. At this point it takes a very special Hugh Conway to find the peace and happiness of Shangri-La at the Salton Sea.277

277 Conway is the main character of Conrad Hilton’s Lost Horizon who travels to the Himalayan city of Shangi-La.

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Appendix A – Illustrations of recreational opportunities at the Salton Sea from real estate newspaper advertisements

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