David Hvidsten

ENG 132A

History of Place

10/15/04

Lake Havasu, Arizona: A World of Incongruity

I first experienced Lake Havasu, Arizona during the summer of 2000 when I was 14 years old. To reach Lake Havasu, my family drove from Minnesota, through Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, before finally reaching Arizona. Having never experienced a desert environment of any kind before, the gradual change in landscape and atmosphere as we drove south was infinitely interesting to me. As we reached farther south, into Utah and Nevada, I noticed that the number of people and homes seen from the road dropped and it seemed as though the majority of each states population was concentrated in cities. In Minnesota, people live wherever the wish. Because fertile soil and fresh water are readily available everywhere, Minnesotans have spread out over the full reach of their state. In the deserts of the American southwest, this was not the case. As we approached Mohave County, Arizona, our final destination, the first thing that struck me was how much of nothing there was. We would drive for hours and not spot one sign of human settlement besides Indian Reservations and the occasional oilrig. Not only was there very little human life, there was almost no visible plant or animal life either. Acknowledging that only a few hundred miles ahead lay a bustling city of 50,000 plus people went against everything I had ever been taught about human survival. Why would anyone want to live here, I asked myself?

The following is an answer to that question.

To truly understand the oddity that is Lake Havasu City, Arizona, one must understand the history of its location and the forces that made its creation a possibility. Prior to 1900, the area now covered in 211 billion gallons of fresh water known as the Chemehuevi river valley was a remote portion of the Colorado River dominated, much as it is now, by harsh desert environment (NetSource 8.). The earliest non-native inhabitants of the area were American fur-traders who traveled along the Colorado during the early 1800's up until 1830 when the Mohave Indians (originally from the Mohave basin in Northwestern Arizona) forced the less violent Halchidhoma tribe out of the region, making the long journey perilous for traders. Also during this time, Spanish gold enthusiasts began moving up the Colorado from present-day Mexico, establishing mining camps along its length, including one called the Kelly Gold Mine, located in the present day Lake Havasu region (NetSource 2).

From 1830 until 1900, the Chemehuevi river valley existed in peace. The miners never hit it big and no one, beyond the Spanish and the occasional gold fiend, felt compelled to settle in the region. The dominating flora of the 90,000 square mile Mohave region, an alluvial basin composed of sediment washed down from the surrounding mountain ranges, included various small shrubs (creosote bush, bursage, cholla), cacti (barrel, beavertail), yucca, and many small, fragrant herbs such as Mormon tea and brittle bush. Dominant fauna of the area included the desert tortoise, various small lizards, snakes, rodents and predators like the kit fox, coyote, and bobcat. The "wild" burro that lives in the Lake Havasu region today, as well as in other parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada, was introduced by Spanish miners during this time period as well.

In 1900, land along the California side of the Colorado River was declared open to homesteading. Needless to say, nobody but a few lonesome fishermen and a handful of miners (the gold mine "Road's End Camp", a name with which the area was associated with up until the 1970's, was built in at this time) bothered themselves with the dusty, sand blown Chemehuevi valley. By 1907, when U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Garfield closed the region to further settlement due to the designation of an Indian Mission Reservation in the area, there was no one in the valley to complain. Except, that is, for the Native Americans.

During the early 1900's, the Lake Havasu region was home to two different Indian tribes, the Mohave and the Chemehuevi. The Chemehuevi were invited to live in the area by the Mohave in the early 1800's. These two tribes, while never existing in complete harmony, lived in and around the Chemehuevi valley, including the present day Lake Havasu region, without issue until 1907. From 1907 until 1930, the Mohave and Chemehuevi, despite increasing pressure from the outside world, lived much as they had previous to governmental interest in the area, though now within imposed reservation boundaries.

During the early 1930's, the United States began searching for a suitable site along the Colorado to construct a dam in order to quench the insatiable thirst of the Imperial Valley in southern California and growing cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix. The Imperial Valley was, prior to the great Westward expansion of the 1800's, was nothing more than an expansive desert. In 1896, when the California Development Company was formed to bring irrigated water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley, thousands of homesteaders poured into the region, despite a yearly rainfall mean of 3 inches and summer temperatures often bordering 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The irrigation canals and dikes that initially routed water into the Imperial region were soon overtaxed. In 1922, delegates from each state bordering on or touching the Colorado River responded to the problem and met to decide where and how water from the Colorado would be allotted and disseminated. The end result of this meeting and the passing of subsequent bills through congress, not to mention the advent of the Great Depression, was the Colorado River dam system. This plan included the construction of the Hoover, Glen Canyon, Davis, and Parker Dams.

Parker Dam, located 155 miles downstream of Hoover Dam, is the force by which Lake Havasu came to be. Constructed during the great depression between 1934 and 1938, Parker Dam is the deepest dam in the world at 320 feet, and supplies water to the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area as well as San Diego. The reservoir created behind it, known today as Lake Havasu, can hold up to 211 billion gallons of water and was at first used primarily by the San Diego community.

The creation of Parker Dam was also a negative for many people. The mining post "Road's End Camp" is currently under some 70 feet of fresh water, as is the Kelly Gold Mine. The owner of "Road's End Camp" secured a lease from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before the dam's construction and ended up building a fishing camp on brand new Lake Havasu's shore. The land that, only 20 years prior to the construction of Parker Dam, the U.S. government had forced the Mohave and Chemehueli Indians onto, no longer existed. The government, as compensation, purchased the land the tribes lost in the construction of the dam, but did not hand over any of the new shoreline for neither tribe had a working constitution and could not legally purchase land. The Mohave eventually left the area and the Chemehueli were put onto another reservation on the California side of Lake Havasu. It was not until 1974 that the Chemehueli, now with a working constitution, finally reclaimed 30 miles of shoreline, including plots of land owned by white homeowners and businesses. Since this acquisition, there has been constant tension between the Chemehueli and those people who had been living on the reservation land before 1974.

After the completion of the Parker Dam in 1938, the region was left alone until World War II, when the U.S. Government closed the area (which included a small settlement around the newly constructed "Road's End Camp") in order to test high artillery and gunnery as well as new fighter planes. The area reopened after WWII and a number of ephemeral fishing and boating camps sprung up around the lake until 1964 and the introduction of Robert P. McCulloch, the founding father of modern day Lake Havasu City.

Robert P. McCulloch was born on May 11, 1911 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His family was wonderfully wealthy due to his grandfather's sound investment in a number of Thomas Edison's inventions and creation of Milwaukee's public utility system. McCulloch's father was also the owner of United Railroads, a trolley and urban rail company in Wisconsin. McCulloch inherited his grandfather's fortune during his adolescence and enrolled at Princeton when he was 18. He transferred to Stanford a year later, and graduated with an engineering degree, a passion for boat racing, and 2 national hydroplane championships. McCulloch's first business venture was the McCulloch Engineering Company, located in his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To begin with McCulloch Engineering manufactured racing motors and superchargers, fueling McCulloch's great passion for boat racing.

In a search for an area to test high performance outboard motors, McCulloch stumbled upon Lake Havasu in 1964. All that existed at the time was the abandoned WWII airstrip and a burgeoning hippie commune at "Road's End" fishing camp. As a testing site, the lake was perfect. 45 miles long and only 3 miles wide at its best, Lake Havasu was like a giant drag strip for boats and McCulloch wasted no time in buying up 26 square miles of land for 75 dollars an acre along the lake's shore -- the largest single purchase of land in Arizona's history at the time. The first McCulloch establishment on Lake Havasu was built shortly after his purchased and named Site Six. Site Six was composed of 100 mobile homes where employees and their families were housed, a Best Western, a Nautical Inn, and a convenience store.

But McCulloch saw something more than a test site in the recovering, manmade lake. He saw a bustling city and thousands of people. To build a small outpost with paid workers is one thing, but to envision a city in the middle of a barren, nutrient devoid, desert is entirely another. McCulloch is quoted here on his first thoughts about Lake Havasu as potential city material. "There's an airstrip here; there's a lot of blue water; there's a warm climate; this can work." And it did work. With the help of a few friends, including the president of McCulloch Oil Company, C. V. Wood, the same man who engineered the original Disneyland and the first Six Flags in Arlington, Texas, McCulloch eventually succeeded.

The first thing McCulloch set about to was the "…there's a warm climate…" problem. The main reason why, in the 160-year history of the Lake Havasu region, very few non-native human beings had made Lake Havasu their home is that it lies in the middle of a desert. McCulloch used this to his advantage. Since no one knew what Lake Havasu was really like, he began to develop it into something more hospitable behind their backs, only revealing his world when everything was in order.

He began by building a small, pre-constructed town dominated by the "Lake Havasu Hotel", a massive, 2 story building surrounded by lush, imported vegetation used to house the thousands of prospective buyers he flew in on 11 Lockheed Martins, purchased solely for the purpose of advertising his new vision. Once a prospective buyer landed, filled with expectations of a warm, beautiful desert oasis, they were greeted by a Holly salesman (McCulloch bought out Holly Development, an Arizona contractor, to utilize their real-estate knowledge to attract potential investors) in one of 40 identical white Jeeps. Since there was only one paved road in the little town of Lake Havasu City, buyers were taxied, off-road, to various "prime" locations on the waterfront and surrounding area and back again to the Lake Havasu Hotel for a night of air-conditioned relaxation.

Despite McCulloch's efforts, Lake Havasu City grew slowly and ungracefully. Between 1960 and 1969, only 953 buildings were built in Lake Havasu, including the business facilities and accommodations that McCulloch constructed at Site Six. Having attracted an estimated 137,000 potential buyers to the area on 2,702 flights, it was obvious that something was wrong with McCulloch's grand vision. Lake Havasu City during the early sixties looked, to any discerning eye, something akin to a squatter village; many of the city's first residents lived in primitive conditions -- some in tents -- without electricity or plumbing. McCulloch never bothered building a public sewage system and each new residence on Lake Havasu's pristine shore was accompanied by a septic tank and drainage field. Today, Lake Havasu City holds the national record for the greatest number of septic tanks within a city's parameters. Not everything was this bleak though. By 1969 children in Lake Havasu City were attending their very own high school and had their first senior Prom in the lobby of the Lake Havasu Hotel, which had become a sort of town hall for the little community. The lake was still, relatively, untouched and the original wildlife of the region continued to live much as it always had.

Lake Havasu City needed something beyond its location and rugged beauty to attract potential homeowners if it were to payoff McCulloch's large investment. Tourism, a large part of many metropolitan economies, was non-existent in lake Havasu. Nobody seemed interested in visiting a small town in the Arizona desert, known prior to development only as a fishing camp and Government test site. McCulloch was aware of this problem and set about to find an answer.

The solution to all of McCulloch's perceived problems was originally built in 1831 in London, England and has been the subject of countless stories, at least one children's song, and a number of Dickens' novels. Sinking fast into the Thames River, the floundering London Bridge was put up for auction in 1962. To McCulloch, the famed bridge was a perfect addition to his new town in the desert and so, for 2.46 million dollars, he purchased, disassembled, numbered, and shipped the bridge, brick by brick, across the Atlantic ocean, through the Panama canal and up the coast to Long Beach, California. The bridge was then loaded onto trucks and driven 300 miles across the desert to Lake Havasu City where it lay until 1963 in a 7-acre fenced storage compound. The Lord Mayor of London, Robert Inglefield, was given the honor of laying the first corner stone.

In the years since the rebirth of the London Bridge, Lake Havasu has experienced a significant population boom. From 1970 to 1979, 4,767 homes were built in Lake Havasu and thousands of tourists began to pour into the city. By 1990, upwards of 1 million tourists a year were journeying to Lake Havasu City to see the bridge, often liking what they saw enough to move there.

The obvious conclusion is that people live in Lake Havasu City because of Robert P. McCulloch's great marketing genius. The not so obvious conclusion is that these people live there under a false sense of security. Most established cities in the world have persisted because they have learned from their mistakes and their history of inhabiting a place what to do and what not to do. The people of Lake Havasu City have no history. They are, as a majority, disconnected to the land and the history of that land. From Parker Dam and the flooding of the Colorado, to the failure to provide the native people of the area adequate compensation, white history in the Lake Havasu region is rife with disconnectedness. It may be that part of the unreality associated with Lake Havasu City stems from it being built upon the shores of an unnatural lake, or across from a forgotten tribe of Native Americans, or simply because it was built in the middle of the desert. Robert McCulloch was equally blind when he saw dollar signs instead of scorpions and palm trees instead of cacti in 1960. Only time will tell if the guise under which the city of Lake Havasu, Arizona will lift.