Homesteading Vegas: Promotion, Race, and Water in the East Mojave

Abstract

The East Mojave is a hot, dry place. As Americans moved into the desert during the early twentieth century, motivated by a national movement championing country life and dry farming, promotional literature from railroads, and advertisements from individual boosters, they confronted an unforgiving environment ill-suited for agriculture. In early Las Vegas, Nevada, external promoters and local powerbrokers obscured the environmental realities of the budding desert railroad hub, contributing to the rapid deterioration of the local aquifer, and setting the stage for the eventual Boulder Dam project. In Lanfair Valley, California, African American homesteaders escaping the brutalities of the Jim Crow South and unrealized expectations for racial advancement in Los Angeles, found community and security in one of the early twentieth century’s most ambitious, albeit never fully realized, mixed-race farming communities. Informed by a Progressive Era belief in envirotechnical solutions to environmental problems, homesteading communities in the East Mojave demonstrate the pivotal role of outside capital and government intervention in the success of desert farming communities. As migrants arrived in the East Mojave, climatic conditions, not hard work or new technology, determined the limits of personal and community success.