Once Upon a Time in the Mojave: Ghosts of the Alphabet Railroad Towns

High & Dry surveys the legacy of human enterprise in the California desert and beyond. Together, writer Jack Eidt and photographer Osceola Refetoff document human activity, past and present, in the context of future development.

Italian Spaghetti Western filmmaker Sergio Leone’s "Once Upon a Time in the West" spoke to me while exploring the railroad route across the Mojave Desert, mapped in the middle 1800s. Go to the now ghost town of Goffs, one of the alphabetical steam train stops on a rise above the Colorado River, and you will experience wind howling into a creaking windmill, midday heat shimmering.

Imagine three desperado gunmen waiting at the train depot for their demise. A rumbling steam locomotive is heard rattling over the rails, whistles screeching as a reminder of the significance of the railroad in establishing the frontier that would serve one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world.

Outlaw played by Jason Robards: A town built around a railroad. [laughs] You could make a fortune. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hey, more than that. Thousands of thousands.

Wanderer played by Charles Bronson: They call them "millions."

– From "Once Upon a Time in the West," directed by Sergio Leone 1968

Leone shot his epic in Spain and Monument Valley rather than California, but he understood the U.S. desert railroad was never simply a means of crossing empty land. It was the landscape's new nervous system, laid down where water could be found. It carried with it the violence, ambition, and an accelerated reordering of a world that had first belonged to someone else.

This "Once Upon a Time in the West" persists where photographer Osceola Refetoff and I meandered along the forgotten train stops, now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) line between Barstow and Needles on the Arizona border. Its mythic origins began not with dynamite and surveyors, but with foot trails worn into the desert floor over centuries by the Mohave, Chemehuevi, and other Native Peoples.

Long before any locomotive crossed this desert, the Mohave Road connected the Colorado River to the California coast, threading between the region's scarce and precious springs. The Mohave People, who call themselves Pipa Aha Macav or People by the Water, live primarily around the lower Colorado. They were at that time nomadic, with their origin story traced to nearby Spirit Mountain, the highest peak in the Newberry Mountains.

Along with historic adversaries in the Chemehuevi, they had mapped this water geography through the mountain passes with an intimacy that no outside expedition could replicate. Today they come together to protect the water sources that remain, with another water grab attempt happening today at Cadiz, one of the former train stops:

Our tribes—the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe — have lived and stewarded lands in the California desert since time immemorial. Groundwater-fed springs in the desert are sacred to our tribes and give life year-round to plants and animals, including bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and bobcats. All these species and more are part of a connected landscape found in our stories, songs, and ceremonies.

– Daniel Leivas, Chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and Timothy Williams, Chairman of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe

Lieutenant Amiel Weeks Whipple led an 1854 expedition, accompanied by scientists interested in astronomy, meteorology, biology, and minerals, to determine a transcontinental road and later train route. His meetings with the Mohave chiefs created a mutually beneficial vision for a transport route, which according to accounts included showing Whipple their “secret trail to the Pacific Coast," along which "there was water and grass.” Whipple would later die as a Brigadier General, fighting to protect the Union in the Civil War.

Lieutenant Edward Beale surveyed the area next. No friend to Indigenous rights and original owner of the massive Tejon Ranch, he disregarded the deal with the Mohave Chiefs. Thus, railroad engineers used the trail knowledge to locate water sources to enable steam locomotives to cross the brutal desert.

As a crowning blow, in the 1860s and 70s, the railroad set aside 20-mile swaths of Mohave traditional lands along the routes to be sold to finance its construction and enable mining ventures and new towns. The railroad did not invent a route through the Mojave; it stole it, the way Leone's desperados stole an Indigenous frontier already besieged by rails and capital.

The Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, which would later merge into today’s BNSF, built a chain of water stops and sidings across roughly a hundred miles of desert and, as a matter of administrative convenience, named them alphabetically running west to east. Now ghost towns, they include Amboy, Bristol, Cadiz, Danby, Essex, Fenner, Goffs, Homer, Ibis, and Java. Route 66 would generally follow this route as well, and we will cover that in a subsequent dispatch.

Amboy was first settled as a salt mining town in 1858 and formally established in 1883. Its name is forever tied to Roy's Motel and Café, now a reasonable facsimile of its former glory. Adjacent to Amboy are the surreal salt evaporation ponds of Saltus. Set along the railroad line, they were dug out of the Bristol Dry Lake expanse by the National Chloride Company of America.

Above this landscape towers the 250-foot-high Amboy Crater, with a dark collapsed volcano called a caldera, formed 79,000 years ago. It was designated in 1973 as a National Natural Landmark and now is a hiking and picnic area.

East of Amboy, the road is basically closed after multiple storms washed out all the bridges on the route. Cadiz is the next alphabetical stop, a summit and siding whose name still marks a rise in the old Route 66 highway grade. Cadiz Solar and agricultural operations serve as a front for a water extraction scheme there by Cadiz, Inc., that threatens Chemehuevi and Mohave traditional territories and is surrounded by federally protected mountain ranges. The Trump administration recently approved the use of a former oil and gas pipeline to move the groundwater to urban areas, against multiple scientific objections.

For over 40 years, our traditional territories have been targeted for the corporate extraction of vulnerable desert water resources by Cadiz, Inc., a foreign investor-backed company. We have successfully opposed their efforts to extract and sell desert ground water, but still they continue to pursue an unrealistic scheme to drain the desert to make a profit for their shareholders.

– Daniel Leivas, Chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and Timothy Williams, Chairman of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe

A lawsuit has been filed. This is the same type of water grab the Mohaves faced, up and down the Atlantic & Pacific route. In the 1870s, the Southern Pacific Railroad usurped Chemehuevi rights to the oasis in Twentynine Palms, which would later become the home of the massive Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center.

After a full day exploring the ghost landscapes, Osceola and I considered Needles for a motel, but then we pulled into the gate at Goffs. What a curated world, where land manager Chris Wirth showed us the restored 1914 Goffs Schoolhouse, camping spots, land art, the infamous and now relocated Mojave Phone Booth, and a working mining stamp mill.

All of this is home to the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association's museum library, archives, and artifacts, housed in a replica of the Goffs Santa Fe Railroad Depot. We received a tour from archaeology researcher Jim Toenjes accompanied by his dog. He shared his research on African American homesteaders to the region.

Founded in 1883 at a steep summit rising west from the Colorado River, Goffs once served as a railroad junction, former Route 66 stop, and later as General Patton’s World War II Army training camp. They also have a divine caboose to spend the night in, with expansive views of the Mojave Trails National Monument.

"Once Upon a Time in the West" ends with the railroad triumphant and the old order of the desert gone, but the frame lingers on what is left behind—a woman carting water to men laying track, a town rising where there had been only creosote bush and cholla cactus.

In the Mojave, the water pumps at the alphabet stops have gone quiet, but the freight trains still run, indifferent and constant, over the traditional lands of the Mohave and Chemehuevi.

Explore more High & Dry on PBS SoCal: www.pbssocal.org/high-dry. We welcome your questions and comments: info@desertdispatches.com