"When a man decides he can control nature, he's in deep trouble." — Laura Dern

"I think we sometimes give ourselves a little too much credit as humans, as being able to control and understand nature, when in fact we do neither." — Richard Preston

California was granted statehood in 1850, and the U.S. military was charged with surveying this new territory. Their goals were to identify resources to exploit (minerals and arable lands for agriculture), to identify routes for railroads to connect the west and east coasts, and to assess the status of the Indian populations (and “escort” them to reservations to make more space for non-Indians from the eastern U.S. to settle and raise families).

In the deserts, it was especially important to identify where there was water. There were few perennial springs, mainly scattered along what would later be known as the San Andreas earthquake fault. The edges of shifting plates grind sand and rock along their contact zones, turning that coarser material into a fine clay called “fault gouge," with so little space between clay particles fault gouge is nearly impervious to water movement. When groundwater, moving through the coarser sediments, hits a zone of fault gouge it is as if it had run up against an underground dam. Behind the “dam” groundwater levels rise and sometimes come to the surface. The surface water, both from the shores of Lake Cahuilla and the remaining perennial springs, provided a critical resource to the Cahuilla people and their use of these lands is evident in the abundance of pottery sherds and stone tools that were left after the lake receded and before the people were moved to reservations.

This was also a time of “gold fever." The gold fields in the Sierra Nevada had been largely exhausted and miners were looking elsewhere for the next “mother lode." Test pits dug during that time dot the desert landscape, but few if any paid any dividends. There was a small gold rush just across the Colorado River from what is now Blythe, in an area of the Arizona Territory called La Paz — near the current town of Quartzite.

Rather than dig himself, Bill Bradshaw saw a more certain cash flow in transporting miners and equipment from southern California to the La Paz gold fields via freight wagon and stagecoach. He just needed a route that had enough water sources along the way to make the trip feasible. Bradshaw befriended local Cahuilla tribal members who told him about a series of springs starting in the Coachella Valley, through the gap between the Chocolate and Orocopia Mountains, south of the Chuckwalla Mountains across the Chuckwalla Bench, and then on to Blythe. On the broad alluvial fan that was formed by gravel and rock transported by periodic local floods flowing from the Chuckwalla Bench through the gap between the Orocopia and Chocolate Mountains, there was one of those dependable springs. The spring included a pool of water and two native palm trees, and so was named Dos Palmas. 

Bradshaw’s stage and freight company was a successful venture from the 1860s through the early 1900s. Passengers often kept diaries of their travels, and some of those diaries have survived and provide a rare glimpse of what traveling was like during that era. The earliest diaries describe the two desert fan palms, Washingtonia filifera, and a pool of water at Dos Palmas. One of those diaries described relaxing by the pool and letting bread or cracker crumbs from their lunch fall into the pool, with little blue fish rising to eat those crumbs. Those were desert pupfish, Cyprinodon macularius, with the drying of Lake Cahuilla and the hyper salinity of the Salton Sea, the pupfish is the only remaining native fish species in this region. They were delivered into Lake Cahuilla during the multiple flood events of the Colorado River, and then found refuge at Dos Palmas when the lake receded. Curiously, later diaries report an ever-increasing number of palm trees, four, a dozen, dozens, and then additional palm clusters (oases) scattered across the alluvial fan. It is likely that there was movement along the San Andreas fault, movement that strengthened the underground dam of fault gouge, and so brought additional water to the surface.

With the advent of autos and trains, as well as the end of “gold fever," Bradshaw’s stage and freight route ceased operation. The stage stop at Dos Palmas disappeared; its boards and fixtures were likely repurposed in the construction of the next phases of human use at Dos Palmas. The only remaining evidence of the stage are three graves, apparently one was for Herman Ehrenberg, who was murdered in his sleep at the stage stop in 1866; the perpetrator and the gold Ehrenberg was carrying were never found. The other two graves are said to belong to an unnamed woman who died in childbirth along the stage route.

That next phase of human use began around the 1920s, with Raymond Morgan building a guest ranch, with an adobe ranch house about a half a mile south of the Dos Palmas Oasis. This was the first in a series of efforts to squeeze a living from this landscape. A guest ranch, cattle grazing, watermelons, date palms, and citrus farming and then a series of aquaculture ventures, ranging from tropical fish, striped bass, largemouth bass, tilapia, and then shrimp farming; all tried, but none had long-term success. A series of 25 or so large earthen ponds were constructed and fed from water from an artesian spring near the Dos Palmas pool. Then another equal number of large aquaculture ponds were built on an adjacent property (“Aquafarms”). In the mid-1960s a Hollywood movie was filmed in the nearby canyons and the actors and crew stayed at the guest ranch. The movie was “The Professionals” and starred Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Woody Strode, and Robert Ryan as the professionals, and Claudia Cardinale as the femme-fatale, and Jack Palance as the alleged bad guy. If you like old westerns it is worth the watch, if for no other reason than it, in a small way strove to break the stereotyped racism and gender bias that Hollywood was otherwise embracing (Woody, an African-American, shared billing with the white actors; Claudia’s character was deceptively active in determining her fate; while Jack portrayed a Mexican bandit, his character was far more moral than the white rancher who had hired “The Professionals”).

Perhaps with the exception of the movie, all these money-making ventures had an impact on the natural landscape, but the largest impact began with the completion of the Coachella Canal in the 1940s. This was an extension of the American Canal system built to divert water for agricultural development from the Colorado River to the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, the same canal system that was being built when floodwaters filled the Salton Sea in 1906. The Coachella Canal was unlined, and as it passed along the northern and western margin of the Dos Palmas basin it leaked like a sieve. All that leakage went into the ground and then was pushed to the surface along the earthquake faults and clay lenses that were formed as a legacy from the repeated filling and drying of the historical Lake Cahuilla. The maybe hundred or so palms that existed before the canal quickly became many thousands of palms trees. The added water also pushed salt to the surface making the ground toxic to all but the most halophilic plants. Creosote bush covered lands shifted as Allenrolfea occidentalis, (iodine bush) expanded and took the creosote’s place in areas with high clay, higher salinity. The iodine bush is native (it was used by the Cahuilla to add salt seasoning to their food) and so the change was in its distribution and greater abundance. The more destructive change was the non-native tamarisk, or salt cedar (Tamarix ramosissima) that engulfed this landscape, covering thousands of hectares in and around the Dos Palmas basin, and hundreds of millions of hectares throughout the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico.  

Tamarisk was purposefully introduced from the Middle East of southern Asia in the early 1900s to act as a windbreak for arid southwestern farmlands. It is unrelated to any western hemisphere plant taxa, and so has almost no insects, other than European honeybees that use it. So, it has almost no wildlife value (nothing to eat) except as a roost for some birds. Once introduced, tamarisk spread to any area with moist soil, consuming exorbitant amounts of water and exuding salt from its needle-like leaves and poisoning the soil for native plant species. Today there is perhaps no wetland in the otherwise arid lands of North America that has not been invaded by tamarisk. Still, although tamarisk and increase salinity were causing habitat degradation, there was still endangered desert pupfish. There were populations of both endangered California Black and (not endangered) Ridgeway’s Rails. The Salton Sea Springsnail, Pyrgulopsis longinqua, is found only Dos Palmas wetlands. Bobcats, racoons, and deer were abundant. 

In 1980 the public, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), lands within the Dos Palmas Basin were classified as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) under the Desert Protection Act signed into law that year. The focus was to ensure that the recently listed as endangered desert pupfish would remain protected. In 1990, I became involved with the Dos Palmas ACEC through my then work with The Nature Conservancy (TNC). We began purchasing the key privately owned parcels from willing sellers, passing those lands on to BLM, and began a strategy for controlling the tamarisk and invasive fish that had been released into the system by the previous owners. I hired Alex Cabrera as the preserve manager, who then spearheaded managing Dos Palmas, shifting the trajectory from a salt-crusted tamarisk-dominated landscape to one dominated by native species. Together, TNC and BLM redesigned the aquaculture fish ponds to be more suitable for the pupfish and the rails. Then we passed the management baton over to BLM in 2000, and they have continued Alex’s work.

Then, around 2006-9, The Coachella Canal was lined to stop the leakage and provide water that the water districts could then sell to San Diego. No more leakage and not surprisingly, Dos Palmas began to dry up very rapidly. That drying was anticipated, so water from the now lined canal is being piped out of the canal and allowed to seep into the Dos Palmas groundwater to stabilize the habitat there. 

Dos Palmas is today a rich wildlife habitat. However, after more than a century of being modified by farmers and water managers, one could hardly call it “natural." Without the aquaculture farming, and tamarisk and without the water leaking from and then drying and then augmentation from the Coachella Canal, Dos Palmas would likely be a vast bajada dominated by creosote bushes, would have that original pool of water (with pupfish) and might have a few hundred palm trees distributed among 3-4 oases, and probably could take care of itself. No rails, no open water for migrating ducks, little attraction to migrating warblers and flycatchers. Today there are a few thousand palm trees, rails, herons, egrets, ducks and more. There are also non-native bullfrogs, snails, crayfish, and lots of non-native fish, and tamarisk. The wildlife values that exist now require perpetual management. The result is a richer, and larger wetland habitat, a habitat that is in critically short supply as the Salton Sea continues a downward spiral. Still, I have an on-going debate with myself whether, if I could turn back the clock a century or more, which future would I select. 

Go outside, tip your hat to a lizard (and a cactus), and be safe.