ds it; there are landscapes of success and landscapes of failure; there is the erasure of the past in search of an ever-new future. These contradictions prompt profound concern for the meaning of place. Environmentalists have been hoping that economic downturn would spur reflection and readjustment. Alas, the major players of the American Southwest seem unwilling to forsake the dictum of growth-for-growth’s-sake. Large real estate companies, having already secured or entitled hundreds or thousands of acres, remain politically powerful; too often sustainable development means “sustaining development.” Even as financial markets were collapsing in late 2008, developers were seeking approval of new developments as neighboring ones slid into foreclosure and bankruptcy.
Our photo-documentation probes the mechanisms and forces driving the complex transitions of the Mojave Desert. The terrain will be familiar to historians of the west. To others it might provide the threshold to a land in which simple visual power often conceals complicated and troubled histories.
The historian John Beck notes that in the Christian and Hebrew traditions the desert is depicted as a land of “otherworldliness,” of “emptiness,” and thus a “venue for unhindered experimentation, a testing ground both physical and spiritual.” 4 The empty desert becomes either a place of “escape from modernity, an elemental alternative to the rational order of ‘civilized’ life,” or else it represents “the chaos of an unordered primal ‘nature’ that must be resisted and expunged. … [A]s the American desert lies within the economically emergent post–World War II ‘New West,’ the desert can increasingly be seen as representative of aspects of contemporary capitalism: a space without boundaries, unhindered and unregulated by old practices and habits.” 5
A great deal has been projected into this space “without boundaries, unhindered and unregulated.” Northern Nevada was the site of the great Comstock Lode and — as with the recent real estate bonanza — many of the miners arriving in Nevada were part of an exodus from California, relocating to the desert as mines further west became exhausted. 6 Nevada is, “after all, the land for the old Californian … with a thousand percent added thereto,” trumpeted the Gold Hill Daily News in 1863. 7 The historian Eugene Moehring reports that the extraction of such extraordinary mineral wealth required a “massive industrial system,” with “towns at strategic points.” Together these boomtowns comprised an urban network, whose core consisted of Gold Hill, Silver City and Virginia City. 8 Virginia City was particularly large and complex; it even developed a Chinatown with industries serving the rest of the city. 9 Densely packed at its center, this network was “elongated at its periphery by the formation of other types of urban places connected to the core by roads, trails, and economics.” 10 Period images depict bustling and jumbled townscapes dominated by mine tailings and smelters’ smokestacks. Both Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson photographed at Comstock, providing a rich visual history of the mining economy. Spatially, this already complex network may be described as a subsystem, a “peripheral extension” of an urban system that originated in California following the Gold Rush. 11
Further south, cities such as Eureka, Tonopah, Goldfield, Beatty, Rhyolite and Manhattan flourished and faded. Although there are no major sites like Comstock in southern Nevada, Goodsprings, south of Las Vegas, remained an active mining community until the postwar era (its location near where Las Vegas will build an international airport will lead the city to flourish again). To the west of Las Vegas were the great borax mines of Death Valley (this “white gold” mining was popularized with the television series Death Valley Days, hosted by Ronald Reagan). The city of Henderson was founded in what would become metropolitan Las Vegas to house workers of the Basic Magnesium plant. Built in 1941 to supply the war effort, Basic Magnesium once employed ten pe