The Town In The Desert

One of the things one has to tolerate here in Quartzsite are the strong Winds blowing across the La Posa Plain, and yesterday we had to stay inside most of the time. But we got company again from our German friends. They have not been successful in selling their rig and have now decided to keep it for them in the US. They will be heading up to Lake Havasu, while we will be heading east.

Yesterday we got ourselves a real shocker as we filled gas in Quartzsite. $4.59/gal made for a $100 fill, where we used to pay $70 earlier. So our trip home will be of the expensive kind. I have to keep reminding myself that the increase of gas prices is just a minor nuissance, compared to the terrible sufferings of the Ukrainians. Yet, it is the greed of the petro industry which has caused these price spikes. 

But while we are here in Quartzsite, let's take a look at the interesting history of this little town.

Where Quartzsite is now located, was from 1863 to the 1880s the site of a waterhole and later a stage station, called Tyson's Wells, along the La Paz - Wickenburg Road on Tyson Wash, in what was then Yuma County, in the newly created Arizona Territory. It was about 20 miles from the Colorado River steamboat landing of La Paz and 25 miles from the landing of Ehrenburg from 1866. The next stop was 25 miles to the east at Desert Station

Tyson's Wells in 1875 was described by Martha Summerhayes, in her book Vanished Arizona:

At all events, whatever Messrs. Hunt and Dudley were doing down there, their ranch (Desert Station) was clean and attractive, which was more than could be said of the place where we stopped the next night, a place called Tysons Wells. We slept in our tent that night, for of all places on the earth a poorly kept ranch in Arizona is the most melancholy and uninviting. It reeks of everything unclean, morally and physically. 

In the valley around Tyson's Wells were places known to have been successfully worked by individual prospectors since the beginning of the Colorado River Gold Rush of the 1860s up until the 1950s. Some large scale operations in the early 20th century were failures.

But there is still gold in "them thar hills". You just have to go looking for it,

The name of the town used to be Tyson's Wells. 

A post office was established as Tyson's Wells in the summer of 1893, but was closed in 1895. In 1896, the post office reopened with the new name of Quartzsite since the postal authorities would not allow a branch to reopen with the same name. A bureaucratic misspelling resulted in an "s" being added to the mineral that was the town's namesake. It is believed that postal officials, being unfamiliar with prospecting and geology, named the town after a site where quartz is found. And so today we know the town as Quartzsite.

The surrounding desert is an unforgiving area in the summer, when temperatures can reach 125F (more than 50C). As mentioned above, the dry La Posa Plain often has strong desert winds throwing up huge clouds of dust. Plants have adapted to this climate and are thorny like the Mesquite Tree. The leaves feel dry, but most are keeping their green color. In order to see flowers starting to bloom, rain needs to fall. Then it won't take long and one can see flowers shooting up many places.

Palo Verde Tree   Below: Desert Trail