Soda Springs Before Springer: Ten Thousand Years at the End of the Mojave River

By C. V. Wooster · October 5, 2026

Curtis Springer liked to say he had discovered Zzyzx. He didn't even name the springs first. The place he renamed in 1944 was called Soda Springs, and it already had a long human history. People came for the same reason he did: in the eastern Mojave, permanent fresh water is rare, and it shapes everything around it.

An ancient lake

The National Park Service tells the deep-time story simply. Thousands of years ago, when the region was cooler and wetter, a large lake called Lake Mojave covered the basin. As the climate warmed, it evaporated, leaving mineral and salt crusts in the Soda Lake and Silver Lake basins. Water persisted at the natural springs on the western shore of Soda Lake, and it still flows there today.

The springs sit where the Mojave River ends. The river flows underground for much of its course from the San Bernardino Mountains, and at Soda Springs groundwater rises to the surface. That is why an endangered native fish, the Mohave tui chub, could survive here after it disappeared from the rest of the river.

The first people of the springs

The NPS notes that the spring system was used by the Mohave and Chemehuevi people for many generations. The CSU Desert Studies Center, which now occupies the site, acknowledges that it sits on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Chemehuevi people of the Southern Paiute (Nuwuvi) territory.

Soda Springs was also part of a much larger network. Water sources across the eastern Mojave were linked by trails used for trade and travel between the Colorado River and the coast. The route later called the Mojave Road followed that chain of springs, and in the 1850s and 1860s it became a wagon and military road, often called the Government Road. Its eastern end was Fort Mojave on the Colorado River, the Army post founded in 1859 during the Mojave War (C. V. Wooster tells that story at themojavewar.com).

Hancock's Redoubt and "Fort Soda"

The U.S. Army arrived next. According to the history compiled by Col. Herbert M. Hart for the Council on America's Military Past, men of the 1st Dragoons built a camp at Soda Springs in the spring of 1860, known as Hancock's Redoubt. It was a set of breastworks and corrals meant to protect travelers on the Government Road, and it was abandoned soon after.

The site came back to life in 1867. An outpost was kept there for a few weeks that spring, and from August 21, 1867, to May 23, 1868, it was manned almost continuously as an outpost of Camp Cady, about 35 miles west. Soldiers called it Fort Soda or Camp Soda Springs, though Hart notes the name never made it into official records. After May 1868 the Army left for good. A colorized 1874 photograph of Soda Springs, credited to the NPS and reproduced on Digital-Desert, shows how small a mark the station made on the landscape.

The Army's presence on the Mojave Road came with violence on both sides. Hart's account records clashes near Soda Lake in 1860, 1863 and 1867, told from the soldiers' point of view. For the Mohave, Chemehuevi and other peoples, the roads and posts were part of an invasion of their homelands.

Salt, borax and a railroad

The next wave came with the mining booms. The Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, built mainly to haul borax from Francis Marion Smith's Pacific Coast Borax Company mines east of Death Valley, ran north from Ludlow across the desert past Soda Lake. It reached Death Valley Junction by 1907 and operated until 1940, when it shut down for lack of profitable traffic. The rails were pulled up in 1943 for the war effort.

The T&T grade still runs past Zzyzx, and Wikipedia's account of the site notes that the settlement is centered on the railroad's former right-of-way. When the lexicographer Dmitri Borgmann described "Zzyzx Springs" in 1967, he placed it "off the abandoned right-of-way of the old Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad." Walk the edges of Soda Dry Lake and you can still find the raised, straight bed of the line.

Then came Springer

By the early 1940s, Soda Springs had water, an old road, a dead railroad grade and almost no one living there. To Springer it looked like an empty stage. In 1944 he filed mining claims on the surrounding federal land, renamed the springs Zzyzx, and began building the resort that would make him famous and lead to his eviction. That story starts in our timeline.

The deeper history puts Springer's thirty years in proportion. The springs supported people for thousands of years before him and have outlasted him by half a century. He was, in the end, a short chapter in a long book.