What Zzyzx is known for

Zzyzx is a Mojave Desert mineral spring where a radio evangelist named Springer filed a mining claim in 1944, built a 60-room resort on federal land and sold mail-order cures. Marshals evicted him in 1974. The place kept its invented name, and a university desert lab now works there.

A siding with no draw

Soda Springs sat where the Mojave Road crossed the Mojave River sink. Jedediah Smith passed nearby in 1826, guided by a Mojave scout. The Army held Camp Soda Springs from 1867 to 1870, protecting travelers. The Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad reached the site by 1907, then was abandoned in 1940, leaving a dry siding.

By 1944 the railroad was gone and Soda Springs was a defunct siding with no clinic, no bottled brand, nothing to draw a traveler off the highway. Springer held no title to the land, no medical license and no proven cure, only a syndicated radio audience he could ask for donations.

A resort on land he did not own

Springer filed mining claims on 12,800 acres in 1944, built a 60-room hotel called the Castle, a chapel, pools and a private airstrip, and syndicated a radio show to more than 300 stations, mailing tonics for ailments from sore toes to cancer as gifts from the last word in health.

Eviction, then science

On April 11, 1974 marshals gave Springer 36 hours to leave, and he served 49 days for false advertising. In 1976 California State University and the BLM converted the seized buildings into the Desert Studies Center, run today by seven CSU campuses on 1,280 acres carrying his invented name.

What survived

Springer manufactured a destination by claiming land, a name and a cure he owned none of, and the government dismantled the operation completely, evicting him and convicting him.

What survived was not his spa but the place itself, the road, the buildings and the improbable name, durable enough that a university consortium filled it with the actual science he had only ever advertised.