During the scorching summer, Quartzsite is a sleepy town of 3,397 inhabitants, but every year between October and March, a new breed of nomad comes to descend upon the town as hundreds of thousands of campers bring their Recreational Vehicles (RVs) to Quartzsite. These “snowbirds,” generally retirees from colder climates, settle in one of the more than seventy RV parks in the area or in the outlying desert administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The BLM and local law enforcement agencies estimate that a total of 1.5 million people spend time in Quartzsite between October and March, a mass migration that temporarily forms one of the fifteen largest cities in the United States. If all of these residents inhabited Quartzsite at once, the result would be a more populous urbanized area than Dallas, San Jose, or San Diego, possibly even bigger than Phoenix or Philadelphia, America’s fifth largest city.
For a half century after Hi Jolly’s death, the population of Quartzsite remained small, with only about fifty people living in the outpost town on a permanent basis. By the 1950s, however, snowbirds began spending the relatively mild winter months in the area, and by the 1960s the seasonal population would swell to 1,500. Many of these winter travelers returned year after year and some settled permanently. As the community slowly grew, businessmen and civic boosters formed the Quartzsite Improvement Association and created a gem and mineral show to encourage more winter travelers to come.
Today, Quartzsite makes a radical break with the surrounding emptiness. Although it rejects vertical density and permanence, Quartzsite proposes a new kind of super-dense sprawl, achieving a remarkable horizontal density as RV is parked next to RV.
That they came at all is the result of the invention of this modern replacement for Hi Jolly’s camels—the RV. In retrospect, the development of such a self-sufficient beast, capable of hauling a family and enough food and water to sustain it long distances, seems almost inevitable.
In his 1896 essay “The Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner, the founder of American Studies, observed that the United States Census Bureau considered the frontier closed in the 1880s. For Jackson, this could only result in an epochal shift in the American psyche. Until then, he argued, Americans could renew themselves in the primitive conditions of the frontier. The loss of a true wilderness experience meant that the individual no longer had a ready place for social regeneration.
The end of social regeneration on the frontier, however, paved the way for a new idea: recreation in exurbia. After Henry Ford built the Model T, his “car for the great multitude,” large numbers of individuals would flee the city on a regular basis in search of the newly domesticated “nature.” Ford himself believed that the Model T’s principal use would be to enable families to enjoy the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open space. Auto camping grew rapidly after World War I. By 1922, the New York Times estimated that of 10.8 million cars, 5 million were in use for camping. Soon “auto-tents” designed to fit the Model T would be available and trailers for the Model T to tow would follow.