Ehrenberg: A River Crossing Named for a Dead Man

In eighteen sixty-three, William Bradshaw's ferry crossed the Colorado River near this bend, and the steamboat landing here was called Mineral City. It was the western terminus of the Bradshaw Trail, the desert freight road connecting California to the Arizona goldfields. Steamboats from the Gulf of California would unload cargo here for the overland haul east.

In eighteen sixty-nine the settlement was renamed for Hermann Ehrenberg, a German mining engineer who had prospected across Arizona in the eighteen fifties. Ehrenberg never saw the town that bore his name. He had been robbed and killed at Dos Palmas in the California desert in October of eighteen sixty-six, about three years before the renaming.

By eighteen seventy-five Ehrenberg had roughly five hundred residents. When the railroad bypassed it, the town faded. Today it is an unincorporated community and a river access point, the same Colorado crossing it always was.