Blythe: Desert Oasis, Giant Figures, Patton's Proving Ground

Blythe sits on the California side of the Colorado River, in a stretch of desert where the water has attracted people for thousands of years and the federal government trained a million soldiers to fight in North Africa. It is a town of layers, and nearly none of them are visible from the highway.

The oldest are the most mysterious. About fifteen miles north of the city, on a pair of desert mesas above the river, six enormous figures have been scraped into the earth, some of them more than a hundred feet long. These are the Blythe Intaglios, and they were unknown to most of the outside world until a pilot named George Palmer spotted them from the air in nineteen thirty-two while flying between Las Vegas and Blythe. The figures depict human forms and what appear to be animals. They were created by scraping away the darker surface stones to expose the lighter soil beneath, then trampling the exposed soil to discourage plant growth. The Mohave and Quechan peoples say the large human figure represents Mastamho, the Creator of Earth. Archaeologists believe they may have been made by the Patayan culture between seven hundred and fifteen hundred years ago. No one knows exactly why.

The town itself traces to Thomas Blythe, an English financier who came to the Colorado River in eighteen seventy-seven with an audacious idea: divert the river to irrigate the Palo Verde Valley and turn the desert into farmland, a new Nile. He established water rights, a canal was opened that year, and the valley eventually became one of California's productive agricultural strips, cotton, alfalfa, vegetables, melons, fed entirely by river water in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.

In the spring of nineteen forty-two, the Army built an airfield at Blythe almost overnight, and the surrounding desert became part of General George Patton's Desert Training Center, an eighteen-thousand-square-mile outdoor proving ground where more than one million American soldiers trained for desert combat against the German Afrika Korps. The heat, the dust, and the terrain were the point. The training center was decommissioned in nineteen forty-four. The desert kept its silence again.