Thirty-Six Hours to Leave

Curtis Howe Springer's mining claim was always the weak link in his desert kingdom. He had filed it in nineteen forty-four, insisting the claim let him develop the surface of the land. But the government took a hard look and found that in three decades, Springer had done almost everything here except actually mine.

Without genuine mining, the claim was worthless, and Springer was simply a squatter on public land. The reckoning came in nineteen seventy-four. A United States district judge, Francis Whelan, ruled against him and ordered him off the property, granting only about thirty-six hours to vacate.

Springer offered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in back rent, reportedly around thirty-four thousand dollars, to stay, but the government refused. He was also convicted on the false advertising charges tied to his health products. Represented by the famous Los Angeles defense attorney Gladys Towles Root, he appealed, but in the end he served a jail sentence of several weeks.

The Bureau of Land Management took possession of Zzyzx, ending nearly thirty years of one of the strangest private empires ever raised in the American desert.