Bunkerville, Nevada

Bunkerville was founded as a communal experiment. In January of eighteen seventy-seven, a Mormon pioneer named Edward Bunker led twenty-seven relatives and friends to the south bank of the Virgin River in southern Nevada to establish a colony under the United Order of Enoch, the cooperative economic system the church was promoting at the time. Residents were to share tools, land, labor, and crops equally.

The Virgin River fought back almost immediately. A flash flood destroyed their earthen dam in August of that first year. The soil was alkaline.

Disputes over fair shares of work and harvest festered. Within a few years the experiment was over, the land divided into individual family parcels. The cooperative failed but the community held.

Bunker's descendants, including the Bundy family, have farmed and ranched this stretch of desert for more than a hundred and forty years. The name Bunkerville has appeared in national news in recent decades, but long before that it was simply a small river-bottom settlement that outlasted the ideals that founded it.