Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

Nineteen sixty. I was 5 years old and talking politics with my best friend’s mom. No, I chattered, my mom had never voted for Barry Goldwater, former city councilman and now U.S. senator from Arizona. She just didn’t trust the man. Whoa! My best friend’s mom seemed to expand like a red balloon. Didn’t I know that the future of Phoenix, my hometown, depended on men like Barry Goldwater? Gulp. Well, no, I didn’t. I was still in kindergarten.

In the 1960s, the desert cities of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles needed more water and electricity in order to grow. In Unreal City, the journalist Judith Nies tells the gripping story of how “the magic of the Southwest Boom” required the underground coal on Hopi and Navajo reservation lands in northern Arizona—and how a coalition of lawyers, businessmen, and politicians engaged in “legal theft” to turn this high desert, called Black Mesa, into one of America’s largest strip mines. The energy from that coal would power the excesses of Las Vegas and pump the Colorado River over three mountain ranges to Phoenix as part of the Central Arizona Project, the world’s most expensive water system.

All this took a lot of political influence—and patience. In 1882, Black Mesa was a Hopi reservation with provision “for other Indians.” By the time Goldwater and others decided they wanted the mineral rights to that land, thousands of Navajo lived on top of the coal beds, with a smaller number of Hopi in nearby villages. Nies details how business interests manufactured a supposed range war between the two tribes. In 1958, to resolve that spurious conflict, Goldwater and the freshman congressman Stewart Udall co-sponsored a bill to force the question of who owned what on Black Mesa; by 1966, coal leases were being negotiated by a Hopi tribal council manipulated by outside interests. In 1974, the Navajo and Hopi Land Settlement Act, also co-sponsored by Goldwater, mandated the removal of Navajo who had lived on Black Mesa for generations. In a kind of sinister House that Jack Built, the area’s aquifer would now be steadily drained to turn coal into slurry, which would be piped to generating stations built by companies like Bechtel. Some people got very rich, although that didn’t include the Hopi or Navajo.