Those wishing to leave shoes at Rice in east San Bernardino County, even find ways to attach them to the last remaining relic of the place, an overhang from a Union 76 gas station. (Photo by Joe Blackstock)
I doubt if J. Robert Oppenheimer ever visited Rice, California, but he was almost linked with that desert ghost town in the annals of American history.
Nearly 80 years ago, Rice, in far eastern San Bernardino County, was a candidate to be the site of the test firing of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Fortunately for our desert lands, Oppenheimer’s group selected the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico for the test, with Rice second-best in the selection process.
Never heard of Rice? It’s a wide spot on Highway 62 – the route linking the Colorado River and Parker, Arizona, with Twentynine Palms. Once described as “No Man’s Land,” it was a place so far out of control that officials in two counties, and even the governor, wanted nothing to do with it.
As early as March 1944, the preparations for the so-called Trinity atomic bomb test were underway among Oppenheimer’s group in Los Alamos, New Mexico. A report written in 1976 by former scientist K.T. Bainbridge said the officials felt it necessary to test the bomb before actually using it against Japan.
Rice was among seven Southwestern places considered for the test, including another California site, San Nicolas Island, the most isolated of the Channel Islands 60 miles off our coast. Eventually the list was reduced to two locations, the military’s desert training area north of Rice or Alamogordo, the latter of which was selected in September 1944.
Actually, you wonder why Rice was even a finalist. At the time, it was the site of the small Rice Army Airfield, with two runways used as part of the extensive desert warfare training then going on. And the town is also less than a mile from the Colorado River Aqueduct, bringing water to Southern California, and a railroad line.
On the other hand, if Los Alamos officials knew of the raucous heritage of Rice, when it was called Blythe Junction, they might have concluded it was just the place to flatten with an atom bomb.
Blythe Junction may have been the last Old West wide-open frontier town after it began about 1910 as a dusty stop on a dirt road from Amboy to Blythe. For the next decade, it was popular for its widespread illegal alcohol, women and gambling. And no lawmen.
The dilemma for police was that no one knew if Blythe Junction was in San Bernardino or Riverside county – no line had yet been drawn out there. A formal survey of a county boundary in the eastern desert was not undertaken after Riverside broke off from San Bernardino to become its own county in 1893.
And as Blythe Junction’s illicit reputation grew, neither county seemed to have interest in claiming the place.
“Citizens of the town who are growing rich with the profits of their illegal traffic have boasted publicly they will fight the efforts of either county to molest them,” wrote the Victor Valley News-Herald on May 5, 1916.
“Almost every night when I was in Blythe Junction after 1911, there was a shebang going on,” wrote Camiel Dekens in his 1962 book, “Riverman, Desertman.” He said there were 18 graves in what he called, perhaps as a joke, the “Shoe Hill Cemetery.” (More about that later)
“Most of them were killed by violence, not in any particular feud but just out of carousing.”
A man named Salazar was arrested in 1913 by a Riverside County deputy for killing Pedro Calderon. The Riverside district attorney later ordered Salazar released because he said Blythe Junction wasn’t in his county, reported the Los Angeles Times April 18, 1913.
Fed up with the debauchery in what the San Bernardino Sun called “a hellhole in the desert,” San Bernardino County Sheriff J.C. Ralphs and Riverside County Sheriff Frank P. Wilson combined forces in March 1914 and sent a posse of deputies from both counties to invade the place. They probably figured one way or another that at least some of the lawmen would have to have some legal authority.
At “No Man’s Land,” as the Times called it, 11 of the 12 male residents were arrested, including its postmaster, David Moreno, who apparently sold illegal alcohol while also delivering mail.
“Hotel owners, saloon keepers … cooks, bartenders, dance hall girls and others were caught and sent to San Bernardino,” recalled Peter Odens in the Needles Desert Star, Oct. 31, 1963. “They were charged with operating saloons without a license, and in the case of the dance hall girl, for doing ‘the high links in dancing the tango.’” (Yes, even in the middle of nowhere, the tango was an immoral dance in those days).
The raid only briefly slowed Blythe Junction, while each county continued to do what it could to foist the town on the other.
It took Assemblyman Samuel Knight of Redlands to finally get involved, introducing a 1917 bill that was passed making Blythe Junction part of San Bernardino County. But Gov. W. D. Stephens for some reason failed to sign the bill, and it died when the Legislature’s session ended. Blythe Junction couldn’t get any respect even in Sacramento.
A 1919 bill was finally approved formally giving San Bernardino jurisdiction over Blythe Junction. And just as quickly, in July 1919, the county decided to rename the place, Rice, honoring a chief railroad engineer Guy R. Rice.
It wasn’t all peaceful – the “action” resumed in Rice during the 1930s. Workers building the nearby aqueduct frequented the town’s facilities, which “were ‘jumping’ day and night,” explained Sun writer L. Burr Belden on March 15, 1964.
With the arrival of World War II, Rice briefly gained some respectability when it was mostly taken over by the Rice Army Airfield. And then, just as quickly, it was almost blown away by an atomic bomb.
Today, a quiet and mostly empty Rice bakes in the sun.
But where saloons and gambling dens once rocked with activity more than a century ago, the landscape is now covered with shoes, thousands of them. Endless arrays of old footwear have inexplicably been tied on old fencing and atop the remains of a gas station overhang. It has become a rather bizarre tradition to leave old shoes in Rice for reasons that only bored sun-parched desert travelers can explain.
So just like the community’s burial grounds of 110 years ago, Rice today can again boast of its Shoe Hill Cemetery.
Joe Blackstock writes on Inland Empire history. He can be reached at joe.blackstock@gmail.com or Twitter @JoeBlackstock. Check out some of our columns of the past at Inland Empire Stories on Facebook at www.facebook.com/IEHistory.
Originally published at Joe Blackstock