Eagle Mountain, California: Kaiser's Iron Town in the California Desert

01Gold Before Iron

Prospectors came to the Eagle Mountains looking for gold long before Kaiser arrived. In the early 1890s William Stevens and Thomas Doffelmeyer located the Iron Chief Mine. In 1897 Charles Lane of San Francisco bought it and installed a small mill that produced about $50,000 in gold. He failed to complete his payments, and the original owners took the property back. They built a 50-ton cyanide plant, piped water 18 miles from Cottonwood Springs, and worked the ground until about 1902. In all, the Iron Chief yielded $150,000 in gold.

The mine's name proved prophetic. According to one story told about the gold years, potato-sized iron nodules in the $10-a-ton ore battered the stamp mills. Some nodules were said to be so hard that they were hauled south to serve as millstones at another gold mill.

Other men saw value in the iron itself. L. S. Barnes had located claims in the range in the early 1890s. In 1909 he took an option on the Iron Chief claims. He then sold them, along with his own claims and those of Charles Brown of Mecca, to the Southern Pacific for a reported $300,000. The railroad's 187 patented claims sat dormant for decades.

02How Kaiser Built Eagle Mountain

In the mid-1940s Henry J. Kaiser paid $2 million for the old Iron Chief and its rights. His steel mill at Fontana, 112 miles to the west, needed ore, and the desert had it. To move the ore, Kaiser laid 51 miles of new track, the Eagle Mountain Railroad, from the pit to the main line near the Salton Sea. Beginning in October 1948, five to eight 100-car trains a week rolled out of the desert.

A complete town grew up beside the pit. It had wide streets, more than 400 homes, a bowling alley, and tennis courts. It also had elementary, middle, and high schools, and a clinic that became part of the origin story of Kaiser Permanente, the health plan Kaiser developed for his workers.

Before the high school opened, teenagers rode 120 miles a day to Coachella Valley High School in Thermal. Once they had a school of their own, the founding students chose blue and gold as its colors. Dan Litteral, class of 1966, designed the original crest. Loretta McDonald, class of 1964, wrote the original alma mater lyrics.

Families came and stayed. One former resident recalled that his family arrived in 1953 and that his father worked for Kaiser Steel for 25 years. "I grew up at the old mine," he wrote. Rae Ann Denny's father was a diesel mechanic there. Theresa Coggins's mother worked in the "DC Cafe," and Coggins summed up the town this way: "Eagle Mountain was the best place a child could ever dream of growing up."

03Why Did the Town Empty Out?

By the 1970s, tightening environmental rules and cheaper foreign steel were squeezing Kaiser's operations. In the summer of 1980 the mine shut down briefly. When it reopened on September 23, only 750 workers came back, and 150 more were left "in limbo." At the time, the 455 occupied homes and trailers rented for $60 to $80 a month, utilities included.

On November 3, 1981, Kaiser announced that half the Fontana mill and all of the Eagle Mountain mine would be "phased out." The Los Angeles Times ran the story under the headline "Eagle Mountain: A Company Town Faces Grim Future." The grocery store closed in October 1982, and the post office followed in January 1983.

In late May 1983, the last class at Eagle Mountain High School "formed a melancholy line for diplomas," as UPI put it. The town was mostly boarded up, and the 50 remaining families, about 350 people, would be gone within a month. On the same day, Kaiser Steel announced it was selling its business and subsidiaries to a group controlled by Minneapolis financier Irwin Jacobs.

04A Prison in the Shopping Center

Eagle Mountain's next residents lived behind fences. In 1988 the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation converted the old shopping center into the Eagle Mountain Community Correctional Facility. It operated under contract with the California Department of Corrections and housed 436 low-risk male inmates. The Riverside Press-Enterprise headlined the change "Prison brings a ghost town back to life."

On October 25, 2003, a riot broke out among about 150 prisoners while inmates were watching the World Series in the recreation room. It lasted 90 minutes and was fought largely along racial lines, with kitchen knives, meat cleavers, pipes, crutches, and fire extinguishers as weapons. Two men, Rodman Wallace and Master Hampton, were killed. More than 50 others were injured, and eight inmates were later charged with murder.

The facility closed on December 31, 2003. It was one of three private community correctional facilities whose contracts Governor Gray Davis ended to save money.

05The Fight Over the Pit

A plan to turn the spent iron pit into one of the largest landfills in the country drew its most determined opposition from Donna and Larry Charpied. The couple were jojoba farmers in the Chuckwalla Valley, and according to LA Weekly they began their legal challenge "with only the help of a how-to book." Donna Charpied warned, "There are five phases to the dump plan, and the fifth phase is the east pit."

County officials rejected the project by a 4–1 vote. Kaiser prevailed in court in 1999, and its letter to stockholders named the Charpieds. Later, a federal district court set aside the project's land exchange with the Bureau of Land Management.

In 2007 the Charpieds objected to military training at the site, a possible prison on part of the townsite, and the use of its rock for Salton Sea restoration. The court rejected that motion. Kaiser Ventures Executive Vice President Terry Cook said the company was "pleased that the Court recognized that the complaints asserted by Eagle Mountain opponents were not valid." A company release went further and called the opponents' actions a "thinly veiled attempt to put Eagle Mountain out of business."

The landfill was never built. After some 15 years of lawsuits, the Sanitation Districts backed out in 2013, and the Supreme Court declined a final petition. More recently, a pumped-storage hydroelectric project has been proposed that would use the open pits as reservoirs.

The town also had a moment on film. In the 1986 Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster film Tough Guys, a hijacked-train sequence was shot on the Eagle Mountain Railroad, with the Southern Pacific 4449 steam locomotive pulling the train. Between takes, the 4449 was stored overnight in the Eagle Mountain yards.

In April 2023, an entity called Ecology Mountain Holdings paid $22.5 million for the town and the land around it. It has not publicly disclosed its plans.

06What Remains of Eagle Mountain Today

What remains is an almost complete mid-century American town, empty but still standing. The rows of flat-roofed houses are still there. So are the shells of the schools, the shopping center that became a prison, the company offices, and the vast stepped terraces of the open-pit mine. The rail grade that once carried ore toward the Salton Sea still crosses the desert, though most of the track is gone.

Inside, the buildings hold traces of the people who left. A mine maintenance shop still has a board for "maintenance safety statistics," once used to record accidents. At the old prison guard post, a visitor found a 2003 calendar and a "police academy of 2003" mug.

Kaiser Road runs off Interstate 10 near Desert Center and dead-ends at the property's edge. The townsite is private, fenced, posted, and patrolled, and most people see it only through the gate. Joshua Tree National Park surrounds it to the north and west. Whether Eagle Mountain becomes a reservoir, a reopened mine, or something else now depends on its new owner.