A History of Date Palms in the Lower Colorado River Valley

Dates are an ancient fruit crop, domesticated thousands of years ago in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley of what is now Iraq. Cultivation spread through the Middle East and North Africa where the palm became an important component of arid land agriculture. Introduced early by the Spanish to the New World, seed-grown dates remained underdeveloped as a fruit crop until the early twentieth century when offshoots of elite varieties with excellent fruit qualities were introduced to create a commercial date industry in the United States.

The history of the introduction and cultivation of the date palm in the United States is generally well documented.¹ As the American date industry developed in the 1920s and 1930s, Indio, California, became its primary focus; later, from the 1960s, a secondary center emerged in the area of Bard, California/Yuma, Arizona. This geographic dominance of the industry stifled development of potential commercial date growing elsewhere in the two states.

The Lower Colorado River Valley was recognized very early in the twentieth century as having the appropriate climate, fertile alluvial soils, and abundant water resources for date palm cultivation. Little known are the historical events surrounding experimental plantings and small-scale commercial date fruit production in the Mohave and Parker Valleys, in Arizona, California, and Nevada. Faced with little or no specific documentation on the subject, information for this study was collected from general publications, newspaper articles, unpublished reports, analysis of historical aerial photographs of the Mohave Valley, Google Earth and Street View imagery, interviews, and field visits to the remnant date palm groves in Needles, California, and Parker, Arizona. The geographic scope of this study is limited to the Colorado River Watershed from Davis Dam to Imperial Dam.

Figure 1.

Silas C. Mason, Frank A. Thackery, and Walter T. Swingle, in Indio, California, 1920. Coincidentally, these three men, each of whom contributed to the creation of the United States date industry, were fellow students at the Kansas Agricultural College in Manhattan in 1890.

Photograph courtesy of Robert R. Krueger, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Riverside, California.

The Mohave Valley is about 25 miles long and 10 miles wide and chiefly located in Mohave County, Arizona, but also includes small adjoining cross-river portions of Clark County, Nevada, and San Bernardino County, California. Initial suggestions to grow dates in the Mohave Valley appeared in Arizona Territory Annual Reports of 1879 and 1898, which state that the bottomlands were suitable for date palm cultivation.² Walter T. Swingle, the leading American date palm scientist of the time, wrote in 1904 that climate records indicated that the popular Deglet Noor date variety could be expected to mature fully at Needles (figure 1). In a letter to Swingle, R. H. Forbes, a prominent Arizona agronomist, stated that Deglet Noor dates would ripen fruits at nearby Fort Mohave, Arizona.³ The reference is to the Fort Mohave Indian School, located 14 miles due north of Needles.

Date palm was publicized as a prospective commercial crop in a circa 1904 promotional booklet of the Rio Colorado Land and Irrigation Company, offering to sell "30,000 acres of rich, irrigated land," and referring to a site visit by R. H. Forbes, who endorsed the land for date growing, and indirectly to Swingle's publication.⁴ R. I. Geare, in a brief article about date palm, stated that before 1911, "At Fort Mohave…a number of Deglet Noor trees have recently been set out, and are reported to be doing well."⁵ This likely represents the first date palms planted at the Fort Mohave Indian School (figure 2).

Figure 2.

Fort Mohave Indian School, Arizona. Pictured is the student dormitory, with date palms planted alongside. The building was formerly a barracks for the Fort Mohave Military Post, which closed in 1890. The photograph is undated but probably was taken in 1920s.

Photograph courtesy of National Archives, Dennis G. Casebier Collection, Goffs, California.

A guidebook to the route of the...