The Lost Ship of the Desert

Desert folklore documented since the 1870 Los Angeles Star

The Lost Ship of the Desert is California's strangest treasure story: a sailing ship, full of riches, lying somewhere in the sands of the Colorado Desert around the Salton Sea, a hundred miles or more from salt water. The setting makes it almost plausible. The Gulf of California once reached much further north, until the Colorado River built a delta that cut the basin off, and the river has since swung back into the Salton Sink again and again, filling ancient Lake Cahuilla and then leaving it to dry. The modern Salton Sea itself formed in 1905 to 1907, when the Colorado broke through irrigation works and poured in for two years.

The best-known version belongs to Captain Juan de Iturbe. In 1615, the story goes, he sailed up the Gulf of California hunting pearls and searching for the fabled strait to the Atlantic, was carried on a tidal bore into Lake Cahuilla, and found himself trapped when the water fell. He beached his ship, standing upright as though under sail, abandoned it and its treasure of black pearls, and walked out. A century and a half later a mule driver with the de Anza expedition is said to have stumbled on the ship by night, filled his packs with pearls and deserted. Much of this comes from Antonio de Fierro Blanco's book The Journey of the Flame.

The newspapers took it from there. The first tales of a lost galleon surfaced after the great Colorado River flood of 1862, and in 1870 Charley Clusker, a 60-year-old Mexican War veteran, set out from San Bernardino to find a ship near Dos Palmas. The Los Angeles Star reported on 1 December that the ship had been found, but when Clusker went back for it, he could not find it again. In 1933 a librarian, Myrtle Botts, said she saw a ship jutting from the side of Canebrake Canyon in the Anza-Borrego Desert, which she believed was a Viking longship, and failed to relocate it. In 1907 a farmer near Imperial was said to have built a fence from old ship's timbers. In 1968 Morlin Childers reported possible ship remains under the dry bed of Laguna Salada, west of Mexicali.

The search is now harder than ever. Much of the Salton Sink has been under water since 1905, and much of the surrounding land is military ground used as bombing ranges. No one has ever shown that a ship lies there. The Imperial Valley Desert Museum in Ocotillo keeps photographs and papers from Childers' desert searches, and visitors still come in asking about the ship.