What the maps did show was that Dreamland is a place where things overlap. Mojave Desert meets Great Basin and quartzite overshoots Cambrian limestone; the range of the ancient Anasazi fades into and over that of the Fremont culture, where Nevada Test Site overlaps the Nellis Air Force gunnery and bombing range — which in turn are overlapped by the National Desert Wildlife Range, created in 1936 by FDR to save the bighorn sheep.
The signs warning of use of deadly force on Dreamland’s perimeter refer to the USAF/DOE liaison office in Las Vegas, for which they provide a post box number. By the best accounts, the Air Force and Department of Energy jointly administer the area, under a “Memo of Understanding.”
The Atomic Energy Commission took control of the area just to the south and west of the dry lake in 1950. Airspace here was limited beginning in 1955, and the area formally shifted from the public lands of the Nellis range to the control of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Nellis Air Force Base had greater needs, too, and by 1959 all the grazing and most of the mineral rights within the range were purchased by the Air Force.
In 1956, 369,280 acres of the Nellis range to the northwest of the lake were lent to the AEC as the Tonopah Test Range for ballistic missiles. In 1958 Public Land Order 1662, signed by one Roger Ernst, assistant secretary of the interior, withdrew from the public lands 38,400 acres (60 square miles) for use “by the Atomic Energy Commission in connection with the Nevada Test Site.” The area was the first formal survey of the six-by-ten-mile “box” around the base.
On August 11, 1961, with tensions rising in Berlin and bad news from Laos, the FAA established a new restricted airspace, designated R-4808 and covering the test site and Groom Lake. On thousands of bulletin boards in large airports and tiny control towers across the country, a NOTAM—“Notice to Airmen”—apprised pilots of the new boundary. In January 1962, the restricted airspace was expanded to 22 by 20 nautical miles in response to a request by the Air Force citing “an immediate and urgent need due to a classified project.” By the early sixties, military maps began to show the air controllers’ name for new restricted airspace over and around the base. Bordering airspaces known as Coyote, Caliente, and Alamo was “Dreamland.”
Starting about 1978, “in the interest of public safety and national defense,” the Air Force began — and here the authors of the 1985 Environmental Impact Statement for the Area 51 region become gloriously politic and delicate—“actively discouraging, and at times preventing, public or private entry to the Groom Mountain Range.” The government also put up fences on the east side of the range.
The next seizure, under Public Law 98-485, in October 1984, included Bald Mountain, the nine-thousand-foot former volcano. In a letter dated July 6, 1984, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force James Boatright assured rancher Steve Medlin, the owner of the Black Mailbox, of his continuing water and grazing rights. These are measured out by the BLM in Animal Unit Months (AUMs). The Bald Mountain Allotment contains some 5,811 AUMs, which translates to 480 head of cattle and five horses. They assured the Sheahans, the owners of the site, of continued access to Groom Mine. But the Sheahans, heading there one day, found the way blocked by blue-bereted Air Force police.
Dreamland and the adjoining nuclear test site had become a de facto nature preserve. Animals could move back and forth between the two in a way humans could not. In the spring of 1985, when environmentalists visited the area to support the Air Force’s effort to withdraw from public use additional land around Groom Lake, they found that wildlife was flourishing. Jackrabbit and cottontail were abundant, as were coyotes, mule deer, badger, and kit foxes. Two mountain lions were recorded. The chukar partridge had been growing in numbers.
The area is home to six kinds of rattlesnakes, the ferruginous hawk, Swainson’s hawk, mountain plover, western snowy plover, and long-billed curlew, as well as four species of bats, ranging from the little brown myotis to Townsend’s big-eared. Naturalists defined several plant and animal communities in the area, ranging from saltbush to mixed Mojave, blackbrush/sagebrush to pinyon/juniper to mountain mahogany. There is a tiny spot of white fir at the top of Bald Mountain, the Air Force — commissioned report noted; soon it would be interrupted by a new high-tech emplacement of antennas and helipad. Thanks to the land closures, the law required archaeological investigation, which showed the area dotted with petroglyph sites, even a well-preserved nineteenth-century wooden wickiup.
Because the military had to be sure no endangered species were affected, Dreamland became one of the most carefully documented areas in the United States.
It makes me feel good about my country that tanks and nuclear tests are dependent on the cooperation of desert species. At Fort Irwin, California, to the west of Dreamland, military maneuvers are required to stop if soldiers encounter the endangered desert tortoise.
Both the Nellis Range and the Nevada Test Site must have their withdrawal from the public lands regularly renewed, which resulted in an environmental impact statement prepared in 1995–96 for the whole test site. It ran to five fat purple spiral-bound volumes.
Once, the map was blank. Once, the place was real. “One of the most desolate regions upon the face of the earth,” First Lt. George Montague Wheeler called it after leading Army Corps of Engineers expeditions through the area in 1869 and again in 1871. It was tough territory, and Wheeler reminded readers of his report that his expedition took place “amid the scenes of disaster of those early emigrant trains who are accredited with having perished in ‘death valley.’ ” He was referring to notorious reports that in 1849 part of the Death Valley Party en route from Utah to California decided to take a shortcut, and camped near Groom and Papoose lakes. Only the intervention of the friendly Paiutes saved them from dying of thirst and starvation.
Unlike earlier expeditions dedicated to science, such as Clarence King’s landmark exploration of the 40th parallel a few years earlier, Wheeler’s mandate was “reconnaissance”: to map the area, survey minerals and mines, and help guide “the selection of such sites as may be of use for future military operations and occupation”—a neat foreshadowing of the later uses of the land.
On his first foray, in 1869, Wheeler and party camped at a place he called Summit Springs, between Pahranagat and the Jumbled Hills, not far from the heights from which the Interceptors would later survey Dreamland. In 1871, on his second expedition, escorted by a detachment of the Third U.S. Cavalry, Wheeler encountered the Paiutes, whom he described as “raising corn, melons and squashes” and harvesting wild grapes. Of this people, who had rescued the California-bound travelers, he added, “Virtue is almost unknown among them and syphilitic diseases very common.”
Wheeler’s photographer, called “the Shadowcatcher” by the Paiutes, was the renowned Timothy O’Sullivan, who not only left us with the first, lasting images of such wonders of the West as Canyon de Chelly but as one of Mathew Brady’s photographers had recorded dead sharpshooters in Devil’s Den at Gettysburg. O’Sullivan’s photographs of Wheeler’s party show men who look even harder than those better-known Civil War veterans. Hard-bitten, resigned, they were as used to fear in this landscape as in battle. Their faces are darkened by the sun above full beards and long sleeves.