The Barbara Worth Country Club is a par-71, 6,500-yard golf course that spreads out on the fringes of Holtville, in California’s Imperial Valley. Like many desert golf courses, it has an apparitional quality: a square of deep green gleams against a surrounding landscape of ochers and grays. The fairways—“straight-up Bermuda grass,” explains course manager Steve Rogers—are pillared with palm trees. Ponds flank the greens, reflecting a powder-blue sky.
The course gets its heaviest use between October and May, when temperatures run in the 70s, as opposed to the 100s they reach in July. After their matches, golfers can head to Caddies Bar and Grill for a beer. A nearby hallway is crowded with framed, signed photographs of celebrities who played the course or performed at the adjacent hotel and convention center. John Travolta, Oliver North, Charo. Also displayed are photos from the club’s early years, after its opening in 1930.
The club’s nine-decade history and its forthright, sporty name may convince you that Barbara Worth was a real person—say, a pioneering female golfer, a contemporary of Patty Berg and Babe Zaharias who founded the club after a successful pro career. That is not the case. Barbara Worth exists in the pages of a novel and in a silent film. She was the creation of Harold Bell Wright, the most popular and influential California writer no one today has heard of. Together, author and heroine propelled California’s favorite story about itself: that given will and engineering prowess and water, the state can be whatever it wants to be. Whether that narrative still holds, in the Imperial Valley, in California, and across the whole American West, is the question.
THE VALLEY
The Imperial Valley lies 100 miles east of San Diego. If you study one of those plastic relief maps of California displayed in elementary schools, the valley looks as if someone had pressed hard on the plastic with a thumb: an oblong indentation sunk between two mountain ranges, the Chocolates to the east, the Lagunas to the west. On its north end, it’s bounded by the Salton Sea, at 325 square miles California’s largest lake. Its official southern boundary is the U.S.-Mexico border, although the valley continues into Baja California under the name Valle de Mexicali, running south toward the Gulf of California.
The valley is hot and dry. Annual rainfall averages three inches. Temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit more than 100 days a year. Despite the extreme climate, the area has for millennia been home to Cahuilla, Quechan, and Kumeyaay peoples. European and American exploration and settlement was halting: the Anza expedition traversed the valley in 1774,
