Springer arrived in the Mojave in the 1940s with the ambition of a showman and the ethics of a patent medicine salesman — which, in many respects, is what he was. He obtained a mining claim that gave him access to the springs, then expanded his operation far beyond any legitimate claim. He built a hotel, a dormitory, a swimming pool, and a chapel on land that belonged to the federal government. He manufactured and sold health products — Antedeluvian Tea, Mo Hair for baldness, Zzyzx Mud for skin conditions — that had no scientific basis.

For thirty years, the arrangement worked because nobody looked closely enough. Springer was a skilled self-promoter who broadcast religious programming from a radio station on the property, which gave his operation a veneer of legitimacy. When federal authorities finally examined his claim and found that he had been squatting on public land for three decades, they evicted him.

In 1976, California State University established the Desert Studies Center at the former spa site. Seven CSU campuses now participate in the consortium, using Zzyzx as a field station for desert research across biology, ecology, geology, and environmental science. Springer's cabins became dormitories. His lecture space became a classroom. The artificial lake he built — Lake Tuendae — became home to the transplanted Mohave tui chub, an endangered fish species with no other home in the world.

The California Desert Protection Act of 1994 formalized the area's status, bringing it within a framework of protected desert land that Springer would have found inconvenient. The contrast between what Zzyzx was and what it became is one of the more complete transformations in California desert history.

Reader's Digest declared Zzyzx the most difficult place name to pronounce in California. The correct pronunciation approximates ZY-zix, though visitors often work through several attempts before arriving there. Michael Connelly used the location in his 2004 thriller The Narrows. The name appears in crossword puzzles, trivia contests, and debates about the English alphabet's outer limits.

Springer invented it as a marketing device — the last word, literally, in American geography. He couldn't have anticipated that the name would outlast his operation by half a century and accumulate cultural associations he never intended. It has become a symbol of the Mojave's capacity for strangeness, a place where someone tried to sell the desert as a cure and ended up giving it a name that sounds like a joke but refers to something real.

The springs at Zzyzx still run. Lake Tuendae still holds water in a landscape that almost nowhere else does. The research center conducts work that Springer never contemplated — measuring climate change effects on desert ecosystems, tracking endangered species, training students in field methods that require actual desert.

The name, for all its absurdity, has become honest. Zzyzx is last in the alphabet and last in a long tradition of people who believed the Mojave could be made to serve human ambition on human terms. What replaced that ambition — careful study, endangered fish, researchers trying to understand rather than sell — may be less dramatic, but it is considerably more durable.