Gold crazed Californians crossed the Colorado River at Ehrenberg during the great La Paz rush. The town was renamed Ehrenberg after Herman Ehrenberg, a surveyor and mining engineer, who was murdered in Dos Palmas, California, in 1866. By the mid - 1870s Ehrenberg was booming, with nearly 500 people living mostly in brush and adobe houses. Mike Goldwater, grandfather of former Senator Barry Goldwater, established a mercantile store and warehouse there. The unincorporated community has a Mohave Desert setting 200 feet above sea level.
Nearby mountains provide topographic relief.
Ehrenberg is on Interstate 10, across the Colorado River from Blythe, California. Phoenix is 142 miles east.