On the Road: Museum hosts program on history of Mojave Road

MOJAVE ROAD: Speaking at the Colorado River Historical Society Museum earlier this week, eastern Mojave Desert historian Dennis Casebier gave a presentation covering the history of the Mojave Road, from its beginnings as a trail used by native tribes, to its present-day status as a recreational trail. “We’re extremely proud to have Dennis here,” said Karole Finkelstein, CRMHSM vice president. “There is no one more qualified to talk about the Mojave Road and the history of the eastern Mojave Desert.” - DK McDONALD/The Daily News

By DK McDONALD
The Daily News

BULLHEAD CITY — G.K. Chesterton called history a road to be reconsidered and even retraced.

For Mojave Desert historian Dennis Casebier, the history of one road has been his focus for more than 60 years.

Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd at the Colorado River Historical Society Museum on Monday, Casebier covered the history of the road, from its beginnings as a trail used by native tribes, through time to its importance in moving troops for training during World War II, to its present-day status as a recreational trail, generously illustrated throughout with historic and personal photos, anecdotes, and stories of his drive to preserve history through the cultural center.

“It was an excellent presentation,” said Nancy Nelson, who attended with her husband, Barry. “We traveled the Mojave Road without knowing much of its history, so this is kind of after-the-fact. Just about everything he told us we didn’t know. The history is fascinating.”

Casebier and other proponents of preserving the route founded the Friends of the Mojave Road in 1981; working with the Bureau of Land Management, Casebier and the group identified the route of the trail.

The Mojave Road is unique in that for most of its 138-mile length it is in much the same condition as it was when formed more than 150 years ago, he said. Bisecting the Mojave National Preserve, the twin tracks functioned primarily as a supply, rather than migration, route, and the road was overlooked while many other early major Western routes were upgraded into state and national highways.

The Friends insisted that the BLM place no signage to mark the route; in order to help preserve the road from overuse and prevent the unprepared from attempting its crossing, navigation is only possibly by locating strategically placed rock cairns and through the travel guide.

“It’s a four-wheel-drive-only road,” Casebier said. “In order to travel the road you have to buy the Mojave Road Guide, which tells you how to access the road, and how to behave while on it. It is a dangerous place; people have died out there.”

The road guide is available at the Colorado River Historical Society Museum, 2201 Highway 68.

“It was a wonderful presentation,” said attendee Leroy Jackson. “I am so interested in his stories of earlier pioneers homesteading the region. It’s amazing to think you could be standing in the same places those people walked.”

Casebier, a retired U.S. Navy physicist, is the driving force behind the most complete archive of Mojave Desert history in existence — the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association in Goffs, Calif.

“He’s a historian above all historians, as far as I’m concerned,” said Elsie Needles, Colorado River Historical Society and Museum president. “He’s devoted his life to that area, and no one is better than Dennis at finding Mojave Desert history.”

Casebier began gathering archival materials pertaining to the Mojave Desert in 1954. When the Friends group transitioned to registered nonprofit status in 1993, his personal collection became the seed of the most complete library known on the history of the eastern Mojave Desert; the cultural center now houses more than 108,000 photographs, 6,000 historic maps of the region, 3,000 files on individuals and cultural sites of interest, 1,300 oral history files, and 6,000 volumes of published literature, including the library and personal papers of desert bibliographer E. I. Edwards, the library and collection of Harold and Lucile Weight, and the collection of San Bernardino County historian Germaine L. Moon.

Warren family excavates 19th century homestead

Mark and Sylvia Warren stand in front of the homestead they built in Morongo Valley in the 19th century. (Stacy Moore, Hi-Desert Star)

By Stacy Moore
Hi-Desert Star

MORONGO VALLEY — “We have pioneering in our blood,” Mike Arnett told his family, and the proof was right before them: a new monument marking the spot where their ancestors Mark and Sylvia Warren built a homestead in 1885.

The Warren homestead is on San Bernardino County land a short walk from Covington Park. The building is gone, destroyed by a 1929 fire and simply the work of passing time, but the Warrens’ descendents recently found out where it had stood and began a restoration project.

Larry Turner spearheaded the project. The grandson of Lela Warren Arnett, the youngest of the Warrens’ 11 children, Turner organized his family into a labor force to excavate the footprint of the old homestead, clear away brush and clean up the footpath leading to the site.

“It’s been a project of love, saving this place for history,” Turner told his family when they gathered Saturday morning to see the fruits of their labor.

The family placed a concrete and granite monument that tells visitors the story of Mark and Sylvia Warren and their homestead. The guests of honor for the monument unveiling were the Warrens’ three surviving grandchildren: Lois Arvicson, the daughter of Ed Warren, the first of the children to be born at the Morongo Valley home, and Mary Ellen Grimes and Marion Arnett, the daughter and son of Lela Warren, the youngest of the 11 children.
“Grandpa raised cattle and Grandma raised kids — 11 of them!” Grimes said.

Turner also thanked Donna Muñoz, general manager of the Morongo Valley Community Services District, Mike Lipsitz, who facilitated permission for the project when he was field representative for county Supervisor James Ramos, and the Morongo Basin Historical Society, which also helped.

The San Bernardino County Fire Department provided a 14-man crew to help tear out brush.

Couple met when wagon train stranded

The story of Mark and Sylvia Warren is tale about making a paradise in a wild land, the power of hospitality and the human spirit, but it begins with a truth uncomfortable in today’s America: When Mark Warren first met Sylvia Paine, she was 12 years old. They were married two years later, in 1866. He was 35 and she was 14.

Chuck Warren, an emigrant from Maine who made a living driving a freight wagon, first saw Sylvia Paine as he drove from the Port of Los Angeles to Prescott, Arizona, Arnett said. Encountering a wagon train lost near Baker, he gave them directions and went on his way. When he returned, he found the Paine family was still there,
stranded in the desert on their months-long migration from Texas to California because of the death of their ox. He loaded them into his wagon and took them to his San Bernardino ranch, where they lived for two years.

Chuck Warren at first wanted to marry the oldest daughter, but she was promised to someone else. Instead, he married Sylvia.

Arnett gave his perspective on Sylvia’s age to his family members.

“This 14-year-old had endured privations,” Arnett said. “She knew how to survive on the meagerest provisions. She knew how to take care of her family.”

The two remained married for 51 years, until Chuck Warren’s death in an automobile accident in 1917. Sylvia bore 11 children, living some of the time at the Morongo Valley homestead and other times in Banning and Yucaipa so the children could go to school.

A sound home where strangers were welcome

Chuck Warren found the land for his Morongo Valley homestead on one of his freighting trips, describing it as a beautiful oasis.

The stream ran year-round,” Arnett said, gesturing to a ravine behind him, now dry. “This was a lush area.”

Around the house, built with adobe brick, the Warrens created a ranch that provided amply for their children and the miners and cattlemen who passed their way.

Arnett quoted his grandmother Lela’s words: “The family never suffered any real hardship for there was a sound, protective house for them to live in and always an abundance of food,” she wrote.

With cattle, crops of vegetables and sugar cane, fruit orchards, chickens and a hog, the Warrens lacked for little.

“There were beautiful alfalfa fields, apple trees with red apples peeping through the leaves and grass covered the ground everywhere,” Lela Warren wrote.

In the winter, they could depend on an abundance of wild game, including rabbits, quail, dove, ducks and deer.
“Whoever came by was always asked to eat with them,” the pioneers’ daughter remembered.

“Pioneering isn’t so bad when everyone works together and for the good of all,” she told Arnett. “Mark and Sylvia were not great as most people value men and women, but their greatness was in their goodness.”

Cahuilla dug wells near La Quinta's Point Happy

Point Happy Date Gardens at the intersection of Highway 111 and Washington Street in the 1960s. This is now the site of Vons shopping center. (Photo: Photo courtesy of La Quinta Historical Society)

Denise Goolsby
The Desert Sun

The area just east of the Santa Rosa Mountains, where its foothills jut out into the desert near the intersection of Highway 111 and Washington Street in La Quinta, used to be home to the Cahuilla Indians. Later, it was a watering hole along a stagecoach route, and for many years, a working ranch.

The sprawling land where the ranch once stood is now occupied by Plaza La Quinta, a bustling shopping center anchored by a Vons grocery store and the Estates at Point Happy, an enclave of luxury homes.

The Cahuilla Indians found the area — which became known as Point Happy at the turn of the 20th century — a hospitable spot, as the Santa Rosas provided protection from fierce desert sandstorms and flash flooding.

Along the wash, the Cahuillas dug gently sloping pathways down to the springs below. The hand-dug "Indian Well" was located less than 300 yards from Point Happy. It was destroyed in the 100-year flood in 1916.

When gold was discovered in La Paz and Ehrenburg, Ariz. in 1862, Major William Bradshaw established the first trail through the Coachella Valley and across the Colorado Desert to California's neighboring state. Point Happy soon became a landmark for stagecoaches traveling the Bradshaw Trail. During this period, the stop began its tradition as a hospitable "watering hole" for desert travelers.

The area, tucked under the shadow of the Santa Rosas, was named after Norman "Happy" Lundbeck, an early desert settler who began homesteading the area in the early 1900s. Lundbeck established a stable and small store and sold wares to those traveling across the hot, dusty desert. A one-room elementary school was built on the property in 1916.

The Point Happy property and 135 adjoining acres were bought in 1922 by philanthropist Chauncey D. Clarke, who named it Point Happy Date Gardens. Clarke, who thought climactic conditions were similar to those in the Middle East, raised Arabian horses on the ranch for four years until his death in 1926.

J. Win Wilson, in a Los Angeles Times article dated March 8, 1925, said Clarke, "is a very enthusiastic booster for the dates and horses of the old world desert lands. The desert climate and condition, he believes, offer the finest training ground for making the horses both sure-footed and strong in shoulders and joints. In other words, he believes that conditions in the Coachella Valley are so similar to those in Arabia, where the Arab horses have been developed to perfection, as to afford ideal environment for the raising of this notable breed of equine."

The Times article described the agreeable conditions at the ranch, where at the time, Clarke had 11 horses — five stallions and six mares.

"His stud is provided with all modern conveniences: solid box walls, corrals, tank house and modern living quarters for his trainer. A quarter-mile track is also a feature, for regular exercising of his horses figures prominently in Mr. Clarke's plans."

Louise Rodarte Neeley, historian and a member of one of the city's pioneering families, recalls happy days at the ranch, where her father, Teofilo Rodarte was a foreman and her mother, Juanita, was the Clarke's housekeeper.

She said the ranch was filled with date palms and avocado, orange, fig, pecan, apricot, mulberry and grapefruit trees, row crops and sugar cane.

"We swam. We hiked. We had the mountain to the back of us," she said. "Growing up was happy. It was wonderful. Mother had chickens and a cow. We had the run of the place."

Her father was hired in 1923 and continued until his death in 1943. Her brother, Jess Rodarte was hired to tend the date trees.

Neeley said Mrs. Clarke's full-time gardener, Mr. Akahoshi, planted a large vegetable garden for home use and maintained an extensive rose garden and many varieties of annual flowers for the pleasure of their guests.

Knowing he was ill, Clarke sold his horses to the Kellogg Ranch in Pomona. Clarke died on Aug. 22, 1926. It is said that those horses became the breeding stock of the purebred Arabians in California.

His wife, Marie Clarke, a founder of the Hollywood Bowl, was instrumental in setting up and financially underwriting the Indio Women's Club. She continued to live on the ranch after her husband's death. She died on Oct. 30, 1948, leaving the property to Claremont College, which in turn, sold off parts of the property.

Point Happy Date Gardens was sold to William DuPont Jr., CEO of DuPont Chemical Corporation in the 1950s. He built a home in the Santa Rosa Mountains overlooking the ranch. To the southwest of the palm grove, he built a Spanish home with a pool and tennis court for friend Alice Marble, the top-ranked American woman tennis player in 1939.

Marble, a longtime Palm Desert resident, won 18 Grand Slam championships. She died at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs in 1990.

The house was finished on Dec. 16, 1965. DuPont Jr. died three days later. Portions of the ranch were sold off to subdividers.

The last owners of the ranch were Dr. Earl R. Kiernan and his wife Florence. By 2004, the final page was turned in the ranch's storied history with the construction of the Estates at Point Happy.

Sources: La Quinta Historical Society, La Quinta Museum, City of La Quinta Historic Context Statement, 1996.

Homesteading's role in settling Arizona Territory

Days Past: Jasper and Sarah Cartwright were early homesteaders in the Arizona Territory of the late 1870s. (Photo courtesy of Patrick Grady)

By PATRICK GRADY
Special to the Prescott Daily Courier

This is a summary of a presentation Patrick Grady will make at the 10th annual Western History Symposium at the Hassayampa Inn Aug. 3. The symposium is co-sponsored by the Prescott Corral of Westerners and the Sharlot Hall Museum and is open to the public free of charge. For more details, visit the Corral's website at www.prescorral.org or call Fred Veil at 443-5580.

Homesteading. The word evokes sod houses in Nebraska or the fabled Okla-homa land rush or the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder. But what about the desert and mountain regions of Arizona Territory?

Homesteading is often ignored in the stories of the settlement of Arizona. While historians have generally downplayed the overall impact of the 1862 Homestead Act on western migration, an estimated 1.7 million homesteaders found opportunity that might otherwise have eluded them, successfully claiming 270 million acres.

In Arizona from the 1870s through 1940, more than 21,000 patents, covering 4.1 million acres, were issued. That number is rather small when contrasted with the 87,000 patents issued in New Mexico, covering 19.4 million acres. Yet all across Arizona there are inspiring stories of homesteaders creating new communities in a wild land during the latter part of the 19th century. A brief overview of that history reveals the significance of homesteading to the future of many a prominent settler and to the establishment of a surprising number of new towns in Arizona.

Take Sedona for example. Several notable landmarks today are on former homestead property - Crescent Moon Park; Slide Rock State Park; Indian Gardens; Junipine; Chavez Ranch; and Los Abrigados. Frank Owenby later sold his homestead to T. C. Schnebly, whose wife, Sedona, provided the town's name.

A similar story unfolded in early Tucson. More than 280 patents were issued in three townships surrounding the Tucson townsite from 1874 to 1900. Early prominent pioneers included William S. Oury, Sidney DeLong (first mayor of Tucson), miller Solomon Warner, merchant and farmer Samuel Hughes, Hiram Stevens, Ramon Pacheco and Pedro Aguirre. In those three townships, 208 patents were issued to Mexican pioneers. Further east, Mexicans were early homesteaders in the San Pedro Valley.

Look at Phoenix. In the 1870s alone 93 homesteaders successfully claimed land near the Salt River. Expansion continued along new canal routes and related irrigation ditches, providing valuable water to this young farming community. Early Phoenix pioneers included prominent community leaders - John Alsap, Darrell Duppa, William Hancock, William Hellings, and the Isaac, Cartwright, Osborn, and Orme families. From 1872 to 1900, 399 patents were issued in Phoenix in the six townships surrounding the townsite. Only 31 of those were patented by Mexicans. Several 160-acre homesteads would become Phoenix's first subdivisions in the 1880s.

Further east along the Salt River, the Mormon colonizers of 1877 utilized homesteading laws to establish their colony in the Lehi-Mesa area. From the early 1880s to 1900, 145 patents were issued in the single township. Mormon leaders like the Jones, Rogers, Crismon, Pomeroy, and Sirrine families were among that group. Nearly 80 percent of the Mesa township land was patented by 1900. Moreover, Mormon colonists were prevalent throughout the Arizona Territory (and frequently used the Homestead law) along the Gila River, in several White Mountain communities, the Arizona Strip and elsewhere.

In Prescott, from 1870 to 1900, only 73 patents were issued in the two townships adjacent to the townsite. But this does not include the 1864 -1865 flurry of Pre-Emption filings by the early arrivals, including Van Smith, Richard McCormick, George Lount, King Woolsey and others. Even Paulino Weaver, reputed to be Prescott's first settler along Granite Creek, filed a Pre-Emption claim (signing his name with an "X"), although it was located in Walnut Grove, not in Prescott. The list of successful homesteaders using the 1862 law, however, includes Levi Bashford, Hezekiah Brooks, Henry Fleury, Jacob and Samuel Miller, Andrew Moeller, Albert Noyes and the Simmons, Dickson, and Sanders families - all prominent Prescottonians. That number included three women but only two Mexican homesteaders.

***

Come to the Western History Symposium Aug. 3 to learn more about the trials and triumphs of a number of the early Phoenix and Prescott homesteaders. Topics include settlement patterns, family histories and the homesteading experience of the Miller brothers, Henry Fleury and the Dickson, Sanders, and Mitchell families of Prescott, as well as the Hancock and Cartwright families of Phoenix. Their engaging stories and journeys, found in homesteading files, family letters and reminiscences, reflect the many facets (some untold until recently) of the pioneer spirit that contributed to the settling of the Arizona Territory.

Days Past is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International. This and other Days Past articles are available at www.sharlot.org. Submit articles for Days Past consideration to Scott Anderson via email at archivesrequest@sharlot.org.

Exhibit focuses on mysterious shacks

Kim Stringfellow’s “Jackrabbit Homestead” documents the history behind empty dwellings that dot the desert

This image of a desert shack in Wonder Valley is part of Kim Stringfellow's "Jackrabbit Homestead" exhibit. (KIM STRINGFELLOW/CONTRIBUTED IMAGE)

By Mark Muckenfuss
Riverside Press-Enterprise

Broken glass and dirt crunched under Kim Stringfellow’s sandals as she picked her way through an abandoned desert cabin in Wonder Valley, a thinly populated plain east of Twentynine Palms.

The walls were nearly skeletonized — mostly bare timber frames with a few asbestos shingles still hanging onto the weathered wood of the exterior.

In what once was a living area, a tangle of rusted coils and a wooden frame were all that remained of a couch, its upholstery shed long ago. In the ruins of the bedroom a dresser still stood, its top two drawers gaping and full of debris.

Stringfellow peered in, curious.

“You wonder about the people that inhabited these cabins and what their stories were,” said Stringfellow, 49, an artist living in Joshua Tree. “How long did they live there? How did they end up here?”

The cabins — some still occupied, others nearly ghosts — dot the desert chaparral east of Twentynine Palms. Stringfellow’s fascination with them has spawned an art exhibit, “Jackrabbit Homestead.”

The show opens at the UCR Culver Center of the Arts in downtown Riverside on Saturday, June 29 and includes photographs, historical material and a life-sized floor plan of a homestead cabin. A companion website offers audio interviews and a map showing where people can tour some of the cabins.

Stringfellow published a book on the subject in 2008. But she has continued to explore the cabins, built as part of the Small Tract Act of 1938, as well as their importance to the landscape and to the development of today’s desert communities. These were the original residents who helped make towns such as Twentynine Palms and Yucca Valley viable.

“It looks like a wash came through here are some point,” she said, noting the alluvial soil covering the cabin’s floor. “People would build during the dry season, and they weren’t accustomed to what happened when the rain came.”

Often when a cabin was hit by a mud flow, she said, the occupants would abandon the place, suddenly realizing the utopia of free wide-open spaces and self-determination was more often than not just a fantasy.

Tyler Stallings, artistic director of the Culver Center, said Stringfellow — an assistant professor of art at San Diego State University — is one of dozens of artists seeking their own utopias in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree. Many of them are drawn by the open expanse and the stark beauty of the desert, as well as the affordable property that once drew the homesteaders.

Stringfellow’s show is the latest in a series of projects and exhibits Stallings has produced in an effort to connect art and the Inland region’s deserts.

“Many nationally recognized artists are choosing to ground their work in and around Joshua Tree National Park in the Mojave Desert in a relocation that is akin to the spirit of the Wild West,” Stallings said via email.



JOHN WAYNE EXPERIENCE

Stringfellow said many of those who built the desert cabins in the middle of the 20th century were attracted by the romance of the vast open spaces.

“Everyone wanted that John Wayne Western experience,” she said.

And for just a handful of dollars, they were able to take a stab at it.

The Small Tract Act grew out of a migration of necessity, but blossomed into something wholly different.

The genesis of the historic episode is generally credited to Dr. James Luckie, a Pasadena physician often acknowledged as the father of Twentynine Palms. In the wake of World War I, Luckie was treating veterans with respiratory problems resulting from mustard gas exposure. He encouraged many of them to relocate to the desert, where the air was warm and dry.

Some acquired land through the existing Homestead Act. But meeting that act’s requirement for cultivating a certain number of acres on a homestead was a challenge in the Mojave. In the mid-1930s, a federal land inspector suggested a different set of rules were needed for the region. The Small Tract Act, passed in 1938, provided homesteaders with five acres, requiring only that they construct a dwelling of at least 400 square feet within three years.

For a $5 filing fee and a lease of $1 per acre per year, a person could lay claim to a piece of the desert. If a dwelling was constructed and approved, homesteaders usually could purchase the land for $10 to $20 per acre.

Hundreds of homestead cabins popped up on the landscape after World War II. Even some famous names got involved. Stringfellow said Desert magazine reported that Ronald Reagan applied for a homestead at one time but never built a cabin, so the land reverted to the government.

The cabins were dubbed jackrabbit homesteads.

Stringfellow said the name came from the fact that the local rabbit population would take advantage of the ample shade the cabins offered in the desert heat. As if on cue, as she walked around the corner of another shack, a jackrabbit leaped off into the sparse brush.

“BE BACK SOON”

Some homesteaders made a go of it. Most did not. The result is the half-deteriorated shacks scattered across the landscape. Stringfellow’s photos depict these relics. But while the images are compelling and saturated with color, she purposely avoids any of the mystique that might have drawn the early residents.

“I wasn’t trying to romanticize the cabins,” she said. “I don’t want to do romantic skies and clouds.”

Instead, she wants to intrigue.

“I’m hoping it opens people up to investigating,” she said. “I want people to go out and actually experience the landscape. You don’t have a sense of the scale unless you’re out there.”

Part of the project is a website — www.jackrabbithomestead.com — that contains a map for touring the area and audio interviews with local residents and historians. Stringfellow wants people to understand that the cabins are more than a curiosity, more than a disturbance of the desert vistas.

“Maybe one of these should be made into a monument for the Small Tract Act,” she said. “I hope, at one point, the historical society acquires one.”

Such a monument could tell the history of the homesteads, and perhaps even some of the stories of those who lived there. Although, she said, she’s found more mysteries than stories.

One shack she photographed had remained largely undisturbed since its abandonment. She found shirts hanging in a closet and an old manual typewriter.

“There had been a note posted to the door that was, ‘Be back soon … something, something,’” she said. “It was probably like the last thing that was left there. So this thing has been flopping in the wind for 25 to 30 years, it’s just sort of faded out.”

Such experiences only pique her interest more.

“I think I’ll always be photographing these,” she said. “I never really get tired of looking at them.”

Jackrabbit Homestead

• ART EXHIBIT: “Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938-2008, a project by Kim Stringfellow”
• WHERE: Culver Center of the Arts, 3824 Main St., Riverside
• WHEN: June 29-Sept. 28, 2013
• CLOSING EVENTS: Panel discussion, 3-5 p.m., and reception, 6-9 p.m. Sept. 28
• HOURS, INFORMATION: 951-827-4787 or artsblock.ucr.edu

By Kim Stringfellow
KCET.org

Jackrabbit homesteads are only for folks who have a bit of pioneering blood in their veins. The land generally is rough, no water is immediately available, more or less road building has to be done. But fortunately there are many Americans who find infinite pleasure in doing the hard work necessary to provide living accommodations on one of these sites--and cabins are springing up all over the desert country.

--Desert Magazine, 1950

Beyond the proliferation of big box chains, car dealerships, fast food joints, and the nameless sprawl located along California State Highway 62 the desert opens up. Out there, where signs of familiar habitation seem to fade from view, a variance appears in the landscape in the form of small, dusty cabins --mostly abandoned--scattered across the landscape. The majority of the existing shacks, historically found throughout the larger region known as the Morongo Basin, lie east of Twentynine Palms in outlying Wonder Valley. The curious presence of these structures indicated that you are entering one of the remaining communities of "jackrabbit" homesteads left in the American West. The mostly derelict structures located among the occasional inhabited ones are the remaining physical evidence of former occupants who were some of the last to receive land from Uncle Sam for a nominal fee through the Small Tract Act of 1938.

One of the many land acts designed to dispose of "useless" federal lands from the public domain, the Small Tract Act authorized the lease of up to five acres of public land for recreational purpose or use as a home, cabin, camp, health convalescent, or business site to able-bodied U.S. citizens. If the applicant made the necessary improvements to his or her claim by constructing a small dwelling within three years of the lease, the applicant could file for a patent--the federal government's form of a deed--after purchasing the parcel for the appraised price (on average $10 to $20 an acre) at the regional land office. This highly popular mid-century homestead movement reflects the quintessential American desire to claim territory and own a piece of the land even if the property in question is virtually "worthless" from an economic perspective.

Although some cabins have been passed down from the original jackrabbit homesteaders to family members for recreation and other purposes, today the majority of the area's jackrabbit homesteads have fallen beyond repair, lending a ghostly and feral presence to the landscape. Others have found new function as primary, full-time residences with modifications, often referred to as "biltmores" by area residents. A small, but growing community of artists and musicians fleeing rising housing prices and general urban ills of the Los Angeles metropolitan area are reclaiming and re-envisioning the structures as artist studios or as creative retreats. Inventive enclaves forming within this geographically defined area are inspired by the Morongo Basin's spacious desert backdrop, its perceived tranquility, and a desire to form a sense of community within a rural environment. Many have migrated to the region with aspirations uncannily akin to the original homesteaders and share similar outlooks or values with them.

In their quest for renewal and reinvention, musicians and other artists have converged on this part of the desert during the past half-century for the creative stimulation that the openness of the place provides. Cosmic, country-rock music icon Gram Parsons, who frequented Joshua Tree often, died there; and other musicians, such as Tim Easton, Gram Rabbit, Ann Magnuson, and Victoria Williams have homes there.

Artists see the desert as a place of refuge and as a source of inspiration. Joshua Tree and its vicinity are home to a well-documented community of creative types. Bob Arnett, Diane Best, Helena Bongartz, Chris Carraher, Shari Elf, Perry Hoffmanm, Mary-Austin Klein, Jack Pierson, Randy Polumbo, and Andrea Zittel are some of the diverse group of artists living throughout the Morongo Basin and who also own cabins originally built by jackrabbit homesteaders. There have been numerous in-depth articles in both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times concerning the artists' presence in the area. Zittel, an internationally-known artist living in Joshua Tree, co-hosts the High Desert Sites, a biannual series of experimental, site-specific art projects, providing an alternative space for both local and out-of-town artists. Helena Bongartz employs the architectural structure of the cabins directly in her art, using the fascade of an abandoned shack near Amboy to project her video work at night.

Historically, the region has also served as a place to build alternative communities, including those of gays and lesbians. It is not known how many gays and lesbians settled in jackrabbit homesteaders, but there is speculation that some are believed to have done so. A long-time lesbian resident refers affectionately to her neighborhood as the "gay ghetto," a tightly knit community home to many practicing artists who have restored cabins into artist studios and very distinctive creative retreats.

As structures for the imagination, the abandoned cabins have become a catalyst for various human projections, where physical and symbolic constructions of space play out over time. If you look closely, you may also find that the cabins reveal a personal text that describes their former occupants in a much more intimate way. Chris Carraher, an artist and cabin dweller in Wonder Valley, asserts: "The homestead cabin is the other icon that figures this place for me. A pervasive relic of a small-time working-class fantasy land-rush, it is the American Dream writ miniature. Abandoned, ghostly, habited, or reclaimed, the cabin is a lone prop that sets the stage of this tremendous theater at the edge of civilization and wildness, a porous vessel through which the desert and human pass, and pass again."

About the Jackrabbit Homestead Project:

Jackrabbit Homestead is a project produced by Kim Stringfellow exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park through a physical installation of photographs, maps, documents, and other related materials. Another component of this project is the Web-based multimedia presentation featuring a free, downloadable car audio tour component available at www.jackrabbithomestead.com. The accompanying book, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938-2008 was published in 2009 by the Center for American Places. The Web site and audio tour were funded by the California Council for the Humanites California Story Fund initiative and were released in March 2009.

African-Americans Shaping the California Desert: Homesteading in the Mojave

by Chris Clarke
KCET.org

Journalist Delilah L. Beasley documented African-Americans' contribution to California in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In this era when "urban" has become a coded phrase meaning "African-American," it can be easy to forget that California's desert backcountry has a rich African-American history of its own. Black California history isn't limited to the 213 and the 510: the 760 is pretty well-represented in its own right.

For generations the California deserts represented both opportunity and the possibility of being left alone to live your own life. Both of these siren songs were alluring to many African-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The deserts of California, namely the Mohave and at Victorville, are government lands, and quite a few colored people have taken up homesteads on this land and are improving them. Some sections have been found to contain oil. Many of the colored people have bought this land and afterwards sold it for a good margin.

So wrote Delilah L. Beasley, the first African-American woman to land a regular writing gig with a major metropolitan daily newspaper, in her 1919 book The Negro Trail Blazers of California. Beasley, quite an interesting figure herself, traveled the length and breadth of the state doing research for the book. The work almost killed her. A poignant note in the preface reads:

During the past year the author has been in very serious ill health and all during the long months of illness there were a few good, staunch friends who voluntarily sent money whenever they wrote and never allowed her for one moment to entertain a thought that she would not get well nor complete the book.

Beasley did live another 15 years after writing that preface, long enough to land a column at the Oakland Tribune, lobby for California's passage of an anti-lynching law, and organize for the establishment of the then-controversial International House at UC Berkeley.

The legacy of the desert homesteaders she mentioned was not always as monumental. The East Mojave's Lanfair Valley, now mostly part of the Mojave National Preserve, offers an example.

In 1910, the first year of homesteading in the Lanfair Valley, six land claims were filed by black people, a respectable proportion of the total number of claims. All in all 17 African-American families homesteaded the valley, most of them in the vicinity of Dunbar - a settlement intended to serve as a center for African-American folks. Dunbar's Post Office opened in 1912, within a month of the opening of another Post Office a tenth of a mile away, in Lanfair. The two offices operated in a kind of de facto racial segregation until 1914, when, according to local historian Dennis Casebier, the U.S. Post Office noticed the redundancy and closed Dunbar's P.O.

Ambitious projects nearby included an orphanage for black youth and the planned community of Harts, billed by its founders G.W. Harts and Howard Folke as "bringing freedom and independence to a limited number of colored people." Neither really got off the ground, though a few young boys did move there from orphanages in the Los Angeles area for a time.

African-American homesteaders proved more resilient. The first half of the decade after 1910 was unusually rainy, and the Lanfair Valley saw a flurry of attempts at wheat farming, some more successful than others. Black families lived with their white neighbors in what must have seemed a liberatingly democratic fashion, the adults helping on each other's farms and the kids sitting together in school. This early integration had its limits, though. As Casebier writes,

In talking with people from that period (black and white) there is an almost categorical denial of any prejudice or discrimination between whites and blacks... In spite of this kind of testimony - which I consider to be honest but somewhat naive - there is evidence of some discrimination.

In speaking of her black neighbors one resident] said "I don't think they ever came to any of our dances." There's a reason for this. I have a copy of the bylaws for the social organization in Lanfair Valley called the Yucca Club and under the heading of who is eligible for membership the bylaws stated clearly that a member could be "any white person in the valley." This is the club that organized the dances.

Also in interviewing black homesteaders (remembering they were children in the teens) they seemed to know little about the community picnics and pioneer celebrations held at Lanfair on the 4th of July and they did not attend them. That tells me that likely their parents did not feel welcome at those gatherings - as they were specifically not welcome at the community dances each month.

Black and white homesteaders had a common enemy in those days: the Rock Springs Cattle Company, which held grazing rights to much of the Lanfair Valley, resented the homesteaders and did its best to chase them out. According to the National Park Service,

The homesteaders experienced constant conflict with the Rock Springs Land & Cattle Company. The company considered Lanfair Valley to be some of the best part of its range, and resented the "intrusion" of settlement. The company denied water to the settlers, forcing them to use the few public springs or dig expensive wells. Cattle trampled carefully nurtured crops, sometimes allegedly after the cowboys cut the nesters' fences. In return, the farmers would occasionally help themselves to beef. The cattle company brought in hired thugs, and rumors swirled claiming some homesteaders' cabins burned to ashes under mysterious circumstances.

In the end it was rain as much as racism that undid the African-American community in the Lanfair Valley: by the second half of the decade the climate reverted to its extremely arid type, wheat crops failed, and one by one homesteaders moved away to better opportunities elsewhere. By 1927 the population had dwindled to the point where the Postal Service was compelled to close the Lanfair Post Office. What remains now is cleared land, foundation stones, and the occasional fence line -- some of it still owned by the descendants of the homesteaders.

But in the few short boom years residents of the Lanfair Valley may well have enjoyed more relative freedom, and less hatred, than any other African-Americans in the U.S. In Casebier's words:

The fertile soil yielded crops with which homesteaders (black and white) could sustain themselves. The children made their own games and toys and played among the wonderland of Joshua trees. From where they lived east of Lanfair a half mile or more -- they could see the smoke of the train rising above the Joshuas and hear the whistle as the train came through twice a day - once early in the morning from Goffs to Searchlight and later in the day back from Searchlight to Goffs. They had a fine school in Lanfair with efficient teachers and friendly students and parents. There were outings to magical places like Fort Piute and Piute Creek and occasional visits to Goffs and sometimes even into Needles.

Chris Clarke is an environmental writer of two decades standing. Author of Walking With Zeke, he writes regularly at his acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing and comments on desert issues here every week. He lives in Palm Springs.

Mojave Desert historian keeps California's heritage alive

Dennis G. Casebier stands in front of the library in Goffs, Calif., that bears his name. The railroad depot replica holds the world's largest archive of Mojave Desert history. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Over the course of decades, Dennis G. Casebier has assembled the lost voices and hidden histories of a place largely washed clean of its past.

By David Kelly
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Goffs, Calif. — Out on the great swells of the eastern Mojave Desert, that vast sand sea lying between Barstow and the Colorado River, there is no crumb of history, no tall tale, no arcane bit of knowledge too small to escape Dennis Casebier's notice.

"I'm fascinated by who ate rabbits," he said, sitting inside a library that will soon hold his life's work. "Did they eat jack rabbits or cottontails? Did they fry them or roast them? Did they grind them up or make stew out of them?"

"You see, that's the level of history we get into here," he said.

The soft-spoken retired physicist is a legend in this harsh land, a sort of Willy Wonka of the desert who transformed 70 acres of rock and scrub into the Goffs Cultural Center, his personal Xanadu of history and imagination.

In this tiny hamlet of 23 on the barren edge of the Mojave National Preserve, he and a group of volunteers carved roads and towed in ore carts, a defunct wooden post office, a caboose, windmills and boxcars. He bought a collapsing 1914 schoolhouse and turned it into a museum. His own Tales of the Mojave Road Publishing Co. has produced 26 books, 16 of which he wrote.

Yet none of it compares to his masterwork, the recently opened $1-million Dennis G. Casebier Memorial Library. Housed in a replica of the old Goffs Railroad Depot, the two-story, climate-controlled collection of thousands of books, maps, photos and tapes is the exclamation point on his arid passions.

Steve Mongrain, president of the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association, a nonprofit group that has helped raise money for the project, calls it "the most extraordinary historical collection of Mojave Desert history and culture in existence."

"There is nothing like it in the world," Mongrain said. "Anything that pertains to the Mojave can be researched there. It is unprecedented."

The association's 800 members donated $250,000 for the library, and the California Cultural and Historical Endowment provided the rest in grants.

Casebier, 74, has assembled the lost voices and hidden histories of a place largely washed clean of its past. The homesteads are gone, the mines closed, the tiny towns swallowed by sand.

Freight trains, some 6,000 feet long, still lumber through to Needles and beyond, but they rarely stop anymore because there are so few towns to stop in.

A 1920s picture of Rock Springs Land and Cattle Co. cowboys is one of about 108,000 photographs Casebier has collected. The library also has thousands of maps, oral histories and biographical files. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Gone too are characters such as gunfighter Bill Hollimon, who, when he wasn't shooting rivals, liked to pour gasoline down anthills and set them alight.

"The history is just everywhere, yet nobody is here. It's empty," said Casebier, an especially polite man who speaks with great precision.

"The people have gone, their life ways ended somehow. We are gathering the history of this forgotten land, and we have done so with a vengeance."

On a recent morning, Casebier rattled around the library, dipping in and out of the new filing cabinets. Each one contained dozens of subject files filled with personal histories.

Harrison Doyle?

"He's the oldest guy I ever interviewed, 103 or 104," Casebier said. "He was walking the streets of Needles in the early 1900s."

Llewellyn Barrackman?

"Former headman of the Fort Mojave Indians."

Betty Ordway?

"She was like the Rosetta Stone," he said. "She came here in 1914 and knew everyone and remembered everything. She knew the gunfighters and the homesteaders and where the stills were. She was the belle of the valley."

Tucked away in library cabinets are 3,000 biographies, 1,000 taped oral histories, 108,000 photographs, 6,000 books and 6,000 maps, ready for perusal by those Casebier believes demonstrate "an advanced interest in the desert."

Jo Ann Casebier, right, and volunteer Carol Brown sort historical documents. Thousands of soldiers were stationed in the Mojave during World War II, and many of their personal accounts are on file in the library. (Irfan Kahn / Los Angeles Times)

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., consulted Casebier and used information from his collection when writing "Searchlight: The Camp That Didn't Fail," a book about his hometown.

"This book is better because of Dennis," he wrote in the preface.

Students working on master's degrees have come to study the homestead period and the military history of the region. Thousands of soldiers were stationed in the Mojave during World War II. Many of their personal accounts are on file in the library.

Casebier's own history in the desert began in 1954, after he left his home state of Kansas and enlisted in the Marines. He was stationed in Twentynine Palms and spent his free time poking around what is now Joshua Tree National Park.

"It was love at first sight when I saw the desert," he said. "It's different for everybody, but for me it was the wide open spaces and maybe the simplicity."

He returned to Kansas in 1956, got a degree in physics from Washburn University in Topeka, and returned to California in 1960. He worked on guided missile systems for the Navy and lived in Corona.

Meanwhile, his passion for the desert led him into the eastern Mojave, where he was smitten by what he dubbed "the forgotten country" encircled by the Colorado River and the I-40 and I-15 freeways.

There, he found an awe-inspiring emptiness.

"All the people had moved away. The schools went away. Everything went away," he said. "You would think that people would be swarming all over this area looking for its past, but they weren't."

Casebier's Navy job often took him to Washington, D.C., where he spent evenings at the National Archives and the Library of Congress photocopying records and maps about the eastern Mojave.

At one point he found a defunct wagon trail stretching 131 miles from the Colorado River to Camp Cady, east of Barstow.

Casebier formed a volunteer group that turned the dirt track into the four-wheel-drive Mojave Road. Soon he was leading caravans down it.

Chris Ervin first toured the road in 1988.

"It was a really fun, educational and a socially uplifting experience," said the Orange County resident, who works on the archives as a volunteer. "Dennis single-handedly rediscovered the Mojave Road and got thousands of others involved. He is an inspiration and a visionary."

In 1990, after he retired, Casebier and his wife, Jo Ann, moved to Goffs and bought 113 acres that included the old Goffs Schoolhouse. Working with the Mojave heritage association, he set to work saving the school and building the cultural center, which he donated to the nonprofit.

At the same time, he traveled the country interviewing former desert residents for his oral histories, persuading many to part with photographs and personal papers.

His disarming approach put people at ease.

"I'd say, 'So, how did a nice girl like you end up in the desert?' "

Some subjects were duds, but others, he said, were "bell ringers." He interviewed Curtis Springer 54 times. In 1944, Springer founded a spa and resort in an area he named Zzyzx, just south of Baker. A road bearing the name still exists.

Betty Ordway was another bell ringer. Casebier, who found her in Auburn, Calif., was so impressed that he put her entire 155,000-word interview into two bound volumes.

"She had 500 photos and she cast light on the big things and the little things," he said. "We had gunfights out here between ranchers and homesteaders, who would help themselves to a cow once in a while. A 1925 shootout killed two gunfighters, and Betty knew both men."

And she liked her rabbit fried like chicken.

"You could see her salivate when she remembered," he said. "I just loved that. Maybe because I'm such a nut or maybe because I wish I lived back then."

With his research constantly expanding and scattered everywhere, Casebier came up with the idea of a central library.

The grants arrived in 2006 and the building was completed in July.

Archival material is still being moved in, and the rules on how people can use the library are still being worked out.

Casebier, who still does oral histories, said anyone interested in visiting must make arrangements first.

"We are targeting researchers of desert history, those who are writing books or papers or scholarly works," said Ervin, the library's project manager. "Our focus is how do we make sure this thing lasts longer than all of us? We are trying to get an endowment -- maybe $10 million -- to pay for and support all these wonderful materials in perpetuity."

Back in Goffs, Casebier hopped into a golf cart and motored down his complex's Boulevard of Dreams. He passed a Justice of the Peace office that once served the towns of Amboy and Ludlow, and pulled up in front of an old library built in 1927.

There are hundreds of books inside that have not been moved to the new library just up the road.

For desert aficionados it's a small, if dimly lit, slice of heaven. Books with titles such as "The Great California Deserts," "Our Desert Neighbors," "On Desert Trails" and "Desert Treasures" stand in dark wooden cabinets behind glass doors.

Casebier likes to sit in the back room and read. If he should ever get bored, which is highly unlikely, he could open the window and drink in unlimited blue sky.

He has spent the better part of his life studying the desert. For years people have asked him why.

"I want people to know the tremendous respect I have for the human beings who lived here and the tremendous respect I have for their self-reliance," he said.

"They were a special breed. I don't want that story to disappear."