On February 16, 1867, the quiet expanse of Rabbit Springs Dry Lake in Lucerne Valley erupted with vengeance. Three years after the Las Flores massacre, another clash flared. What followed was less a battle than a sudden strike: a posse of settlers descended on a small Indigenous band—likely Serrano—wrongly believed to be Southern Paiute (Chemehuevi)…
In 1915, Stephen “Desert Steve” Albert Ragsdale, originally from Coffeyville, Kansas, rattled his way west, coaxing an early‑model automobile across the Mojave as if stubbornness alone could substitute for horsepower. He was bound for a business conference in Los Angeles, because apparently the best route to professional success was straight through a sun‑scorched nowhere, but…
The U.S. Army officer slowly banked his 1940 Stinson Voyager to the left and readied it for a rough landing on the dirt runway. The small 80 horsepower airplane always got a workout during the many flights made by this solder while he surveyed the land below him during a hot summer. A cavalry officer…
The shifting sands of the Imperial Valley were not just an obstacle; they were a force of nature that swallowed early automobiles whole. By 1913, the challenge had grown so dire that the Auto Club of Southern California summoned all interested parties to El Centro, demanding a solution for a road that could carry travelers…
The Kelso Depot, formerly the Kelso Depot, Restaurant and Employees Hotel, and now home to the Mojave National Preserve Visitor Center, sits in the heart of the Mojave Desert within the National Park Service’s Mojave National Preserve. Kelso Depot is one of the Mojave National Preserve’s star attractions—it played a major role in shaping the…
During the Panic of 1907, a financial crash that began with a severe drop on the New York Stock Exchange, James Hart and the brothers Bert and Clark Hitt, discovered pockets of rich gold ore in rhyolite on a steep slope in the Castle Mountains, approximately 4 miles south of the 23-miles long Barnwell &…
At the northwest corner of Waalew Road and Dale Evans Parkway in Apple Valley, just across the road from the Los Ranchos Mobile Home Park, is a vacant piece of desert with a few cement foundations and a smattering of trees near Bell Mountain. Next time you drive by there you might want to know…
Not quite the desert, but Cucamonga was on the border. At the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, Route 66 was still the way to or from the great Mojave, from where I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. I remember many trips to Cucamonga to explore the abandoned stone houses of early…
While we have been known to move around a lot in the style of a comedic witness protection program, this is the first time we have actually written about our current hometown. That says something about La Quinta, California. Located in the Coachella Valley surrounded by the Colorado Desert, La Quinta was founded as a…
Once there was a town. Rice, California, formerly named Blythe Junction, west of the Colorado River, between Twentynine Palms and the Arizona state line. Now the place is just a lonely train siding with the tattered remains of a few buildings, an ubiquitous “shoe tree” and an abandoned airfield watching cars race by at 90 miles…