Mojave Desert Sanctuary

by Gary J George

  When he was released from the military hospital, the doctors told him he would never survive the damp climate of England. His only hope, they explained, lay in seeking out dry, desert air.

  In his teens, he had been fascinated by romantic stories of the American West. After long discussions with my mother, discussions during which she adamantly refused to leave London, he made plans to travel to the United States. He hoped that once he was settled and established there he could persuade her to join him.

  But in the winter of 1919, before he could set out on his journey, Mother fell ill during the Spanish Flu pandemic that was sweeping the world. It is entirely possible her crowded social calendar, which brought her into contact with so many people in close quarters, led to her exposure. Father was at the estate. As soon as he heard she was ill, he left for London. He arrived in time to remain by her side as she struggled in vain against the illness. It’s a wonder he didn’t contract it himself. With his damaged lungs, it certainly would have killed him if he had.

  After the funeral, Father took me, the nanny, and the governess back to the estate, then left for the United States, leaving me with Grandfather Stonebridge.

  He stayed in New York only long enough to buy train tickets to Los Angeles. Arriving at Union Station, he went straight to the Los Angeles Public Library and began to sift through back issues of the Los Angeles Times for information about land in the desert. He discovered stories about the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916. The act allowed the homesteading of six hundred and forty acres of land in the Mojave Desert. No cultivation was required: only the construction of a structure and the purchase of a few head of cattle. Although Father was a citizen of England, all he had to do to qualify for the land was sign a statement saying he intended to become a U.S. citizen at some unspecified, future date.

  Before the sun went down over the Pacific Ocean, he had paid four hundred dollars for a new, Model T Ford stake bed pickup and headed east on National Old Trails highway. Late that night, he was in a hotel in Barstow. The next morning, he set out for the Eastern Mojave on what soon turned into a narrow, graded dirt road through the desert.

  Father often told me that he felt better the instant he reached the desert. At Goffs, he turned off the graded road onto a bumpy track through Lanfair Valley, passing ramshackle homes and buildings built by homesteaders. He drove through the area, many times on primitive wagon trails, looking for a suitable place. He considered Carruthers Canyon but said he felt hemmed in. He wanted wide open spaces. He also had no interest in having his ranch headquarters close to the operations of the Giant Ledge silver mine. Gold Valley would have suited him perfectly, but there was already a ranching operation there.

  Then he found this place. He drove past it several times on the Old Mojave Road before he realized it was just what he was looking for. He parked his car down there on what is now Cedar Canyon Road. With his damaged lungs, it took him a long time to get to the top of the mountain. But it was worth the climb. He arrived short of breath but satisfied. He saw wide open vistas to the south, east, and west, and plenty of grazing lands on both sides of the Pinto range – south of him through the Mid Hills and north though the Pinto Valley. There were a few homesteads in the Pinto Valley, but most of them looked like they were on their last legs. And even if they weren’t, there was enough water throughout the area that he knew he could create stock ponds to water his herds without coming into conflict with the farmers.

  On the advice of one of the locals, he hired an old Timbisha Shoshone woman from near Death Valley to witch him a well. Who better to find water than someone who had spent her entire life worrying about having enough of it? He watched as she worked with her desert willow dowsing stick on the hillside for several hours. She moved in ever narrowing circles until she came to the spot where the well is today.

  “Right here,” she told my father.

  “Drive a stake in the ground.”

  He did.

  She told him when the drilling company came to make sure they set up the rig right where they were standing and to make sure the bit went into the ground right exactly where the stake was. Not two feet or even a foot away. She told him there was a big sheet of solid rock right under their feet, but there was a crack in the sheet and the drill would slide right through into a big pool of water beneath.

  That’s exactly what happened. The well they brought in has never failed nor flagged.

  Then father had this house built, and the barn and the bunkhouse and the corral. It took almost a year. While he supervised the construction, he lived in a tent over by where that last switchback turns into the driveway. He told me it was one of the best years of his life. Said he woke up feeling better every day. Said he went from being an old, sick man to being a young, healthy one in that year.

  When the house was done, Father came back to England. He conferred with Grandfather Stonebridge on the kind of cattle operation he should run on the desert. He told grandfather most of the ranchers out here ran calf and cow operations. Grandfather convinced him a steer operation had potential for larger profits. Since Father had plenty of capital, the occasional bad year would not be a problem.

  Once that was settled, Father spent a month on the continent, mostly in Spain and Italy, buying the furniture and other furnishings that are still in this house today. Had everything shipped through the Panama Canal to Los Angeles, and then to Goffs on the Santa Fe and then onto a siding off the Searchlight spur just by where Lanfair road and Cedar Canyon Road intersect.

  Then he returned to England for me. We came to America, just the two of us. Father left the governess behind. I remember she cried when we left. I cried too. I was ten years old.

  At first, that trip was a glorious adventure. First by ship and then by train across the American continent. It was late summer, and I was astounded by the endless miles of wheat and corn on the prairie. I had never seen anything remotely like that.

  But then, as we traveled farther west, I started to worry. By the time we hit New Mexico, I knew I was in trouble. The land grew more barren and brown, the sky almost totally cloudless, the horizon more distant and the vegetation more sparse. When we got off the train in Goffs, I thought there had been a terrible mistake. Everywhere I turned, the landscape seemed dead and abandoned. Mountains made of black rock without a blade of grass on them. Sinister looking plants. Dust devils spinning across what might as well have been the face of the moon.

  We stood together on the platform at the depot, a man in formal clothes and a boy in short pants. Father pointed at the Goffs schoolhouse on the other side of a dirt road and said I would be enrolled there in the coming week. I practically wept! But I was determined to be brave the way Grandfather Stonebridge told me Father had been brave in the war. Surely the ominous looking world spread out before me was not as bad as No-Man’s-Land.

  By Christmas, I loved the desert and felt like I had lived on it my whole life.”

  Kiko’s voice came again.

  “But it must have been quite a shock, coming from a life of wealth and privilege in the green fields of an English country estate to this place.”

  John laughed.

  “Well, it was a little rough and tumble at first. I was in school with the sons and daughters of homesteaders, ranchers, miners and gandy dancers.”

  “What on earth is a gandy dancer?”

  “Sorry. A worker on a railroad track maintenance crew.

  Anyway, there I was with my upper-class British accent and perfect diction, which many of my schoolmates interpreted as evidence I considered myself superior to them. They picked on me and made fun of me. Naturally, I came right back at them.

  I was often scuffed up and the worse for wear when Father picked me up in the Model T after school, so he taught me to box and grapple. He’d learned a lot of that in the army. It wasn’t long before I was holding my own in the schoolyard. After awhile, I was just one of the gang.”

  “Mr. Stonebridge … I mean, John, what was t
he Lanfair Valley like back then?”

  “Well, there were a lot more people here then, that’s for sure. Probably a few hundred of them, counting the Negro families in Dunbar.”

  “What was Dunbar?”

  “Negro people from the South started coming west when they heard about the Homestead Act. Many of them were sharecroppers, a miserable life, and they had long dreamed of owning land of their own. The first few who got here sent word back to Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia.

  Soon there was a whole little community. I’m not sure why it was called Dunbar, but it even had its own post office.”

  “Was it separate from the other homesteaders?”

  “Well, in a way, I guess you could say that.”

  “Did the Negro families and the white families get along?”

  “I never heard about any serious problems.

  No, the real trouble was between the cattle operations and the homesteaders.”

  “You mean like in Shane with Alan Ladd?”

  “Just like that.

  The Rock Springs Cattle Company was the biggest problem. They were the most established operation. They ran over ten thousand head, and they were used to their cattle grazing on open range all through the valley. But then the homesteaders came and planted wheat. You can imagine what a field full of wheat would look to a steer that had been getting by on white bursage, big galleta and blackbrush. The homesteaders had to put up fences to protect their crop, and sometimes the fences kept the ranchers’ cattle from getting to water sources they were used to using. All hell broke loose.

  You know how hard it is to set a fence post in desert ground? Especially a crooked post chopped out of cedar or pinyon? Well, a fence that took weeks and weeks to put up could be pulled down by a few cowhands in one night.”

  “What did the law have to say about it?”

  “What law? There was no law to speak of out here in those days. San Bernardino County had one deputy in Smoke Tree, and even if you could persuade him to come all the way up here, he didn’t like to get his Model T off the main roads.

  No, we were on our own out here.”

  “Who won?”

  “There was an incident with gunfire and injuries across the valley there at Government Holes, but I don’t know what would’ve happened eventually because in the end, the weather won.

  The wet years came to an end, and the place remembered it was a desert. Also, grain prices took a dive after World War One. Put all those things together: less rain, lower yields, lower grain prices, and one by one the homesteaders gave up and drifted away.

  Father helped the ones in the Pinto Valley, and those along the north end of Watson’s Wash, so they could get their five years of improvements and farming in to qualify for title to the land. Then he bought their parcels at fair prices. At least that way they had something to show for the backbreaking work they had put in all those years.”

  John was quiet again for a moment.

  “In the days when the homesteaders were active, if you stood on top of Hackberry Mountain and looked out over the valley, the place was almost crowded. At least crowded for the Mojave Desert. There were scores of one hundred sixty and three hundred and twenty acre parcels. They all had small farmhouses. That was required. Some had a little barn or at least some storage sheds. And they all had cleared acreage.

  Even now, if you walk out through the Joshua trees, you will find squares of nearly vacant land that had been completely cleared of vegetation and planted with crops.”

  “I’ve seen those. Desert plants haven’t grown back after all these years?”

  “Not much. Wounds on the Mojave are very slow to heal.

  Let me give you a great example. Take a hike northwest of Arrowhead Junction sometime. In a few miles you’ll come to a place where General Patton’s boys bulldozed and leveled the desert for an airstrip before World War Two. You could still land a plane on that airstrip and not run over anything over two inches tall.”

  “You said Lanfair Valley was full of homesteads. I don’t see any buildings out there now.”

  “Patton’s boys, again. Those were cold winters when the troops were out here training. There were ten thousand soldiers scattered over the desert living in unheated tents. They tore down all those abandoned buildings and burned the lumber to keep warm.

  And one more thing you would have seen from the top of that mountain in those days. The railroad. From the late 1800s until 1923, the Nevada Southern, which was later bought out by the Santa Fe, ran through the valley all the way to Barnwell and then on to Searchlight.”

  “How big was Searchlight?”

  “Fifteen hundred people lived there and worked the mines, mostly copper, but then everything played out. The Santa Fe abandoned the line, and the town died.”

  “Aeden,” said Kiko, “you spend a lot out time out here. I’ll bet you’d like to see the place the way it once was.”

  I thought about that.

  “I’d like to see it, but I like it better the way it is right now.”

  “Why?”

  “I like it without a lot of people. Besides, I think a lot of those people never really left. Maybe they’re wandering around out here.”

  “What a strange idea.”

  “Sometimes, when I’m walking at sunrise, especially on a cold, winter morning when the wind is blowing hard, I think I hear voices from just over the hill or up the draw somewhere. But when I go to look, there’s no one there.”

  “You’re a strange boy,” said Kiko. “You might want to try to give up that kind of thinking. The white jacket people may come looking for you. If I thought I heard voices of dead people, I’d go the other way as fast as I could.”

  “Voices, what do they say?”

  “I can never make out what they’re saying.”

  Joe took another puff of his cigarette. By the movement of the glowing ember, I could tell he was nodding his head.

  “Chemehuevi voices. Mojave, Southern Paiute. Spirits everywhere out here. Not for you to understand.”

  “Maybe so, Mr. Medrano.

  And sometimes, it’s more than a feeling. The other day ….”

  I realized I was about to describe my hallucination in Paiute Wash. I knew if I did, I would sound like a real nut case. I clamped my mouth tightly shut to keep the words from coming out.

  “The other day what, Aeden?”

  “Never mind.”

  I tried to laugh but it came out more like a cough.

  Joe put out his cigarette with his fingertips.

  John leaned down and struck a match. The sudden light seemed very bright after the darkness. He lifted the chimney on the carriage lantern and lit the wick.

  The veranda came into view all around us. The spell was broken.

  I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. I got to my feet.

  “Thank you for inviting me to dinner. And for the story about the old days. I love hearing about that stuff.”

  When I walked off the porch and headed for my car, Mr. Stonebridge came with me.

  “Nice to have you join us this evening. I think it’s good for Kiko to have someone close to her own age around. You come by whenever you can, Ade. Don’t be a stranger this summer.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d really like to be around while Mr. Medrano builds the new room. I could learn a lot by watching him. I’ll help if he’ll let me. I’d like to learn to build.”

  “If you really want to do that, come by in the morning. Say around seven? Joe and I are going to plan out the room. You can be in on it from the very beginning.”

  “All right.”

  “One more thing I forgot to talk to you about the other day. Who have you told about Kiko being here?”

  “No one, yet, John. I didn’t know if it was okay to.”

  “Good lad. Go ahead and tell your mother and father. You shouldn’t have to keep secrets from them. But ask them to please not to tell anyone else in town. I know your folks. I know they can keep
something to themselves.”

  “All right. I’ll tell them you don’t want it to get out.”

  “Appreciate it.

  Kiko’s not ready to tell me what happened. Maybe she never will be. And that would be okay with me, but I think there’s something she wants to get off her chest. Sometimes, when we’re sitting at the table, she looks like she’s just about to spill it, but then she holds back.

  Anyway, see you in the morning if you want to come by.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  A few minutes later, I was on Cedar Canyon Road heading back to Lee’s camp. As I drove, I thought about the marvelous story Mr. Stonebridge had told us about the old days. But it wasn’t long before I was thinking about what Kiko’s mysterious secret might be. And I realized I wasn’t ready to tell Mom and Dad about her yet. When I did I was going to ask what they knew about Poston. I wanted to be sure I knew exactly how to ask before I started down that road.

  I turned on the radio. It was permanently tuned to KOMA in Oklahoma City, the only radio station playing rock and roll that could reach the middle of the Mojave. The Coasters were singing “Searchin”.

  I came up the driveway the next morning at exactly seven o’clock. John and Joe were standing beside the house where the addition would be built. I joined them.

  “Good morning, Aeden.”

  “Good morning John. Mr. Medrano.”

  Joe nodded.

  Joe had a tablet. He sketched as they talked. It was fascinating watching not just the room but its underpinnings taking shape.

  When Joe was done sketching, we went inside and sat at the kitchen table. John and I talked while Joe arranged the pages in a “start to finish” order. He made some sketches of small details which he inserted at various places. When he was done, I looked on as he and John went through the pages one by one.

  As they went, John asked for some minor changes here and there. Joe made them. John apologized for asking for changes.

  Joe almost smiled.

  “Change your mind again. Don’t worry. Always happens.”