General Edward O. C. Ord has a small but interesting connection to the Mojave.
Ord was a career officer who fought in the Mexican-American War, against Native tribes in California, and later became a Union general in the Civil War. Before his rise to prominence, though, he spent time in California during the 1840s and 1850s. After arriving in Monterey in 1847, Ord worked on some of the earliest surveys of California.
That position put him in charge of military affairs in California and Nevada, where he directed troop deployments in and around the Mojave to protect settlers and suppress conflicts with Native peoples. His work overlapped with the surveying of wagon roads, trails, and the need to establish military posts to protect emigrants, mail lines, and freight routes. Fort Tejon, established in 1854, and later Camp Cady along the Mojave River (1860s), were part of that broader mission. While Ord himself did not leave a long record of direct operations in the Mojave, his service in California helped shape the Army’s early presence in the desert region.
In 1863, during the Civil War, Ord briefly commanded the Department of the Pacific, headquartered in San Francisco. That position placed him in broad command of military affairs in California and Nevada, and he oversaw troop deployments in and around the Mojave, where soldiers guarded settlers and suppressed conflicts with Native peoples.
There are actually two different mountain ranges in Southern California that bear the name Ord Mountains, and the duplication stems from history, cartography, and military associations.
- The better-known Ord Mountains sit north of Lucerne Valley and southeast of Barstow, between the Stoddard Wells area and Johnson Valley. These were named for General Edward O. C. Ord, a Civil War officer who had earlier surveyed parts of California in the late 1840s. His name was applied to several places in the state, and this Mojave range was one of them.
- A second, lesser-known Ord Mountains name shows up southwest of Lucerne Valley, closer to Hesperia and Apple Valley. This separate range appears to have been named after an incident in 1849, when Lieutenant Ord and his cavalry detachment were attacked while surveying in that area. Contemporary reports described the soldiers being “surrounded and mauled” by Native Americans. Later mapmakers and local usage extended Ord’s name to those hills as well, even though they are distinct from the main Ord Mountains to the north.
So, while General Ord is not a “Mojave figure” in the sense of someone like Kit Carson, Edward Beale, or later officers tied directly to desert posts, his career intersected with the Mojave at points when the U.S. Army was extending its influence, building forts, and securing travel routes across the desert.
General Ord