Mojave Desert History

The Early Harvey House and Casa del Desierto

Before the Casa del Desierto, Barstow featured a wooden railroad depot, restaurant, and hotel serving Santa Fe passengers. Authoritative historical accounts generally date this earlier complex to 1885. Later, Fred Harvey operated the railroad’s hotel and dining facilities at Barstow, preparing the foundation for the site’s future development.

A turning point occurred in 1908: a fire destroyed the wooden depot-hotel. By then, Barstow had grown to be more than just a stop; as an important railroad division point, it needed more than another temporary replacement. The Santa Fe Railway responded by commissioning a much larger and more permanent structure.

In 1911, builders opened the Casa del Desierto, combining a railroad station, a Harvey House restaurant, a hotel, and a community gathering place. The reinforced construction, broad arcades, towers, tile roofs, and thick walls sharply departed from the wooden building it replaced.

While the above sequence is well documented, several local histories report additional depot fires and reconstructions preceding the construction of the Casa del Desierto. Although this account appears plausible, no one has yet verified the chronology using primary-source documentation.

Regional and Local Knowledge

Regional and local knowledge are not competitors—they are nested and interdependent.

To better understand this relationship, think of it as a hierarchy.

Local knowledge answers questions such as:

Who lived here?
Where was the spring?
Which road did they use?
What did people call this place?

In essence, local knowledge is intimate, detailed, and place-specific.

For example, someone in Lucerne Valley might know:

which ranch occupied a particular parcel,
where an old school stood,
How Rabbit Springs changed over time,
who built a specific road,
or where grinding slicks are found.

That knowledge may never have been published.

Regional knowledge asks a different question:

“How does Lucerne Valley fit into the Mojave Desert?”

It connects the local story to larger patterns.

For example:

Lucerne Valley was not simply a farming community.

Regional knowledge recognizes that it was:

part of the traditional homeland of the Serrano and Vanyume,
connected to the San Bernardino Mountains through seasonal travel,
influenced by nearby mining districts,
shaped by the Mojave River watershed,
linked to Cajon Pass and later highways,
affected by regional groundwater use,
and economically tied to Victor Valley and beyond.

Ultimately, the regional perspective explains why Lucerne Valley developed as it did.

Importantly, the relationship between local and regional knowledge works in both directions.

Local knowledge builds regional knowledge.

Imagine a thousand communities, springs, mines, ranches, and canyons.

Each contributes a piece of the puzzle.

Individual site       ↓Local history       ↓Community history       ↓Regional history       ↓Understanding the Mojave Desert

At the same time, regional knowledge also strengthens local knowledge.

Suppose someone finds an old wagon road near Newberry Springs.

A local historian can describe the road.

A regional historian may recognize it as:

part of the Mojave Road,
a branch of the Old Spanish Trail,
a military supply route,
a mining freight road,
or an early automobile route.

Without the regional context, the road is just an old road.

With the regional context, it becomes part of a much larger story.

This is why regional historians often act as connectors. They recognize that events separated by hundreds of miles are actually related.

For example:

A discovery in Holcomb Valley affects freight traffic through Cajon Pass.
That increases travel through Victor Valley.
This leads to the creation of new stations along the Mojave River.
This eventually influences settlement at Barstow.
Which changes transportation across the entire desert.

A local historian may document one link.

A regional historian explains the chain.

I think this is where your work naturally fits.

For instance, you’ve written local histories of places like Hesperia, Lucerne Valley, Newberry Springs, Ridgecrest, and Summit Valley. Yet your websites consistently connect those places to broader themes: Indigenous travel networks, the Mojave River, geology, mining booms, transportation corridors, military history, ecology, and settlement.

You’re not replacing local history; rather, you’re integrating it into the larger history of the Mojave Desert.

A useful way to express the relationship is:

Local knowledge tells us what makes a place unique. Regional knowledge explains why that place matters.

Neither is complete alone. Local knowledge gives detail; regional knowledge gives context. Together, they create a fuller understanding of the place and its larger landscape.

necessary gaps between the two

That’s an insightful question. There are necessary gaps between local and regional knowledge. If there weren’t, the two would simply be the same thing at different scales.

Those gaps are actually where much of the work of a regional historian takes place.

Some examples:

1. Scale

A local historian can know nearly everything about one town or valley.

A regional historian cannot know every detail of every community. Instead, they identify the details that matter beyond the local setting.

For example, a Lucerne Valley historian may know every schoolteacher, store owner, and election. A regional historian asks, “How did Lucerne Valley contribute to the development of the Mojave Desert?”

Some local details remain local—and that’s appropriate.

2. Perspective

Local knowledge often looks inward.

Regional knowledge looks outward.

Local:

“This spring supplied our community.”

Regional:

“This spring was one stop in a chain of water sources connecting the Colorado River to the San Gabriel Mountains.”

Both are true, but they answer different questions.

3. Completeness

No regional work can contain every local story.

If it tried, it would become an encyclopedia measured in hundreds of volumes.

Instead, regional knowledge abstracts.

It asks:

What is representative?
What changed the region?
What illustrates larger processes?

Many local details remain intentionally omitted because they do not change the regional picture.

4. Expertise

Local historians often possess knowledge unavailable anywhere else.

Regional historians rely upon them.

Conversely, local historians sometimes don’t see how their own community fits into larger patterns.

The relationship is complementary.

5. Interpretation

This is perhaps the largest gap.

Facts alone don’t create regional knowledge.

Someone must recognize relationships.

For example:

A local historian writes:

wagon road
spring
ranch
mining camp

A regional historian recognizes:

transportation corridor
watershed
settlement pattern
economic network

The same facts become a different understanding.

For your own work, I think there is another gap.

You often bridge disciplines.

A page about a canyon isn’t only about the canyon.

It’s also about:

its geology,
Native use,
exploration,
mining,
wildlife,
transportation,
photography,
and modern recreation.

That interdisciplinary connection is difficult to produce because few people work across all of those fields.

I sometimes think of it this way:

Facts   ↓Local knowledge   ↓Regional knowledge   ↓Regional understanding

Most people stop at facts.

Many historians stop at local knowledge.

Fewer people synthesize regional knowledge.

The rarest step is regional understanding—recognizing the forces that have shaped an entire landscape over centuries.

That’s where the enduring value of a regional reference lies. It doesn’t just preserve information; it helps readers see patterns that are invisible when viewed in isolation.

Mojave Desert History:

Who Is in Charge?

No single government, tribe, agency, or company controls the Mojave Desert. That is the first rule for understanding its history. The Mojave is not one jurisdiction. It is an area with many overlapping authorities. It is older than the borders now drawn. It is still managed piece by piece: by federal land agencies, tribal nations, state governments, county supervisors, city councils, military commands, water districts, railroads, utilities, conservation laws, mining claims, private property, and custom.

Before American maps and agencies, Native peoples held authority over the region. Their homelands, trails, springs, food-gathering areas, trade routes, and river crossings shaped the land. This was not “ownership” in the later courthouse sense; instead, it meant use, memory, obligation, defense, kinship, and sacred geography. The Mojave people controlled key parts of the Colorado River. Paiute, Chemehuevi, Serrano, Cahuilla, Kawaiisu, Timbisha Shoshone, and others were tied to desert and mountain margins. Authority followed water, trails, seasonal movement, and social ties.

Spanish and Mexican authority followed, coming lightly and unevenly. The Mojave was crossed, described, feared, and sometimes claimed. It was not closely governed. Missions, ranchos, military parties, and traders affected the edges and corridors more than the interior. The desert was difficult to occupy in the usual colonial way. Water was scarce. Distances were great. Native people still controlled much of the practical geography.

After the United States took California and the Southwest, authority became more formal but not necessarily more complete. Surveyors, soldiers, miners, freighters, railroad companies, and county officials imposed new systems of control. Military posts guarded roads and river crossings. Mining districts drafted local rules before the full government arrived. Stage and wagon roads made certain corridors important. Counties claimed jurisdiction, but their reach was often thin.

The arrival of the railroad changed the balance of power. The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, later tied to the Santa Fe system, crossed the Mojave. Authority gathered around depots, water stops, sidings, land grants, and townsites. Places like Daggett, Barstow, Needles, Kelso, and Mojave developed. Transportation created order in a land that had previously resisted centralized control. The railroad did not govern the whole desert. However, it controlled movement, freight, settlement patterns, and economic opportunity.

Mining created another layer. Silver, gold, borax, copper, iron, salt, and other minerals brought camps, claims, mills, roads, and speculation. In many districts, authority came from miners’ meetings, claim notices, local custom, and whoever could pay for extraction and hauling. Over time, state and federal law provided the legal framework. On the ground, the desert was ruled by remoteness, money, water, and endurance.

Homesteading added another layer to authority. The government encouraged settlement through land laws. Much of the Mojave, however, was marginal for farming. Some settlers proved up claims. Some built cabins. Some failed. Some left behind the jackrabbit homestead landscape. Authority here was paper-based: legal descriptions, patents, assessment rolls, roads, school districts, and county maps. But the land itself often had the final word.

In the 20th century, the federal government became the main land authority. National parks, military bases, grazing districts, wildlife refuges, reclamation projects, and later BLM management made much of the Mojave public land. World War II and the Cold War expanded the military presence. Fort Irwin, China Lake, Edwards Air Force Base, Marine Corps bases, and training ranges made the desert a national defense site.

At the same time, water and power authorities became decisive. As a result, projects like the Hoover Dam, the Colorado River system, aqueducts, transmission lines, pipelines, and later solar and wind initiatives connected the Mojave to cities across the Southwest. In this phase, the desert was governed by both land ownership and infrastructure.

Later, the conservation era changed the question of authority again. Laws and designations like the 1964 Wilderness Act, the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the California Desert Conservation Area, and the 1994 California Desert Protection Act redefined much of the Mojave as habitat, wilderness, cultural landscape, and public trust. Groups such as the National Park Service, BLM, Fish and Wildlife, state agencies, county governments, tribes, miners, ranchers, off-road users, utilities, conservation groups, and local residents all joined the debate.

Today, much of the California desert is managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Other major areas are under the National Park Service, such as Mojave National Preserve, Joshua Tree National Park, and Death Valley National Park. The military is also a major landholder and decision-maker. Tribal authority is increasingly recognized through consultation, co-stewardship, and co-management, though this is not always done equally or adequately. Counties regulate land use in private and unincorporated areas. Cities govern their own townsites. Water districts, utilities, mining companies, conservation groups, and private owners all hold some authority.

Also, who is in charge?

The best answer is: it depends on where you are, what resource is at issue, and what kind of authority you mean. A ranger can control a campground. A county may control the zoning. A sheriff can enforce local law. The BLM can manage grazing, recreation, mining access, or conservation on public land. The Park Service may regulate activity within a preserve or park. A tribe may exercise cultural, historical, legal, and, sometimes, land-management authority. The military can close an entire landscape. A water district can decide the fate of an aquifer. A railway or utility may control a corridor. A private owner may hold title to a desert square surrounded by public land.

That is the Mojave’s pattern: not centralized command, but layered jurisdiction. The desert has always been negotiated valley by valley, spring by spring, road by road. Its history is people trying to cross it, use it, protect it, extract from it, defend it, name it, and claim it—but never mastering it. Whoever controlled water, movement, maps, law, minerals, military access, or infrastructure controlled part of the desert. But no one controlled it all. The Mojave is best seen not as a single chain of command, but as a contest between landform, use, law, memory, and power.

The Borax Machine

Borate, Marion, and Daggett are best understood not as separate curiosities, but as three parts of one late nineteenth-century borax machine. Borate was mined in the Calico district. Marion was the crushing and calcining plant that handled treatment and transfer. Daggett was the rail junction and shipping outlet where desert production met the wider market. That is why the formal railroad name remained the Borate and Daggett Railroad even though Marion stood near the operational center of the system. The California historic record identifies Marion as a Pacific Coast Borax crushing and calcinating plant established in 1898, while another historic registration summary describes the Borate and Daggett line as spanning about 11 miles, narrow gauge from Borate to Marion and standard gauge beyond.

The system grew out of a transport problem. Once Francis Marion Smith shifted attention from the older Death Valley borax works to the richer colemanite deposits near Borate, ore had to be moved efficiently across difficult ground to a railroad outlet. Cindy Baker’s history of Daggett says Smith moved his operations from Harmony Borax Works to Daggett, opened mining at Borate, used twenty-mule teams to haul borax to the processing works at Daggett, and then replaced the mule haul with the Borate and Daggett Railroad. The same source describes Daggett during the borax years as a hub of shipping and transfer activity.

There is a small dating tension in the surviving sources, and it is worth keeping rather than smoothing over. Baker places the railroad in 1896, while the California Historical Record lists the Marion plant as built in 1898. The safest reading is that the Borate-Marion-Daggett rail and processing system took shape in the late 1890s, with the railroad and plant representing one integrated industrial build-out rather than three disconnected events. In historical writing, that is the cleaner way to respect both citations without forcing a false precision.

What makes the system important in Mojave terms is that it marks a transition from wagon-borax to rail-borax. The older heroic image of desert haulage did not disappear by legend alone; it was displaced by a tighter industrial corridor in which mine, mill, and junction were coordinated. Borate became the country’s chief producer of borax and boracic acid from 1890 to 1907, according to the Death Valley historic resource study, but the district was never the end of the story. As Smith’s attention turned toward the Lila C and the Tonopah and Tidewater reached Death Valley Junction in 1907, Borate was abandoned, and its equipment moved on.

Seen this way, Borate, Marion, and Daggett form a hinge point in Mojave industrial history. Borate supplied the ore, Marion gave the system its processing heart, and Daggett connected the entire enterprise to the transcontinental freight world. The line was short, but its historical value is larger than its mileage because it shows exactly how the Mojave’s extractive economy moved from freighting tradition into a coordinated rail industry.

Daggett

Uneasy History

Bill Mann’s books occupy an uneasy place in Mojave Desert history. They are valued by many readers because they preserve a kind of field knowledge that was once passed from explorer to explorer, prospector to prospector, and local historian to local historian. His guidebooks were published by the Mojave River Valley Museum, and the series was built around little-known desert places in the Mojave, the Calicos, Saline Valley, Lucerne Valley, and Big Bear regions. Museum listings and booksellers describe the books as guides to “interesting and mysterious” sites, with coverage of remote backcountry places and, in some editions or descriptions, GPS coordinates and vehicle requirements.

That is also where the controversy begins.

The issue is not that Bill Mann became the center of a single famous scandal. The controversy is structural. His books belong to a long-running desert argument over whether publishing directions to obscure places is a form of preservation or exposure. When guidebooks identify fragile ruins, mining camps, rock formations, or little-known historic sites, they can preserve memory and broaden public knowledge. At the same time, they can increase traffic to places that had previously been protected by distance, obscurity, or the simple difficulty of finding them. The books themselves were marketed around places that “few people know about,” which makes that tension especially clear.

In the older field-guide era, that risk was partially limited by friction. A reader still had to acquire the book, interpret the directions, read the landscape, and navigate difficult terrain. Printed guidebooks did not behave like digital information does today. They spread more slowly, required more effort, and usually reached a narrower audience. In that older setting, a desert guide could reveal a place without instantly turning it into a widely circulated waypoint. That does not mean there was no danger, only that the rate and scale of disclosure were different. This is why Mann’s books can be understood as part of a pre-digital field-guide tradition rather than as modern mass-access publishing. The surviving descriptions of the series consistently frame them as backcountry exploration guides rooted in firsthand desert travel.

A second source of controversy is methodological. Mann’s books are useful, but they are not usually treated as academic works. Reviews and summaries describe them as broad, eclectic field guides covering mining ruins, homesteads, curiosities, scenic areas, and oddities across the desert. That kind of book can be rich in leads, local knowledge, and exploratory value, but it does not carry the same authority as a tightly sourced historical monograph or archaeological report. The result is that researchers may respect the books as guide-layer material while still feeling the need to verify individual claims, route logic, or site identifications against other records.

So the real controversy around Bill Mann’s books is best described in three parts. First, they disclose obscure places. Second, some of those places may be fragile. Third, the books sit in a gray area between field exploration, local history, and public site-sharing. For readers who value openness, these books are generous and important. For readers concerned with site protection, that same quality can seem careless or outdated. Both reactions come from the same fact: the books were designed to help people find places that were not widely known.

In that sense, the controversy is larger than Bill Mann himself. His books are evidence of a transition in desert culture. They come from a period when local knowledge was beginning to move from oral tradition and private notes into wider print circulation. Today, in a digital environment, that same kind of site-sharing raises sharper ethical questions because information can be copied, mapped, reposted, and amplified far beyond the original context. What once functioned as a field guide can now operate like a distribution system. That is why Mann’s books remain historically valuable, but also why modern public-facing desert projects often handle this kind of source material with more caution than earlier guide writers did.

For Mojave work today, the fairest reading is this: Bill Mann’s books matter because they preserved a layer of desert knowledge that might otherwise have been lost. The controversy is that preserving such knowledge in public form can also place vulnerable sites at risk. That tension, more than any personal scandal, is what defines the debate around his books.

Lucerne Valley History

***Range One East* and *Raising the Dust***

The early history of Lucerne Valley has been preserved in large part through two closely related books: Range One East and Raising the Dust. Together, these works provide an important record of desert homesteading, agriculture, and daily life during the early settlement period of the Victor Valley region.

Lucerne Valley occupies a high desert basin north of the Mojave River and at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the area was still largely an undeveloped desert, visited mainly by ranchers, prospectors, and travelers moving along routes between the Mojave Desert and the mountain communities. Permanent settlement increased during the homestead era, when families began attempting agriculture in the basin despite its arid conditions.

A central figure in this early history was F. J. Gobar, who settled in the Rabbit Springs area. In 1912, he gave the valley its modern name, “Lucerne Valley,” inspired by lucerne—another name for alfalfa—which he believed could be cultivated successfully there. (Swarthout History – CA, n.d.) The Gobar family experimented with crops and water development, helping demonstrate that farming could be attempted in the valley if irrigation wells were developed. (California – Cult Resources Mojave Western, 1978)

Much of this early period is described in Range One East, written by Virginia C. Hemphill-Gobar and published in 1972. (Hemphill-Gobar, 1972) The book documents the lives of settlers who attempted to build farms and ranches in Lucerne Valley during the early twentieth century. Drawing on family records, oral histories, and local recollections, Hemphill-Gobar describes the challenges of desert homesteading—scarce water, isolation, and the difficulty of establishing a reliable agricultural base in an arid landscape.

The title of the book refers to the Public Land Survey System designation “Range One East,” a six-mile-wide column of survey townships east of the San Bernardino Meridian. (Public Land Survey System, 2024) Much of the land in Lucerne Valley was described using the township-and-range system, and Hemphill-Gobar used that framework to organize the valley’s geography and the locations of early homesteads.

While Range One East presents a broader settlement history, the companion work Raising the Dust provides a more personal perspective. The book records the recollections of Julian Smith Gobar, who grew up in the region during the early years of settlement. His stories describe daily life in the Mojave Desert—working cattle, farming experiments, desert travel, and the colorful characters who populated the small communities scattered across the high desert.

Together, the two books complement each other. Range One East documents the development of the community and settlers’ efforts to establish farms and ranches in Lucerne Valley. Raising the Dust, by contrast, captures the personal experiences of those who lived through that period, preserving memories of the hardships, humor, and independence that characterized desert life.

Although neither work was written as an academic study, both have become valuable historical sources. They preserve details about early settlement, agriculture, and everyday life that are often absent from official records. Cultural resource studies, local historians, and researchers examining the development of Lucerne Valley frequently cite these books because they document firsthand accounts of the region’s formative years.

Through the combined efforts of Virginia C. Hemphill-Gobar and Julian Smith Gobar, the early history of Lucerne Valley—its homesteads, ranches, and pioneering families—was preserved for later generations. Their books remain an important window into the era when settlers first attempted to transform a remote Mojave Desert basin into a farming community.

A central figure in this early history was F. J. Gobar, who settled in the Rabbit Springs area. In 1912, he gave the valley its modern name, “Lucerne Valley,” inspired by lucerne—another name for alfalfa—which he believed could be cultivated successfully there. The Gobar family experimented with crops and water development, helping demonstrate that farming could be attempted in the valley if irrigation wells were developed.

Much of this early period is described in Range One East, written by Virginia C. Hemphill-Gobar and published in 1972. The book documents the lives of settlers who attempted to build farms and ranches in Lucerne Valley during the early twentieth century. Drawing on family records, oral histories, and local recollections, Hemphill-Gobar describes the challenges of desert homesteading—scarce water, isolation, and the difficulty of establishing reliable agriculture in an arid landscape.

The title of the book refers to the Public Land Survey System designation “Range One East,” a six-mile-wide column of survey townships east of the San Bernardino Meridian. Much of the land in Lucerne Valley was described using the township-and-range system, and Hemphill-Gobar used that framework to organize the valley’s geography and the locations of early homesteads.

Together, the two books complement each other. Range One East documents the development of the community and settlers’ efforts to establish farms and ranches in Lucerne Valley. Raising the Dust, by contrast, captures the personal experiences of those who lived through that period, preserving memories of the hardships, humor, and independence that characterized desert life.

Although neither work was written as an academic study, both have become valuable historical sources. They preserve details about early settlement, agriculture, and everyday life that are often absent from official records. Cultural-resource studies, local historians, and researchers examining the development of Lucerne Valley frequently cite these books because they record firsthand knowledge of the region’s formative years.

Needle’s Eye

Inyo Canyon, Death Valley National Park

The Needle’s Eye is a narrow rock portal in the upper section of Inyo Canyon on the west side of the Funeral Mountains. It sits in a remote tributary draining toward the lower end of Death Valley. The feature is a natural window carved into steep canyon walls where erosion exploited weaker zones in the bedrock, leaving a tight, vertical opening that frames the sky from the canyon floor. The canyon itself is a classic debris-cut gash through Paleozoic formations associated with the Inyo Mountains and the Cottonwood block uplift.

Travel to the Needle’s Eye follows old miner and prospector routes up Inyo Canyon toward workings scattered along the western flank of the range. The canyon exhibits evidence of washouts, slumping, and boulder chutes, which were produced by cloudbursts and winter runoff. Side slopes exhibit talus fans and dryfalls that mark intervals of rapid erosion. The rock types shift from limestone and dolomite to more resistant quartzites in the upper reaches, with the Needle’s Eye forming at a contact of contrasting hardness.

Human activity in Inyo Canyon dates back to early prospecting waves in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Small diggings, adits, and tent camps once dotted the margins of the canyon. Miners used the route as an access path while searching for lead, silver, and other minerals typical of the Cottonwood and Inyo belts. No permanent settlement survived the lack of water, rugged terrain, and unreliable ore bodies. Occasional surveyors and desert wanderers later described the canyon’s narrow rock door as a striking landmark.

The Needle’s Eye fits naturally into the region’s long tradition of desert travel through constrained bedrock points. It shares similar features with those found elsewhere in the Mojave, where travelers have passed through tight clefts or rock windows while following natural drainages. The spot also marks a transition between lower alluvial slopes and the more rugged upper canyon, giving it prominence on foot routes. Today, it offers a quiet reminder of past use and the steady work of water and gravity shaping the canyon.

References

Burchfiel, B. C., and Davis, G. A. 1981. Mojave Desert and Inyo Mountains tectonic studies. Geological Society of America Bulletin.
Hunt, C. B. 1975. Death Valley: Geology, Ecology, Archaeology. University of California Press.
McAllister, J. F. 1956. Geology of the Furnace Creek Quadrangle, Death Valley, California. USGS Professional Paper 354.
Nolan, T. B. 1928. Geology of the Inyo Range and the White Mountains. University of Nevada Bulletin.
Storz, J. 1970s. Desert Magazine articles on Death Valley side canyons and miner routes.
Wright, L. A., et al. 1974. Geology of the Death Valley region. California Division of Mines and Geology Special Report series.
USGS. 1988. Geologic Map of the Death Valley Region, California and Nevada. Miscellaneous Investigations Map I-1933.
NPS. Death Valley National Park Backcountry and Wilderness Access Guides (Inyo Canyon section).
NPS. 1994–present. Death Valley National Park administrative files on backcountry routes and cultural resource surveys.
Stovall, H. 1930s–1940s. Notes of prospecting and travel in the Inyo and Cottonwood Mountains (archival field notebooks cited in regional mining histories).

Angel Unknown

The roadside praying angel is one of those quiet desert mysteries that blend faith, memory, and human expression. It is a small stone carving, rough and straightforward, standing alone near the edge of a road in the Mojave National Preserve. Travelers who find it often notice the small offerings placed at its base—necklaces, coins, stones, or bits of ribbon—tokens left by strangers moved by something they may not fully understand. There are no signs, no plaques, and no explanation for why it is there, only the silent presence of the angel itself.

Its origins are unknown, but that is part of its power. In the desert, where life feels fragile and time seems endless, people have long left markers of their passing. The angel may be a memorial to someone who died nearby, perhaps in an accident along the road. It might also be an act of devotion, a gesture of gratitude, or protection placed by a traveler who felt the desert’s vastness and wanted to acknowledge it. Some might even see it as a roadside shrine, a spot where faith touches the landscape without ceremony or permission.

Whatever its story, the praying angel fits into a long tradition of folk memorials scattered across the Mojave. These handmade symbols are not official monuments or park features; they are personal expressions, born out of loss, love, or awe. They stand where official history ends and personal meaning begins. Each one reminds us that people still reach for the sacred, even in the loneliest places. The stone angel is less a destination than a moment of reflection—a quiet sign that someone cared enough to mark the desert with prayer.

Rare Earths

Mountain Pass, California, is an unincorporated community in San Bernardino County near the Nevada border along Interstate 15. It lies on the south flank of the Clark Mountain Range at about 4,730 feet in elevation. Before its transformation into a rare earth mining hub, Mountain Pass was part of a high desert rangeland used for cattle grazing and seasonal travel.

In the late 1800s, ranchers from Ivanpah and the Mojave River region grazed cattle along the area’s sparse grasslands and natural springs. By the early 1900s, a few homesteads, corrals, and line camps appeared, but permanent settlement was limited due to aridity and isolation. The nearest centers of activity were Cima and Ivanpah, tied to the Union Pacific line.

During the 1920s and 1930s, open-range ranching declined as highway construction and mineral exploration expanded. U.S. Highway 91, built through Mountain Pass in the 1930s, connected Barstow and Las Vegas and reshaped movement across the desert. Prospectors began testing local outcrops for copper, fluorspar, and uranium.

In 1949, while searching for uranium, geologists discovered bastnasite—a mineral rich in rare earth elements. By 1952, Mountain Pass Mine was in production, marking the shift from ranching to mineral extraction. The mine’s bastnasite ore, containing about 7% rare-earth oxides, proved exceptionally rich. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Mountain Pass supplied most of the world’s rare earth elements, which are critical for electronics and defense.

Environmental concerns and global competition, particularly from China, led to a decline in the 1990s. A series of wastewater pipeline spills and stricter regulations led to the closure in 2002. Molycorp reopened the site in 2010 but went bankrupt in 2015. MP Materials acquired it in 2017 and restarted production, now emphasizing on-site recycling and domestic refining. Mountain Pass currently produces 10–15 percent of global rare earth supply and remains the only major U.S. operation of its kind.

Timeline:

Late 1800s – Early cattle grazing begins between the Clark and Mescal Ranges.
1890s–1910s – Small ranchers and homesteaders establish corrals and wells near Cima and Ivanpah.
1920s – Ranching continues; U.S. Highway 91 construction increases access.
1930s–1940s – Grazing declines; mineral prospecting grows.
1949 – Bastnasite discovered while prospecting for uranium.
1952 – Mountain Pass Mine begins rare earth production.
1960s–1980s – Peak years; mine supplies most of the world’s rare earth elements.
1980s–1990s – Environmental issues and foreign competition led to a decline.
2002 – Mine ceases operations.
2010 – Molycorp reopens the mine.
2015 – Molycorp declares bankruptcy.
2017 – MP Materials resumes production.
2020s – Expansion of domestic processing and magnet manufacturing.

Mountain Pass stands as a symbol of changing desert economies—from open-range cattle country to strategic mineral industry—each era leaving its own traces: windmills, corrals, and open pits scattered across the Mojave’s high desert plain.

Other Roads

Mormon Hogback, Sanford Pass

In the early 1850s, long wagon trains of Mormon pioneers crept down from the high desert into the mouth of Cajon Pass, hoping to reach the fertile San Bernardino Valley beyond. They soon found themselves at a natural choke point – a narrow ravine called Coyote Canyon, now known as Crowder Canyon – where sheer rock walls and a jumbled creek bed made passage nearly impossible. The first wagons through had to be disassembled: wheels removed and rolled by hand, cargo shifted onto a mule’s back, and wagon beds dragged piece by piece over the worst boulders. Early travelers remembered this grueling process, and the Mormon settlers who followed in 1851 likely endured the same ordeal to get their covered wagons through the upper Cajon Pass.

But adversity often sparks ingenuity. Not long after, some enterprising pioneers scouted a detour a few miles to the west of the treacherous canyon. There, a high spine of land offered a way around the worst narrows. This route ran along a slender ridge – a true hogback that rose above the canyon – and though it added a few extra miles, it spared travelers from having to lug their wagons through Coyote Canyon’s rock-strewn gauntlet. The Mormon colonists heading to Southern California in those years eagerly embraced this alternate path. In fact, by the early 1850s, they had established a wagon trail atop that ridge, which would later be known as the Mormon Hogback in honor of the many Latter-day Saint families who had blazed it.

In 1850, a veteran freighter named William T. B. Sanford took it upon himself to hack a rough wagon road along this western Cajon route. Sanford’s road departed the old Spanish Trail near present-day Victorville, climbed onto the flanks of Baldy Mesa, and then edged down through the West Cajon Valley, eventually descending toward a cluster of towering sandstone outcrops. Those pale rocks marked a kind of gateway at the foot of the hogback trail. They would later be known as the Mormon Rocks – named for the Mormon pioneers who camped beneath them after braving the ridge and finally emerging into the open Cajon wash.

Traveling the Mormon Hogback was still a heart-pounding adventure. The ridge was narrow and the drop-offs unforgiving; in places, the trail was scarcely wider than a wagon itself. The ascent to the summit was so steep that teams often had to “double up,” hitching multiple teams of oxen or mules to a single wagon. One contemporary account describes wagons needing as many as 32 mules in harness to tug a heavy load up the incline. On the way back down, drivers would lock their wagon wheels and skid the first several yards, the wooden rims dragging like sleds to slow the descent. The air filled with the shouts of teamsters and the groan of brake chains as each wagon inched along the hogback’s crest. It was perilous, yes, but for a time, this high road was the only practical way for settlers and supply wagons to get through Cajon Pass intact.

Despite these dangers, the ridge route quickly became the preferred wagon road. Sanford and others made further upgrades over the years. In 1855, workers even cut into the mountainside to create a new alignment about a mile and a half west of the original track. This was known as the Sanford Cutoff, which bypassed the most challenging section of the hogback. The grades were gentler than before, though still outrageously steep – some stretches tilted at a 30% incline, straining both beast and brake. Nevertheless, from the mid-1850s up until 1861, virtually every wagon train bound to or from Southern California chose to tackle the Mormon Hogback via Sanford’s route rather than risk the old rocky canyon. For the Mormon settlers in particular, this ridge road was a vital lifeline, allowing them to bring wagons loaded with families, lumber, and provisions into their new settlements without having to unload and reassemble everything at Cajon Pass.

The reign of the Mormon Hogback came to an end in the 1860s. In 1861, a local pioneer named John Brown Sr. partnered with two associates to finally tame the original canyon route itself. Capitalizing on a surge of travelers during a nearby gold rush, Brown’s company widened and improved the old trail through Crowder (Coyote) Canyon, smoothing out the worst boulders and drop-offs. They built a proper wagon road right through Cajon Pass’s eastern narrows and set up toll gates to collect fees from anyone using this new shortcut. Travelers gladly paid a few dollars rather than face the old hogback or haul their wagons apart again. With the opening of John Brown’s toll road – shorter and far less harrowing – the Mormon Hogback’s importance swiftly faded. The new turnpike through the canyon became the main gateway between the desert and the coast. Before long, even stagecoaches and mail wagons were rumbling through Crowder Canyon instead of teetering along the ridge.

Although the wagon ruts along the Mormon Hogback have long since faded into the brush, its legacy remains etched in the landscape and lore of Cajon Pass. The very name “Mormon Rocks” for those sandstone sentinels is a reminder of the emigrants who passed that way in the 1850s. Modern highways and railroads now carry traffic through Cajon Pass, roughly tracing the corridors that pioneers like the Mormons and John Brown once opened up. In fact, the historic Mormon wagon trail itself wound through the same valley of curious rock formations that visitors see today. Next time you drive north from San Bernardino and glimpse the weathered cliffs and crags of Cajon Pass, imagine a line of canvas-topped wagons winding down a dusty mountain ridge. That was the Mormon Hogback – a vital, if temporary, wagon road born of necessity and determination, now a nearly forgotten chapter of the westward migration to Southern California.

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