Home sweet home inside Joshua Tree National Park? A look at private residences of yore

Janet Wilson | Palm Springs Desert Sun

Once upon a time, long before the hipsters descended on the Southern California desert to snap Instagrams of their rock climbs, a different kind of traveler jounced over dusty back roads to reach the same harsh, beautiful terrain.

Arthur Case worked at Los Angeles' El Rey tarpaper roofing company — "The King of All Roofings" — and his wife, Annie, was a schoolteacher. In 1953, the Alhambra couple legally bought five acres of land from Southern Pacific Railroad inside what was then the Joshua Tree National Monument and built their retreat from the city. Today, the ruins of the small compound sit tucked at the end of a sandy trail, marked only by a "Private Property" sign.

There are about 100 such "inholdings" in Joshua Tree, which became a national park in 1994. They are part of decades of little-remarked upon private property ownership in the park's storied 83-year-old history, from massive land swindles to cozy weekend getaways.

"These are the average Joes you've never heard of ... they were middle-class families who wanted a little place they could get away from the madness of the city," UC Riverside doctoral student Todd Luce said, speaking of Arthur and Annie Case and about a dozen others who managed to build homes inside Joshua Tree's boundaries.

Luce and two UC Riverside history professors have been commissioned by Joshua Tree National Park officials to prepare a resource report on private property inside the 800,000-acre preserve.

The ultimate aim is to decide which properties could be restored and which should be cleared away, the land being added back to the vast natural landscape. They also want to fill in the gaps in the park's history, including a narrative of the people who have lived there — or in a few cases, still do.

Blowing in the wind

Many of the popular national park's more famous residents and neighbors are well-established in area lore. All were drawn by the austere beauty and deep connection to nature.

Hippie musician Gram Parsons, for example, often spent time in the area. When he died in 1973, his body was "liberated" from a runway at Los Angeles International Airport by his manager, spirited to a location near Cap Rock and, per his wishes, set afire.

But other inhabitants, the bulk of them from the 1930s to the 1970s, have been a quieter presence, little chronicled. Their traces are now fading as descendants pass away and their properties succumb to scorching heat and other elements. Before they vanish, the UC Riverside researchers and Joshua Tree authorities are aiming to capture this piece of park history too.

Jason Theuer, chief of cultural resources at Joshua Tree National Park, was the one who saw a hole in the park's chronology: Everything from ancient petroglyphs to rock climbing pioneers had been documented, he realized in 2016, but the story of private property inside the preserve had not. "There's a cultural landscape there that's as important as the natural landscape," said Theuer.

To fill in the blanks, UC Riverside's vaunted public history program was awarded a $60,000 contract and will complete the report in 2020.

For three years, the team has been on a wide-ranging scavenger hunt of sorts. There are still a handful of people living in residences. They guard their identities and the locations of their inholdings fiercely: Polite letters from the researchers have yielded few responses.

But they are making headway: A retired park ranger, former caretakers for some of the homes and a longtime resident of the nearby town of the same name are starting to share stories.

Meanwhile, the historians have pored over property tax records, newspaper clippings, a series of oral histories recorded in the 1970s and other sources. Environmental historian David Biggs has compiled databases and maps, and they're beginning to piece together individual narratives.

They're also identifying themes that tie into not just the park's past, but regional, state and national customs, trends and developments.

For example, like much of the country, mobility and a bit of pocket cash created new ways of life. As dirt roads were oiled or paved with concrete for automobiles, what had been a three-day journey from Los Angeles to the monument became an afternoon's drive. Tourism was becoming a new pastime, and more people visited Joshua Tree. But it was still a tough proposition to build a home.

"It marks a shift to a different kind of extraction of value," said UC Riverside public historian Catherine Gudis. "They're not mining copper, but they're still extracting a value of peace and beauty. And that is something that comes at a price. You have to bring in your water, you have to have some means, but you also have to have some really resilient resourcefulness."

The Pinto Basin Swindle

In the late 1920s and '30s, once word got out that a national monument was going to be formed east of Yucca Valley, "there was a major land grab," said Theuer.

In many instances, the buyers were unwitting victims of a land scam by the Pinto Basin Land Co. and successor companies, said Luce, who is devoting a chapter of his report to the swindle. The company bought up large tracts, subdivided them, and used high-pressure sales tactics that sound like a modern telemarketing hustle

"They had call sheets, and they would call up and say 'you won a prize,' and send you a beautiful glossy brochure, talking about all the beautiful water under the Pinto Basin," said Luce. "Some of the savvier predators would prey on widows who had inheritances."

In reality, it would have cost millions to drill to the water below the desert rock. People who invested didn't buy a piece of paradise, but a slice of land a three-day journey away from Los Angeles that was unlivable because of the prohibitive cost of obtaining water.

Notices were placed in newspapers as far north as Sacramento warning people to beware of the slick pitches. Nearly all the parcels were eventually sold for a small fee or donated to the national monument, created in 1936 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Pinto Basin today is a beautiful, unspoiled part of the national park. One homestead exists and there are about 100 of the old, empty private parcels left.

Individuals can still buy a parcel here or elsewhere in the park on occasion. Eminent domain—when the government takes land from an unwilling seller—is rarely used on inholdings in national parks or forests. On federal lands in the West, a "willing seller only" policy usually prevails, meaning the owners can sell to the government, or anyone they choose. The government typically does not have a right of first refusal.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust and other preservation groups work with willing sellers to acquire properties inside or at the parks' boundaries and hold them until the cash-strapped park system can afford to acquire them.

Park officials don't track private land sales inside Joshua Tree's boundaries: With about 100 staff for millions of visitors annually, there are more urgent needs. But "that is one of the great parts of having a partner like the Mojave Desert Land Trust, which is constantly monitoring and tracking land sales and properties that go into default in the national parks," said Theuer. "It takes a village."

To this day, Theuer said, people pull up at an entrance or visitors' center clutching papers showing they've bought a parcel inside the park, and wanting to know how to get there. They're stunned to learn there is no road to their property, and no running water nor electric lines anywhere in the park either.

It's the buyer's responsibility in California to check what they're buying, Theuer explained. People often end up in tears, frustrated or angry once they realize what has occurred.

Theoretically, someone could build on their parcel or put up a yurt, as long as they can overcome a complicated "layer cake" of federal, state and local land policies. Often access to the parcel is the biggest hurdle: If you don't have a legal right to build a road or travel over an existing one, it is nearly impossible to get a tent—let alone building materials—onto your site. Pulling in an oversize manufactured home won't work either.

"We are certainly not going to tear down one of our entrance booths to allow this to get through," he said. "Nothing has been built inside the park in a very long time."

Park staff console dejected buyers by noting that despite Joshua Tree's surge in popularity — visits doubled between 2013 and 2018, to 3 million travelers — it is still possible to enjoy the getaway they dreamed of, just in a public setting. Yes, it's crowded, but head deeper into the park, hike for a few miles, and one can find the same splendid solitude expected from a private parcel.

The Wonderland Ranch (aka the Bagley Place)

Some folks defied the odds and did manage to build properties inside the park from the 1930s to the 1970s. Former miner Bill Keys and about a dozen others successfully "proved up" sites under the old Homestead Act, Luce said, grandfathered in after the monument was created. Keys amassed adjoining properties from everyone he could — even his mother-in-law — to build the Desert Queen Ranch.

The remains of Keys' ranch still stand, as do the remnants of the home of L.A. sheriff's deputy Worth Bagley. The deputy and the miner did not have a neighborly relationship, and one day in 1943, Bagley lay in wait for Keys and tried to shoot him dead, possibly after Keys let his cattle wander across the other man's freshly laid adobe foundation. But it was Bagley who died after his bullet missed the mark and Keys shot him dead.

The next year, an artist named Signe Ohlson and her husband, Charles, bought the spread and within a few years had turned it into a 2,400 square-foot-home that Luce said "was probably the envy" of monument homesteaders. It was painted bright pink, and was called the Wonderland Ranch, the Pink House or Uncle Willie’s Health Food Store. Luce called that "a moniker without clear provenance," though Ohlson did eventually open a health food store in Twentynine Palms.

The couple had plumbing, running water and probably a garage. But while the house lasted, the marriage did not. After divorcing, Signe Ohlson stayed in the house for years tending goats, then finally moved to town after selling the home to the park. Caretakers in the home, likely using drugs and alcohol, burned it down. Today one bright wall, the fireplace, parts of the foundation and a few rusty pipes remain.

Luce visited on a recent golden afternoon. Standing inside what was probably the living room, he exclaimed, "This place was huge!"

Lost Horse Ranch and Whispering Pines

The UC Riverside historians' project has led them down the trail of other properties. The Lost Horse Ranch was owned by Charles Stokes, a successful Los Angeles patent attorney who fought to abolish Joshua Tree National Monument, bring back mining and perhaps build a resort on the 450-acre swath he bought from Southern Pacific Railroad.

In the end, Stokes sold the ranch to the federal government he despised for $150,000 in 1957 —a hefty sum back then that would be about $1.4 million in 2019 dollars.Today it's a ranger station used by search and rescue teams and park administrators.

Sam Maloof, the renowned Redlands furniture maker, had a compound of cabins known as Whispering Pines in another corner of the park, said Gudis. She first heard about it from one of his longtime apprentices, who recalled going to the spot, sheltered by large pinons.

But when the researchers cross-referenced his information with the master property list and visited the site, there were no trees to be seen. Slowly, through interviews, Gudis and Luce learned of a series of fires that had ravaged both the trees and the homes, which likely contained fine examples of Maloof's woodworking.

Mom-and-pops

In addition to the more elaborate properties, there were ordinary people's getaways. After World War II, the Cases and a half-dozen other families built modest homes on their plots, Luce said. They carried in wood, roofing, bed springs, window panes and everything else they needed. The 10 freeway didn't open until 1965, but Highway 99 between San Bernardino and Indio had been paved, as was Highway 62 into Morongo Valley.

Unlike the miners' cabins or livestock ranches, these vacation homes had big porches, outdoor patios and other amenities better suited to the new phase of life in the monument: tourism and relaxation. In back of the Case compound, a barbecue was fitted into a giant boulder overhang with a natural chimney opening.

Today, the Case property is a ramshackle jumble. Theuer warns people to stay away because the structures contain asbestos and hantavirus, a potentially deadly flu-like illness. If anyone who trespasses there is harmed, park staff have orders from superiors in Washington, D.C., to immediately raze the structures. But he's eagerly awaiting the final determination on the site's historic value in UC Riverside's report.

Assuming it's deemed worthy of preservation, which is likely, the couple's hideaway will be rebuilt and transformed into an educational and research center. Annie Case, the schoolteacher, would likely approve.