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“Folks with the blood of pioneers—or of poets—running strong in their veins, will regard the task as a grand adventure. I know Los Angeles people who spent most of their weekends for months building a stone cabin on their claim. And what fun they had doing it! Two days every week they drove out and mixed mortar and hauled rocks, and stone by stone the little cabin took form. It isn’t a perfect construction job—but it is theirs. They planned it themselves and built it with their own hands—and in terms of spiritual values it is worth more than a mansion in a ritzy subdivision.”

–Desert Magazine 1944

BELOW ARE A COLLECTION of audio stories related to the jackrabbit homesteading experience. To listen to an audio segment, please click an icon below. After listening to an audio segment, return to this page by clicking on your bowswer's 'Back' button.

JOANNE ANDERSON, original jackrabbit homesteader
Joanne (Hart) Anderson’s parents are original Twentynine Palms jackrabbit homesteaders. Her father, James Raymon Hart, a discharged U.S. Navy serviceman and WWII veteran acquired the patent for his tract in 1955 through the BLM’s Small Tract Act program which gave filing preference for U.S. veterans to acquire tracts for health and rehabilitation purposes. In this audio segment Joanne shares her family’s experiences and their love of their homestead cabin which her family continues to visit to this day.

TED BINGHAM, BLM historian
Ted Bingham is a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) historian who has worked with the BLM for more than fifty years. The BLM was the federal agency charged with administrating the Small Tract Act program from 1938 to 1976. In his first two years with the BLM Ted estimates that he had classified more than 200,000 acres for the Small Tract Act program. In this audio segment Ted discusses his experiences working as a tract surveyor.

CHRIS CARRAHER, artist
Chris Carraher is a Wonder Valley artist who uses a historic homesteading cabin as her studio. In this audio segment Chris reads from her artist statement for her 2007 exhibit at the 29 Palms Art Gallery titled, The Plan: Claims of Territory in the High Desert.

Chris is also actively involved in organizing cultural events incorporating the homesteading cabins as the event’s core theme. Carraher with two other Wonder Valley artists, Scott Monteith and Andy Woods, co-directed the Wonder Valley Homestead Cabin Festival in 2008 to showcase the work of area artists and performers whose work is inspired by the abandoned shacks.

Click here to read the transcription of Carraher's presentation, Home: Finding Our Place given at the 29 Palms Historical Society Museum during the Jackrabbit Homestead Audio Tour Listening Party event on March 28, 2009.

• Listen to Chris’s track in the JRHS audio tour.

JACOB SOWERS, cultural geographer
Jacob Sowers is an assistant professor at Missouri State University’s Geography, Geology, and Planning program. Sower’s dissertation research, Symbiotic Tensions of Wonder Valley, California: The creation, maintenance, and unpredictability of an Existential Ecotone discusses the cultural geography of Wonder Valley landscape. In these three audio segments, Jacob discusses his first encounter with the Wonder Valley landscape, his concept of Ecotone and the idea of isolated proximity in the High Desert region.

Click here to read an essay of Sower's titled, Wonder Valley: Place and Paradox based on his dissertation reseach of Wonder Valley.

• Listen to Jacob’s track in the JRHS audio tour.
  

© Kim Stringfellow 2009. All rights reserved unless otherwise specified.

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