Mojave Crossing

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author's note As in all my previous books, the place names are those of actual places that existed as described at the time the story took place.

Although a writer of fiction is under no compulsion to be as exact as I have chosen to be as to locale, I regard each of my novels as, in a sense, historical. Each water hole or spring, each valley, canyon, creek or mountain, each store, gambling house, or hotel exists now or did exist at the time.

The tanks visited by Sackett after leaving Dorinda are the White Tanks, and the well he next visited was Lost Horse Well, both of which are now within the limits of Joshua National Monument. The Hidden Valley where Sackett was loaned a horse is now visited by thousands of tourists, and they enter by crawling, as he did. The Button brothers actually used the valley to hide stolen horses (nobody yet knows how the horses were taken in or out), and they were killed, sometime later, in a gun battle in San Bernardino.

The house of Greek George was located near the intersection of Fountain Avenue and King's Road, only a block off the famous Sunset Strip in what is now Hollywood.

The local round-ups, called rodeos in California, were held in an area roughly between La Cienaga and Robertson streets, give or take a few blocks.

Although California is not usually considered a western state in the "wild west" conception of the term, few states were more so. Only Texas could have had more cattle, and without doubt the greatest of all ropers, as well as some of the finest horsemen, were the early Spanish-Californian vaqueros ... roping grizzlies was a favorite sport.

By 1893 El Tejon Ranch, still one of the largest in the United States, was running more than 125,000 head of sheep and 25,000 head of cattle. Without doubt one of the greatest stock drives in western history was the movement, over uncharted trails, of 17,000 head of sheep from El Tejon Ranch to Montana in 1879, by Jose Jesus Lopez. This ranch is in the Tehachapis, only a few miles from the outskirts of Los Angeles.

No cattle baron ruled his empire with a harsher hand than did the "Big Basque"

Leonis, of Calabasas; and the gun battles between Carlisle and the Kings, or that between Jim McKinney and a sheriff's posse were the equal of the OK Corral fight or any of the famous gun battles of the West. McKinney, a notorious outlaw with a number of killings behind him, shot it out in Bakersfield with Will and Burt Tibbett and Jeff Packard ... McKinney was killed, as were Jeff Packard and Will Tibbett (the father of singer Lawrence Tibbett), Burt Tibbett killing McKinney. There was considerable testimony to the effect that Also Hulse, and perhaps another man, were also shooting at the deputies from the room where McKinney was killed.

It is an ironic fact that it was in the City of the Angels that the street called the Calle de los Negros held a record for violence and killing unequaled in the West.