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Edna Brush Perkins. The White Heart of Mojave: An Adventure with the Outdoors of the Desert
The White Heart of Mojave: An Adventure with the Outdoors of the Desert
Table of Contents
ILLUSTRATIONS
I The Feel of the Outdoors
II How We Found Mojave
III The White Heart
IV The Outfit
V Entering Death Valley
VI The Strangest Farm in the World
VII The Burning Sands
VIII The Dry Camp
IX The Mountain Spring
X The High White Peaks
XI Snowstorm and Sandstorm
XII The End of the Adventure
APPENDIX
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Edna Brush Perkins
Published by Good Press, 2019
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Randsburg, Atolia and Johannesburg are mining towns close together about forty miles north of Barstow. The road there was no such highway as we had been traveling upon; often it was only two ruts among the sagebrush, but it was well enough marked to follow easily. Great sloping mesas spread for miles on either side of the track, rising to rocky crowns. All the big, open, gradually ascending sweeps are called mesas on the Mojave, though they are in no sense table-lands like the true mesas of New Mexico and Arizona. The groves of Joshua palms had disappeared; we were lower down now where only greasewood and sagebrush grew. The unscientific like us, who accept the word "mesa," lump together all the varieties of low prickly brush as sagebrush. The little bushes grew several feet apart on the white, gravelly ground, each little bush by itself. They smoothed out in the distance like a carpet woven of all shades of blue and green. The occasional greasewood, a graceful shrub covered with small dark green leaves, waved in the wind. Unobstructed by trees the mesa seemed endless. We stopped the car to feel the silence that enveloped it. The place was vast and empty as the stretches we had seen from the railroad, and now we found how still they all had been. The strong, fresh wind pressed steadily against us like a wind at sea.
Atolia was the first town, golden in the setting sun, on the shoulder of a stern, red mountain. Before it a wide valley fell away in whose bottom gleamed the white floor of a dry lake. All the mountain tops were on fire. The three towns were very close together, separated by the shoulder of the red mountain. Randsburg was the largest, whose one street was a steep hill. It had a score of buildings and two or three stores. Johannesburg, just over the crest, had six buildings, among them an adobe hotel and a large garage. All three towns ornamented the map with big black letters. We thought we were approaching cities and found instead little wooden houses set on the sand with the great simplicity of the desert at their doors.
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