JRHS at DESERT X 2021

Project Essay

When I was invited to create a site-specific installation for Desert X 2021, I decided to revisit my 2009 Jackrabbit Homestead project. I had always envisioned the construction of a small Tract desert cabin as an interpretive artwork, and now I finally had the chance to build one. For inspiration, I looked to a single female homesteader whose diary I had discovered during my initial research.

This homesteader, Catherine Venn Peterson, authored an engaging six-part series for Desert Magazine (DM) during 1950, detailing her jackrabbit homesteading experience in the Palm Desert area for the magazine’s readers—just as this “baby homestead” movement was picking up speed. For those unfamiliar with jackrabbit homesteading, the term refers to the popular mid-twentieth-century land rush that followed the enactment of the Small Tract Act of 1938. This act allowed qualified U.S. citizens the chance to lease and “prove up” public land considered “disposable” and classified as “chiefly valuable as a home, cabin, camp, health, convalescent, recreational, or business site.” Located mostly on arid lands of the American Southwest, these holdings lacked developed roads, water, electricity, indoor plumbing, and other modern conveniences we now consider standard.

To acquire a homestead, the applicant simply filed a lease with the regional General Land Office (the predecessor of the Bureau of Land Management) and paid the annual fee of one dollar per acre for a five-acre tract in an area specifically designated for jackrabbit homesteading. Once the applicant completed the necessary improvements to their claim by building a small dwelling costing at least $300 in materials within three years, they could file for a patent—the federal government’s form of a deed.[1] The parcel could then be purchased at the appraised price from the federal government, usually ranging from $10 to $20 per acre. Once all requirements were met, the land was theirs to keep, develop, sell, or pass down to heirs just like any other property.

This highly popular homestead movement reflects the quintessential American desire to claim territory and own a piece of the land even if the property is considered “worthless” from an economic and government standpoint. As a result, thousands of tiny, derelict cabins can be seen across the desert landscape, especially east of Twentynine Palms, California. It should be noted that Small Tracts were available for lease in thirty-one states but were mainly found in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

Catherine Venn with her son Kenneth (date unknown). Courtesy of the Brownless family.

Between 1938 and 1977—the period during which the Small Tract Act was in effect—Uncle Sam issued a total of 59,481 patents covering 232,473 acres of publicly-held land across the U.S. The General Land Office received 141,536 lease applications during this same timeframe, indicating that nearly two-thirds of applicants had not “proved up” their leases. In California alone, 27,880 patents were issued for 124,487 acres of public land—mainly within San Bernardino County’s portion of the Mojave Desert—considered the epicenter of this public land transfer to private ownership. Overall, the Feds collected $19,271,336 from the “disposal” of our collectively owned public lands.

Catherine Venn first learned about the Small Tracts program in January 1943 after reading about it in a Los Angeles newspaper. Venn, a divorcee in her mid-forties with a grown son who had already left home, was working at the City of Los Angeles as an office clerk at the time.[4] Eager to participate, Venn went to the General Land Office in downtown Los Angeles and filed her lease on an unseen 330 by 660-foot parcel located “somewhere in the California Desert.”[5] Her five-acre tract turned out to be part of Section 36, Township 5 South, Range 5 East of the San Bernardino Meridian in unincorporated Riverside County, California, near the “Palms to Pines Highway” or California State Route 74 above the town of Palm Desert, which had not yet officially been established when Venn filed. Section 36 features rugged, spectacular hillside terrain with the Santa Rosa Mountains as a scenic backdrop. Wildcat Canyon’s mostly dry wash divides the section. Locals refer to the area as Cahuilla Hills after the Desert Cahuilla people, who inhabited the Coachella Valley long before these new desert homesteaders made claims there. Today, Cahuilla Hills is just a short distance from the exclusive Bighorn Golf Club, whose membership initiation fee starts at $250,000.

A single, independently minded woman, Venn eagerly began her homesteading journey with a sense of freedom that she enthusiastically shared throughout her DM series, “Diary of a Jackrabbit Homesteader.” In the opening paragraphs of her first installment, published in July 1950, she exclaims, “I was fast reaching the saturation of city living. So much so that there were mornings when the urge to drive out to the desert was so strong that I could hardly resist it. I would find myself at my desk listening to jangling phones, pacifying citizens and taxpayers, jumping to the buzzer from the boss’s desk, and deciphering my Gregg as I treadled another day in my squirrel cage.”

When Venn and a group of her fellow “tenderfoot” homesteaders finally drove out to Coachella Valley to view their unseen leases, she approvingly describes their first collective impression:

As we turned up the highway that led to our section, the picture that met our eyes left us breathless. The majestic mountain range rising before us was covered with a mantilla of snow that had fallen into folds and patterns as exquisite as old lace. There was nothing man-made to be seen on the brush-strewn landscape. On either side, low-walled mountain slopes of smooth rock sheltered the sandy floored cove. Finding ourselves in such a rare setting magnified our hopes and intensified our suspense.

We stopped just short of where the nearest paved road commenced its serpentine up the mountain. At this point we fanned out in search of the government survey monument that established the section corner. We soon stumbled upon it and excitedly started pacing off the tracts to our sites.

Words failed me when I discovered my good fortune. My five acres proved to be fairly level except for a slice of wash, part of a knoll, and nearly all of a little rock hill from which distinctive feature my homestead derives its name. It is a proud miniature of a hill with a character all its own. We fell in love at first sight, Rock Hill and I.

Venn’s Section 36 neighbors were a notable group of desert dwellers that included Randall Henderson, the founder, publisher, and editor of DM; his younger brother Cliff, who devised the master plan for Palm Desert; and their brother Phillip T. Henderson Jr. Another prominent Palm Desert founder was Tommy Tomson, who built the eclectic “Hot Rocks” house with the help of locals on a logistically challenging, boulder-ridden five-acre hillside using recycled railroad ties and custom steel girders for support. Featured in the March 1949 issue of DM, the structure was incorporated into a larger home years later and remains one of the more intriguing artifacts of mid-twentieth-century Desert Modernism.

This 1940s plat map of Section 36 in Cahuilla Hills of unincorporated Riverside County displays the names of the original homesteaders that received patents for their Small Tracts. Catherine Venn’s holding is shown at the lower right. Courtesy of the Palm Desert Historical Society.

Founded in 1936, DM was the main promoter of jackrabbit homesteading. Throughout the mid-1940s and into the 1950s, the magazine regularly featured at least one or two articles per issue on the topic. As I navigated stacks of DM at my university’s library while researching my book, I became captivated by the jackrabbit homesteading stories of Venn and Melissa Branson Stedman, both single women sharing their experiences in the magazine. Their stories stood out because, for women of their era, their feminist spirit, ingenuity, and self-reliance weren’t typically valued as desirable feminine qualities by the dominant white heterosexual male society. Nonetheless, both women thrived independently in their desert sanctuaries.

As an example of self-reliance, Venn attempted to move her pre-built 8 by 15 foot “little midget of a house” (which looks like a mix of a child’s playhouse and a garden shed)[7] from Pasadena to its new desert home on a flatbed truck by herself, but she failed. To her credit, it was her first time driving one. She did manage to haul the cabin partway to her parents’ ranch in Etiwanda. When she arrived, she enlisted her brother (the only male among her seven siblings) to help with the second leg of the trip to Palm Desert.[8] Several years later, she was granted U.S. patent number 1154652 from the Los Angeles General Land Office for her desert homestead on September 30th, 1955.

Venn’s installments published in 1950 detail her homesteading adventure with lyrical imagery. Descriptions of her daily chores are woven together with lively accounts of her desert sensory awakening. For example, in this passage from the second installment in the August 1950 issue of DM, she explains:

Rock Hill is the baby toe on a foot of graduating bills that rise to the flank of mountains which separate the coastal plain from the desert. It was up these hills that I set out on my first hike. A tag-along wind dogged me the first since the cabana was securely anchored.

High up on the 8000-foot summit storm clouds gathered. The wind rose to challenge the moisture-laden invaders from the Pacific. And a wild, elemental battle ensued. Time and again the rolling mass of clouds plunged over the mountain backs determined to carry their moisture to the desert goal. Each time they were driven back by the defensive tactics of the wind fighting to hold the desert line. Unknowingly, I had witnessed the thrilling, spectacular phenomena that occurs up on the high rim when the rain-laden clouds encounter the dry blasts from the heated desert floor. It was a vivid revelation. No longer could I despise the wind. It had become something heroic, glorious in battle, the battle of holding back the clouds to win the victory of the desert.

Catherine Venn’s Rock Hill pictured in the first installment of “Diary of a Jackrabbit Homesteader,” Desert Magazine, July 1950. Photo by George Merrill Roy.

Venn wrote poetry throughout her life, sharing it with her family but not publishing it outside her small circle. She authored several other DM articles during the early 1950s. In March 1953, at age 52, she married her third husband, Los Angeles’ City Controller Walter C. Peterson, after a brief stint working for the U.S. government in Japan. Plat maps then listed her tract under Catherine Peterson. It is unclear when Venn and her husband sold her beloved Rock Hill, but it seems they did so sometime during the 1960s—after Randall Henderson and her magazine colleagues had sold out years earlier.[9] Nonetheless, she returned to Palm Desert to live full-time during two different periods before passing away at age 101 in 2002. Today, Rock Hill is divided into what appear to be three spacious lots, each featuring a large modern home surrounded by lush landscaping. Venn’s cabin was long demolished.

In revisiting Jackrabbit Homestead for Desert X 2021, I began to view my earlier project from a new perspective—rethinking who benefited from the Small Tract Act and who did not. It’s easy to romanticize and celebrate the homesteading stories of Catherine Venn and others like her, but it’s convenient to overlook those who were probably excluded because of ethnic and racial bias—unfortunately common for that time. Legally, Small Tract applicants could not be racially denied, but racial prejudice against people of color—especially African Americans, Japanese Americans, or Native Americans—was prevalent during the mid-twentieth century. These groups were not DM’s target audience.

Advertisement in the March 1949 issue of Desert Magazine for the Palm Desert Corporation, founded by Cliff Henderson.

Over time, I have come to see jackrabbit homesteading as an “entitlement” for a specific racial and/or ethnic group of American citizens, regardless of their class or economic status. This entitlement was fueled by the outdated yet persistent settler colonialism narrative, widely promoted through popular culture in the form of the romanticized Hollywood Western, which was at its height when the program began. This exclusionary and often violent narrative must be considered when reflecting on the Small Tract homesteading experience, as it shapes how participants either perceived or projected their collective identities onto the landscape. It also offers insight into why other groups chose not to participate.

I suspect that the primary racial and ethnic makeup of Small Tract participants in Southern California and throughout the American Southwest consisted of those who, like me, identify racially as “white” on the U.S. census form. Although it is nearly impossible to determine participants’ race by studying the surnames of historic Small Tract filers, I have not encountered many Latin or Asian surnames in my research. Given the political climate during and after World War II, along with the internment of Japanese Americans across the American West from 1942 to 1946 and the widespread xenophobia they faced, it is safe to say that Japanese Americans most likely did not participate in this program, nor did those of other Asian or Pacific Islander descent.

I believe that very few African Americans filed because Jim Crow-era segregation laws were still enforced in many parts of Southern California, through officially sanctioned discriminatory property zoning, restrictive housing or community covenants, and unwritten but widely accepted negative attitudes toward them. Burbank, Culver City, Glendale, Indian Wells, Palmdale, Pasadena, and Riverside are some of the former (or possible) 100 or so racist “Sundown Towns” spread across California where African Americans were warned not to be outside after sunset.[10] Staying meant they could face serious, or even fatal, consequences.

My assumption that Native Americans did not actively participate in the Small Tract Act is especially discouraging because the arid lands of the American Southwest, considered disposable for the program, are the ancestral lands of Indigenous groups that have inhabited these lands since time immemorial. It is unlikely that any Desert Cahuilla acquired jackrabbit homesteads in Cahuilla Hills because they were not consulted before the program was enacted, nor were they encouraged to file leases alongside the predominantly white homesteaders. Furthermore, the idea that our shared public lands were seen as ‘disposable’ is problematic on many levels.

These reflective thoughts continue an important conversation about who has benefited from U.S. public land policies and who has not, while also honoring the story of an individual who had the opportunity to participate. Venn’s beautiful memoirs, which inspired this project, draw visitors of all ages and backgrounds, including those whose ancestors were previously excluded from participation. I have seen this firsthand when I meet with people at the cabin to discuss the project face-to-face. Some see themselves in this simple space, free from the pressures of overconsumption and technology that have overwhelmed our modern lives; others regard it as a creative retreat or “Desert Walden.” Whatever your personal interpretation or observation, the cabin invites us to live closer and in harmony with the natural world around us.

Kim Stringfellow 2021 (revised 2026)

Related Events and Publications

• A live listening party event with Claire Campbell, Jim White, Kim Stringfellow, and Desert X Artistic Director Neville Wakefield was broadcast on Saturday, May 1st, 2021. Click here to view the archived program.
• Desert X – The Film on KCET Artbound (PBS SoCal) premiered on November 3, 2021.
• Emily Eliza Scott’s “X Marks the Land” essay at Art Journal Open, a publication of the College Art Association, was published in March 2022.
• Kim Stringfellow’s Jackrabbit Homestead essay was published in Log 55 | Summer 2022 architectural journal.

Jackrabbit Homestead (2021) was realized as a collaborative effort made possible by the individuals listed below.

• Jim White, Claire Campbell of Hope for Agoldensummer, and Tim Halbur. Claire brought Catherine’s voice to life and was so inspired by her story that she wrote and performed with Hope for Agoldensummer the opening song. The brilliant Jim White organized the program and suggested Claire as Catherine’s voice. Tim Halbur, with whom I’ve been collaborating on nearly all of my audio projects, created the wonderful sound design.
• Jerry Comer for his continued support of my projects.
• Nate Otto of Hot Purple Energy generously donated the solar system that powers the cabin and sound piece.
• Michael Sanderson constructed the cabin. Leon Creekmore, Thomas Fjallstam and Arnold Valencia completed the exterior of the cabin on site.
• Linson Huang, a former SDSU graduate student in architectural design, drafted the cabin plans.
• Terry Taylor Castillo, director of the Joshua Tree Retreat Center, provided a site to construct the cabin. Without Terry’s generosity, I most likely would not have been able to realize this project.
• As Catherine Venn did previously, we moved our cabin via a flatbed truck. Trent at Plaza Towing in Indio, along with his crew, did the heavy lifting, making the move seem effortless.
• Artist Jennifer Kane created the drawings of “Boy,” Catherine’s coyote friend.
• Rochelle McCune and Luke Leuschner from the Palm Desert Historical Society helped me find many historic documents related to Cahuilla Hills homesteading.
• Moriano Patencio of the Agua Caliente Tribe helped me understand the nuances of both ancient and modern land tenure of his people, the Desert Cahuilla, in the Coachella Valley.
• Big thanks go to the Desert X team, including co-curators Neville Wakefield and César García-Alvarez, Jenny Gill, Kamil Beski, the Desert X press team, and documentary filmmakers. Lance Gerber for his stunning photographic documentation. Palm Springs Life editor-in-chief Steven Biller for his continued support of my work, and the City of Palm Desert for providing us with a prime downtown site to place the cabin.
• I also want to thank the Brownless and Peterson families for generously sharing photographs and memories of Catherine Venn Peterson.