JRHS at DESERT X 2021

Project Essay

When I was invited to develop a site-specific installation for Desert X 2021, I revisited my 2009 Jackrabbit Homestead project. I had envisioned the construction of a Small Tract desert cabin as an interpretive artwork from the start and now I had the opportunity to build one. For inspiration, I referenced a single female homesteader whose diary I had stumbled across during my initial research.

This homesteader, Catherine Venn Peterson, wrote 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 when this “baby homestead” movement was getting into full swing. For those unfamiliar with jackrabbit homesteading, the term refers to the popular mid-twentieth-century land rush that ensued after the Small Tract Act of 1938 was enacted. This act allowed qualified U.S. citizens the opportunity to lease and “prove up” public land deemed “disposable” that had been classified as “chiefly valuable as a home, cabin, camp, health, convalescent, recreational, or business site.” Located primarily on arid lands of the American Southwest, these holdings lacked developed roads, water, electricity, indoor plumbing, and other modern conveniences that we now take for granted.

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 a dollar an acre for a five-acre tract in an area specifically made available for jackrabbit homesteading. Once the applicant completed the necessary improvements to their claim by constructing a small dwelling costing a minimum of $300 in building materials within three years, the applicant could file for a patent—the federal government’s form of a deed.[1] The parcel could then be purchased for the appraised price from the federal government for, on average, $10 to $20 an acre. Once fulfilled, the land was theirs to keep, develop, sell or hand down to heirs like any other real estate holding.

This highly popular homestead movement reflects the quintessential American desire to claim territory and own a piece of the land even if the property in question is deemed “worthless” from an economic and governmental perspective. As a result, thousands of tiny, derelict cabins can be viewed 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 concentrated in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

Between 1938 and 1977—the time that the Small Tract Act had begun and effectively ended—Uncle Sam issued a total of 59,481 patents for 232,473 acres of publicly-held land across the U.S. The General Land Office received 141,536 lease applications during this same period suggesting that nearly two-thirds of people applying had not “proved up” their leases. In California alone, 27,880 patents were issued for 124,487 acres of public land—primarily within San Bernardino County’s portion of the Mojave Desert—considered to be the epicenter of this public land to private ownership land transfer giveaway.[2] In all, the Feds received a total of $19,271,336 for its “disposal” of our collectively-owned public lands.[3]

Catherine Venn first learned about the Small Tracts program in January 1943 after reading about the opportunity in a Los Angeles newspaper. Venn, a divorcee in her mid-forties with a full-grown son out of the nest, was at the time working for the City of Los Angeles as an office clerk.[4] Excited to participate, Venn went to General Land Office in downtown Los Angeles and filed her lease on an unseen 330 x 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 located not far from the “Palms to Pines Highway” or California State Route 74 above the municipality of Palm Desert, which had yet to officially exist when Venn originally filed. Section 36 is ruggedly 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 had occupied Coachella Valley long before these nouveau desert homesteaders had laid claim to it. Today, Cahuilla Hills is a stone’s throw from the exclusive Bighorn Golf Club whose membership initiation fee is a mere $250,000.

A single, independently-minded woman, Venn would embark on her homesteading experience with vigor and a sense of freedom enthusiastically expressed 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’ desk, and deciphering my Gregg as I treadled another day in my squirrel cage.”[6]

When Venn and a group of her fellow “tenderfoot” homesteaders finally drove out to Coachella Valley view their unseen leases she approvingly describes their collective first 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 (refer to map at right) were an illustrious desert gang that included Randall Henderson, founder and publisher and editor of DM, his younger brother Cliff who conceived the master plan of Palm Desert along with their brother Phillip T. Henderson Jr. Another noted Palm Desert founder was Tommy Tomson who built “Hot Rocks” with the help of the locals on a logistically-difficult boulder-ridden hillside five-acre tract with 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 ago and remains one of the more curious artifacts of mid-twentieth century Desert Modernism.

Founded in 1936, DM was the main booster of jackrabbit homesteading. During the mid-1940s and throughout the 1950s, the magazine had at least one or two items per issue dedicated to the program. After pouring through stacks of DM at my university’s library while researching for my book I became fascinated with the jackrabbit homesteading adventures of Venn and Melissa Branson Stedman, both single women who wrote about their experiences in the magazine. Their stories were unusual for women of their time in that their feminist flair, ingenuity, and self-reliance weren’t particularly esteemed as desirable feminine traits by the ruling status quo of white heterosexual men that dominated mainstream society. Regardless, both women thrived independently in their adopted desert sanctuaries.

As an example of self-reliance, Venn attempted to move her pre-built 8 by 15 foot “little midget of a house” (what appears to be a mashup of a child’s playhouse and a garden shed[7]) from Pasadena to its new desert home on a flatbed truck by herself but failed. To her credit, it was her first time she had driven a truck. She did manage to haul the cabin midway to her parents’ ranch to Etiwanda. Upon arriving, she enlisted the help of her brother (the only male child of her seven siblings) on the second leg of the trip to Palm Desert.[8] On September 3oth, 1955, she was granted U.S. patent number 1154652 from the Los Angeles General Land Office for her desert homestead.

Venn’s installments published during 1950 share her homesteading adventure in lyrical detail. Descriptions of her daily chores are intermingled with exuberant chronicles of her desert sensory awakening. For instance, in this passage from installment two in the August 1950 issue of DM she elucidates:

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.

Venn would write poetry throughout her life, although she shared it only with her family. She would not publish professionally outside the handful of DM articles she had penned during the early 1950s. In March 1953, at age 52, she would marry for a third time to Los Angeles’ City Controller Walter C. Peterson after returning from a short stint working for the U.S. government in Japan. Plat maps would now list her tract under Catherine Peterson. It is not clear when Venn and her husband sold her beloved Rock Hill but it appears that they did so sometime during the 1960s—after Randall Henderson and her cohorts from the magazine had sold out years earlier.[9] However, she would return to Palm Desert to live full-time during two different periods of her life before she passed at age 101 in 2002.

Today, Rock Hill is subdivided into what appears to be three spacious lots each with a large contemporary home surrounded by lush landscaping. The ghost of her little cabana is submerged in the pool of one of these homes at the base of Rock Hill. I wonder if the current residents are lucky enough to hear the whispered voices from the past singing “Still Waters and Green Pastures” as the smell of burning brush floats on the evening desert breeze?

In revisiting Jackrabbit Homestead for Desert X 2021 I began to contemplate my earlier project with a fresh perspective and deeper consideration for the segment of the population that benefitted from the Small Tract Act and also those who did not. After all, it is easy to romanticize and celebrate the homesteading experiences of Catherine Venn and others like her but convenient to overlook those who were likely excluded from participating because of ethnic and racial bias—sadly par the course for the time period. Legally, this was not the case but racial stigma and prejudice towards people of color—especially those of African American, Japanese American, or Native American descent prevailed during the mid-twentieth century. These groups were not among the targeted segment of the readership DM was encouraging to participate. Nor were they interviewed or pictured in various editorial features documenting the phenomena.

Over time I have come to understand jackrabbit homesteading as an “entitlement” for a certain racial and/or ethnic group of American citizens notwithstanding their class or economic status. This entitlement was driven by the outdated but persistent settler narrative spoon-fed en masse via popular culture—in form of the romanticized Hollywood Western that was entering its height of popularity when the program began. This exclusionary and violent narrative must be considered while reflecting on the Small Tract homesteading experience as it informs how participants either saw or projected their collective identities onto the landscape. It also provides 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 were those who, like myself, identify racially as “white” on the U.S. census form. Although it is nearly impossible to determine the race of participants by studying the surnames of historic Small Tract filers, I’ve yet to come across that many Latinx and Asian surnames during my research. Considering the political climate during and after World War II, in conjunction with the internment of Japanese Americans throughout the American West from 1942 -1946 and widespread xenophobia directed towards them that ensued, it is safe to state that Japanese Americans most likely did not participate in this program nor did those of other Asian or Pacific Inlander descent.

I presume that very few African Americans filed because Jim Crow-era segregation laws were alive and well in many parts of Southern California through officially sanctioned discriminatory property zoning, restrictive housing or community covenants and unwritten but perceived negative attitudes towards them. Burbank, Culver City, Glendale, Indian Wells, Palmdale, Pasadena, and Riverside are some of the former (or possible) 100 or so racist “Sundown Towns” found throughout California where African Americans were warned to not be physically present after sunset.[10] To stay, meant they could likely suffer dire or even fatal consequences.

My assumption that Native Americans did not actively participate in the Small Tract Act is particularly discouraging because the arid lands of the American Southwest deemed disposable for the program were ancestral lands of various Indigenous groups that have occupied and continue to occupy these same lands since time immemorial. It is doubtful that any Desert Cahuilla acquired jackrabbit homesteads in Cahuilla Hills because they certainly were not invited to the table to discuss the fate of their former territory when the program was enacted nor were they encouraged to file leases next to the predominately white homesteaders.

Further, the notion that our shared public lands were considered “disposable” in the first place is problematic on many levels. Many jackrabbit homesteaders, including Catherine Venn and Randall Henderson, thought otherwise and stated their love for the desert landscape they homesteaded in their writings for DM—yet both were first in line to break ground in the beautifully rugged land of Section 36.

These tangential reflections continue a critical and meaningful conversation about who benefited from U.S. public land policies and who did not while at the same celebrating the story of an individual who had the opportunity to participate. Venn’s lovely memoirs are now part of the public domain and appeal to a great many visitors from all ages and backgrounds including those who were excluded from participating in the first place. I have seen this firsthand when I meet with people at the cabin to discuss the project in person. Some see themselves within this modest space without the burdens of excess consumption that has overwhelmed our contemporary lives, others see it as a creative haven or “Desert Walden” while others look to the cabin as a potential solution for “houseless” individuals in transition. Whatever one’s personal projection or observation, the cabin is an invitation to see the potential in ourselves and the world around us.

Kim Stringfellow 2021

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. Thank you for your support, expertise and guidance!

• 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 who I’ve been collaborating for 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 setup that powers the cabin and sound piece.
• Michael Sanderson constructed the cabin.
• Linson Huang, a former SDSU architectural design graduate student, 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 could not have realized this project.
• Like 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 and made the move seem effortless.
• Arnold Valencia painted both the interior and exterior of the cabin.
• Thomas Fjallstam volunteered his time over three days to install windows and help install the siding with Leon Creekmore.
• Artist Jennifer Kane created the drawings of “Boy,” Catherine’s coyote friend.
• Numerous friends donated props for the cabin interior, including Diane Best. Michel Cicero helped me move the new bed into the cabin.
• Bob Fisher brilliantly came through a day before the cabin was launched with two period-appropriate chairs in the perfect color!
• Rochelle McCune and Luke Leuschner of the Palm Desert Historical Society helped me locate numerous historic documents related to Cahuilla Hills homesteading.
• My mother, Judith Stringfellow, made the cabin’s curtains.
• Moriano Patencio of the Agua Caliente Tribe helped me understand the nuances of ancient and contemporary land tenure of his people, the Desert Cahuilla, within the Coachella Valley.
• Kudos to the Desert X team for supporting this project! Special thanks go to co-curators Neville Wakefield and César García-Alvarez, Jenny Gill along with the Desert X press team and documentary filmmakers.
• Kamil Beski for supporting my initial concept and facilitating the actual realization of the cabin.
• Lance Gerber for his beautiful photography.
• Palm Springs Life editor-in-chief Steven Biller for his continued support.
• The City of Palm Desert for providing us with a prime downtown site location to site the project.
• The Brownless and Peterson families generously shared photographs and memories of Catherine Venn Peterson.