Barstow, The Mojave Desert and the Mojave river

Barstow is a city in San Bernardino County, California, in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Located in the Inland Empire region of California, the population was 25,415 at the 2020 census. Barstow is an important crossroads for the Inland Empire and home to Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow.

The historic Casa del Desierto today.

Prehistoric Native American tribes inhabited the region as long as 3,000 years ago. The Native Americans hunted, fished and gathered turquoise. The indigenous people left hardly any discernible footprints along faint pathways as they traveled up to the Mexican territory to trade goods. The written history of the Mojave Valley dates back to the 1700s and the missionary excursions of Spanish Franciscan friar Francisco Garcés. Garcés followed the earliest faint footpaths to the Mojave River Valley and from there across the desert around Barstow on his way to Spanish missions beyond the mountains of California.^[12]

The settlement of Barstow began in the late 1840s in the Mormon Corridor. Every fall and winter, as the weather cooled, the rain produced new grass growth and replenished the water sources in the Mojave Desert. People, goods, and animal herds would move from New Mexico and later Utah to Los Angeles, along the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe, or after 1848, on the Mormon Road from Salt Lake City. Trains of freight wagons traveled back to Salt Lake City and other points in the interior. These travelers followed the course of the Mojave River, watering and camping at Fish Ponds on its south bank (west of Nebo Center) or 3.625 miles up river on the north bank, at a riverside grove of willows and cottonwoods, festooned with wild grapes, called Grapevines (later the site of North Barstow). In 1859, the Mojave Road followed a route that was established from Los Angeles to Fort Mojave through Grapevines that linked eastward with the Beale Wagon Road across northern New Mexico Territory to Santa Fe.

Troubles with the Paiute, Mojave, and Chemehuevi tribes followed, and from 1860 Camp Cady, a U.S. Army post 20 miles (32 km) east of Barstow, was occupied sporadically until 1864, then permanently, by soldiers occupying other posts on the Mojave Road or patrolling in the region until 1871.^[13] Trading posts were established at Grapevines and Fish Ponds that supplied travelers on the roads and increasingly the miners that came into the Mojave Desert after the end of hostilities with the native people.^[14]

Barstow's roots also lie in the rich mining history of the Mojave Desert following the discovery of gold and silver in the Owens Valley and in mountains to the east in the 1860s and 1870s. Due to the influx of miners arriving in Calico and Daggett, railroads were constructed to transport goods and people. The Southern Pacific built a line from Mojave, California through Barstow to Needles in 1883. In 1884, ownership of the line from Needles to Mojave was transferred to the Santa Fe Railroad.

Paving the major highways through Barstow led to further development of the city. Much of its economy depends on transportation. Before the advent of the interstate highway system, Barstow was an important stop on both Routes 66 and 91. The two routes met in downtown Barstow and continued west together to Los Angeles. The intersection of U.S. Route 91 and U.S. Route 466 was among the busiest intersections in the country—with about 800 gallons of gasoline being pumped per day nearby, during the year before U.S. Route 40 was extended to bypass Barstow.^[15] By the end of the 20th century, U.S. Routes 40, 91, and 466 were renamed or truncated as to no longer cover California and Nevada—with Interstates 15 and 40 now being the main interstate highways going in and out of Barstow.^[16]

Barstow is named after William Barstow Strong, former president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.^[17] Some early Barstow names were Camp Sugarloaf, Grapevine, Waterman Junction and Fishpond.^[18][19][20]

The Mojave River is an intermittent river in the eastern San Bernardino Mountains and the Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County, California, United States. Most of its flow is underground, while its surface channels remain dry most of the time, except for the headwaters and several bedrock gorges in the lower reaches.

A desert branch of the Serrano Native Americans called the Vanyume or Beñemé, as Father Garcés called them, lived beyond and along much of the length of the Mojave River, from east of Barstow to at least the Victorville region, and perhaps even farther upstream to the south, for up to 8,000 years in a series of villages, including the major village of Wá'peat.^[5][6]

The Mohave's trail, later the European immigrants' Mojave Road, ran west from their villages on the Colorado River to Soda Lake, then paralleled the river from its mouth on the lake to the Cajon Pass. Native Americans used this trade route where water could easily be found en route to the coast. Garcés explored the length of the Mojave River in early 1776.^[5] He called the river Arroyo de los Mártires ("river of the martyrs") on March 9, 1776 but later Spaniards called it Río de las Ánimas ("spirit river or river of the (lost) souls"). In 1826 Jedediah Smith was the first non-Native American to travel overland to California by following the Mojave Indian Trail. He called this the Inconstant River.

A pack horse and livestock trail, the Old Spanish Trail, was established by Antonio Armijo in 1829 between New Mexico and El Pueblo de Los Ángeles, joined the Mojave River at its mouth near what is now Soda Lake. It followed the river to where the trail reached the foot of the mountains at Summit Valley and turned westward to pass over Cajon Pass and descend into the coastal valleys of southern Alta California. In 1830, Wolfskill and Yount pioneered what became the Main Route of the Old Spanish Trail, which followed a different route than Armijo, farther south just west of the Colorado River and then followed Jedediah Smith's path on the old Mohave Trail west to the Mojave River mouth at Soda Lake, to meet with Armijo's route coming south from Salt Spring.

Sometime before 1844, a cutoff developed on the Old Spanish Trail that cut the distance traveled along the upper river by cutting across what is now Victor Valley, from the Cajon Pass to a crossing just below the Lower Narrows of the river. John C. Frémont intercepted this route to the river, riding east southeast from Lake Elizabeth, north of the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains on April 20, 1844.^{[7]: 258–259}

Frémont named the river Mohahve after the Mohave people on April 23, 1844, although these people lived two mountain ranges away on the Colorado River. He had met six traveling Mohaves that day. Some early Mormon ranchers called it the Macaby River.^{[7]: 259–260 [8]} Additionally another cutoff to the Old Spanish Trail had developed before 1844, where the trail forked northeastward from the Mojave River and Mohave Trail, east of what is now Yermo, California running over Alvord Mountain, to Bitter Spring, then through Red Pass, to join the Armijo route near Salt Spring in the Silurian Valley.^{[7]: 261–264} The fork of the trails there on the Mojave River, later became known as Fork of the Road.^[9]

From 1847, Mormons pioneered the wagon road that became the Mormon Road from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, closely following the route of the Old Spanish Trail from Parowan, Utah. They followed the Mojave River from the Fork of the Road to the Lower Narrows and left the river for the Cajon Pass on the route Frémont had found. In 1849, Forty-niners late on the main trail to California used the Mormon Road as a winter alternative route to California, referring to it as the "Southern Route" of the California Trail. Later, emigrants to California followed the same route during the winter months. In 1855, the Mormon Road was improved, and the route changed in places, becoming a major commercial wagon route between Utah and southern California, ending Utah's winter isolation until the railroads arrived there in 1869.

In 1859, as part of the Mohave War, the Mohave people's trail was improved as the wagon route of the Mojave Road. It followed the Mojave River from where the Mormon Road turned north away from the river at Fork of the Road, near Daggett, to where historic Camp Cady was located. It then followed the river to Soda Lake, where the road turned eastward to Fort Mojave, and in 1862 following the gold and silver strikes on the Colorado River, to Hardyville and the mining districts near it, and its connection at the head of the toll road to Prescott and the mines in the interior of Arizona Territory.

From 1863 to 1864, the Mojave River valley was a refuge from the great drought in California in those years; cattle of some resourceful ranchers of southern California were preserved by its resources.