Between 1938 and 1976, tens of thousands of urban Southern Californians became rural landowners by applying for public land. People like Melissa Stedman, who began leasing her parcel in 1941, succumbed to an ongoing “land fever” that only escalated in the years to come. As Stedman described it, the desire for land during this period was so strong that a “horde” of claimants “swooped down” on federal land offices in a “mad rush.” Few of these individuals had lived in a rural setting before grabbing their hammers, pickaxes, and shovels; in fact, most hailed from Los Angeles County. But these urban pioneers did not let their inexperience stop them. Eager to own land and use it as an escape from the city, they flocked to the Mojave Desert, the hottest and most inhospitable part of the state.
They obtained their land under a little-known revamp of the 1862 Homestead Act. Passed in June of 1938 and dubbed the Small Tract Act, this legislation allowed the General Land Office—and later, the Bureau of Land Management—to dispose of unused federal land in five-acre parcels. Like the original Homestead Act, which lured four million Americans into the West by offering land on the cheap, the Small Tract Act’s purchasing scheme was lease-to-own with nominal fees. Lessees earned their land patents by completing mandated improvements within a set period of time, a process informally known as “proving up.” At the outset, this referred to a dwelling worth $300 in materials built within five years, although the terms changed several times over the course of the program.
In Southern California, most of these five-acre parcels were in the Mojave Desert, with hotspots in Twentynine Palms, the Morongo Valley, and Barstow. Locals began calling them “jackrabbit” homesteads. Over the years, interest in these desert tracts only increased. By the 1950s, homestead hopefuls, who were predominately white and middle-class, were demanding land faster than the Bureau of Land Management could process applications.
Hot, dry, and isolated, the Mojave Desert proved tough to tame. Most areas lacked water, utilities, and roads and encompassed rugged terrain. Some applicants trekked out to the desert to view the land on offer, but many chose their parcels off a map, sight-unseen, only to be so disappointed that they reapplied. Stedman described one homestead location she rejected as “a sandy wash, infested with lizards, beetles and every manner of thing that creeps or crawls” and another as “a boulder-strewn arroyo where there wasn’t enough level ground for a pigeon roost.” Homesteader Tommy Tomson’s experience shows that the Mojave Desert was also troubled by extreme weather. Just weeks after he finished his cabin, a freak windstorm ripped it off its foundation and tossed it into a ravine.