From the book
Prologue
A German prospector made his home beneath a boulder seven stories high. A man called Burro spent nearly four decades driving a tunnel through a mountain. A woman who had raced airplanes ran a dude ranch on the edge of an Air Force base until a long fight with the government ended it. A uranium prospector nobody believed drilled into ground everyone called worthless and found one of the richest deposits in the country.
All of them belonged to the deserts of the American West. Those deserts stretch across time as much as geography, an expanse of sand, scrub, and stone where the desperate and the daring alike have come to wager everything they had. They are desolate yet alive, barren yet full of promise. People have come to them to survive and to start over, and the land has kept a record of both, in tailings, in foundations, in names scratched into rock.
By the mid-20th century, the Mojave was the last long stretch of America’s most famous highway. Route 66 promised a neon-lit path to the Pacific, and the desert was where that promise met the heat in the last hard miles before the sea.
None of it was empty. For the Serrano, the Chemehuevi, the Cahuilla, and the Mohave, this country was the center of everything. They knew its washes, springs, and dry lakes the way a farmer knows a field, and they lived on what it grudgingly gave.
The settlers who came later brought picks, wagons, and the habit of claiming whatever they could reach. For every boomtown that lasted there were others that sank back into the dust nearly as fast as they had gone up. The desert rewarded patience and punished almost everything else.
It took in other kinds, too, people who had not come for gold at all. Painters came, and writers, inventors, preachers, and men and women who wanted to vanish from their pasts or their debts. Some found beauty out there. Some found money. Some found ruin, and a few found all three.
This book is about some of them: a hermit, a contactee, a tunneler, a poet on a mountain, a pilot, a showman, a painter of visions, a uranium man, and others who went into the desert and did not come back the same. Where the record is solid, the book says so. Where it thins into rumor, the book says that too.
Here is told the tale of each of them, one chapter at a time.
From Desert Eccentric · © 2026 C. V. Wooster