The 7.1-mile dirt road to Corn Springs was in fine condition in mid-January, just days after heavy rains coincided with President Biden’s designation of the surrounding Chuckwalla Mountain range as a national monument.
My partner, Edgar, and I were relieved as we left Interstate 10 in our dust and headed toward the legendary palm oasis where, from the 1880s to the 1940s, prospectors seeking gold, silver, and ore found precious water and shade beneath a canopy of fan-shaped leaves.
We drove around rocks and ditches along the dusty bajada and sped through patches of deep sand while crossing Corn Springs Wash. In the last quarter mile before reaching the oasis, we slowed to marvel at the petroglyphs covering the outcroppings that flanked our path — drawings created some 10,000 years ago by the Chemehuevi, Cahuilla, and Yuma people.
Map by Stuart Funk, inspired by Norton Allen of the original Desert Magazine
We’d read all about the mysterious marks in old books and magazines. “The figures were scratched in firm outline on the faces of smooth slabs of rock and stood out white against the red of the granite as clearly as if done but a year or two ago,” J. Smeaton Chase wrote in his 1919 book California Desert Trails, chronicling his journey from Palm Springs to Blythe and back to the eastern Coachella Valley.
Settlers named Corn Springs for the feral corn plants sowed by the Indigenous people. Prospectors passing through the oasis on the way to mine sites to the south would find remnants of early Native American life, including metates, potsherds, and flint dart points.
The petroglyphs created by the Chemehuevi, Cahuilla, and Yuma people at Corn Springs are among the oldest in the Colorado Desert, with some dating back as far as 10,000 years.
PHOTO BY TOM BREWSTER
At the oasis, Edgar and I found a paradise — and amenities — beyond our expectations. The Bureau of Land Management established this campground in 1968 with nine campsites equipped with fire-pits and cooking grills close to a vault toilet and a hand-crank pump for potable water.
We chose a site, pitched our tent, and set out to explore the oasis of Washingtonia filifera — palms that were vital to the Indigenous people. They ate the sweet fruit clusters, built shelters from the trunks, made utensils from frond stems, and fashioned sandals from leaves, according to Temalpakh: Cahuilla Indian Knowledge and Use of Plants. Likewise, nutritious beans from the equally versatile mesquite trees provided a dietary staple.
We found a pamphlet in the wooden box at the oasis detailing the 12 stops along the half-mile interpretive loop trail. The guide noted trees and plants such as the ocotillo, palo verde, ironwood, and brittlebush as well as historical points — including the spot about 60 feet south of the oasis where the eternally optimistic prospector and painter August “Gus” Lederer built his humble cabin.
The “Mayor” of Corn Springs
Journalist Randall Henderson, in his 1961 book, On Desert Trails: Today and Yesterday, recalled that Lederer lived in “an unpainted one-room shack … his door unlatched to all who came this way.”
A gentle man standing 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing about 120 pounds, Lederer was the self-appointed “mayor” of Corn Springs from 1915 to 1932. He nurtured the spring, cultivated a vegetable garden, and welcomed wayward travelers.
Painter and prospector August “Gus” Lederer had a soft spot for animals — especially burros. At one point, he cared for 18 of them. The October 1954 edition of Desert Magazine documented Lederer’s breakfast ritual for his braying companions: “Each burro, in his turn, received one of the flapjacks, wheeled and left the crowd to quietly chew and swallow his morsel in peace.”
Photo courtesy warner graves collection
Lederer visited Henderson each month at his newspaper office in Blythe, insisting he’d find gold in the Chuckwallas and inviting him to visit. Henderson, who later founded Desert Magazine and, with his brother Cliff, the city of Palm Desert, first went to Corn Springs in 1920. He described Lederer in a January 1945 Desert Magazine article as “a typical hard rock miner … who staked many claims, but never found pay ore.”
Lederer worked as a fruit tramp during the annual melon harvest near Brawley, earning enough in six weeks to sustain his quiet life at the oasis for a year. He’d stop along the way to see his friend and fellow gold-seeker and burro man Frank Coffey, known as the “mayor” of Dos Palmas, northeast of the Salton Sea. They visited each other annually and were known to swap wildly exaggerated stories and plan prospecting trips together.
He nurtured the spring, cultivated a vegetable garden, and welcomed wayward travelers.
“Between prospecting excursions,” Henderson noted, “Gus spent his idle hours with paint brush and canvas. His was the untutored art that knows no rules except to transfer to canvas as faithfully as possible the beauty and color of the desert landscape. … He just painted for the happiness that comes from creative work — and then gave the pictures to friends who admired them.”
According to a March 1945 letter to the editor in Desert Magazine by historian Don Meadows of Long Beach, two cabins existed at Corn Springs in 1922. “The newer one … was occupied by Lederer. The other was a short distance down the canyon and was open to the public. On the wall of this older cabin was a large sheet of paper headed ‘Corn Springs Register.’ There were perhaps 50 names in the register, mostly those of prospectors.”
Like Henderson, Meadows commended Lederer’s pride in Corn Springs, writing that he “did everything possible to make it attractive. …When our day’s work was done, we would sit on the porch of the Lederer cabin and listen to Gus philosophize and discuss desert lore. He talked of burros, prospecting, mountain sheep, dikes, dry placers, city people, ambition, cats, education, mosquitoes, politics, and stars.”
Desert documentarians Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves visited Corn Springs between 1927 and 1930, photographing the oasis, its ancient petroglyphs, and its self-appointed caretaker, Gus Lederer. Their images, featured in Postcards From Mecca: The California Desert Photographs of Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves, 1916–1936, by Ann Japenga and Warner V. Graves III, offer a rare glimpse of life in the remote Chuckwalla Mountains during that era.
Photo courtesy warner graves collection
Nothing endeared Lederer’s guests more than his devotion to his 18 burros, many abandoned by miners. Every morning, he cooked pancakes for his beloved jacks and jennies that nudged the cabin door, braying when they heard his metal spoon clanking on the tin pan.
When Lederer became ill in 1932, his friend “Desert Steve” Ragsdale, the “mayor” of Desert Center, took him to the county hospital in Riverside. He was 64 when he died that December from streptococcus and a “dental infection,” according to his death certificate. Many accounts suggest he suffered a deadly black widow bite on his spine.
Ragsdale took Lederer’s burros to Desert Center and honored his friend’s wishes by burying him beneath a mound of stones at Aztec Well, a few miles up the arroyo, beside Lederer’s friend Tommy Jones. Lederer and Jones, a prospector and a poet, “disagreed on every subject under the sun,” Henderson recalled, but their arguments about politics, rocks, and art spiced up the life in this remote nook of “The Chuck.”
“A Haven of Rest”
After completing the loop trail, Edgar and I watched the sunset near the palms before returning to our tent and building our campfire. We ate dinner and relaxed in our chairs, staring into the theater of stars and listening to the chorus of nocturnal creatures — Merriam’s kangaroo rats and small Western pipistrelle bats — and rustling of palm leaves until the fire burned out.
The next morning, we tried to go farther south on the dirt road to visit Aztec Well and the remains of the Corn Springs Mining District, established in 1897, but the sand became too deep for our vehicle. We turned off at the Corn Springs Mill site and found a note dated Dec. 26, 1999, inviting us into the cabin: “This room is always open. Please shelter, rest, stay overnight if you wish to. … Please cherish & enjoy this place as we do.” The note was signed “Sabrina & Family, Caretakers” and indicated the cabin was built in 1940.
There was a guest book on the counter and a few newspaper clippings tacked to the wall about another prospector, John de la Garza, who had walked from Moapa, Nevada, to Needles, California, and settled at Corn Springs in 1930. “Old John was a continuous if quiet presence at Corn Springs,” one article notes, explaining that he lived in a cabin at Aztec Well. “He knew local celebrities like Gus Lederer, the adventurer and photographer Susie Keef Smith, the various members of the Ragsdale family of nearby Desert Center, and a string of full- and part-time residents.” He lived to be 100 and was known as the “mayor” of Aztec Well.
The cabin was as far as we could go on this visit to Corn Springs, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. The oasis and archaeological site offer an extraordinary destination for campers, hikers, and history buffs — one likely to deepen your appreciation for the Chuckwallas’ national monument status. As we returned on the dirt road toward Interstate 10, we wondered if the current administration would follow through with its promise to dissolve the monument, opening the land to mining and oil and gas drilling.
For now, Corn Springs remains, as Henderson put it in 1945, “a haven of rest for those who come to the desert for peace and relaxation.”
Corn Springs Interpretive Trail
The ½-mile Corn Springs Interpretive Trail offers a light workout and an abundance of features that bring this storied nook of the Chuckwallas to life. Here’s what you can expect at each of the 12 stops along the loop:
Stop 1: The trail starts at the palm oasis. Native California fan palms (Washingtonia filifera), named after President George Washington, can grow up to 70 feet tall. These flowering plants point to the presence of surface water and were valuable to Native Americans, who ate its fruit and used its sturdy parts to make tools, utensils, and structures. Nearby tamarisk, or salt cedar, competes with native species for water.
Stop 2: Fire has damaged many palms in the grove. Dead, topless palms serve as nesting places for woodpeckers,
elf owls, and American kestrels, and their fallen fronds create shelter for ground dwellers.
Stop 3: Before you looms the Chuckwalla Mountain range, which gave its name to the surrounding wilderness. Part of the Colorado Desert section of the Sonoran Desert, it’s home to ocotillo, barrel cactus, and creosote bush, one of the world’s oldest living species, estimated to be 10,000 years old.
Stop 4: This is where prospector and painter Gus Lederer, the “mayor” of Corn Springs, built his cabin and lived with his burros from 1915 to 1932. He was buried at Aztec Well, 3 miles south of the campground.
Stop 5: Wild burros prefer the bitter-tasting white bursage over other available plants. Look for the rounded, grayish shrub with white stems.
Cross the dirt road to reach the next stop.
Stop 6: The ironwood tree in the wash along the right side of the trail produces a wisterialike flower in May and June. Native Americans used its hard wood for arrow points and tool handles. Parasitic desert mistletoe infests and eventually kills ironwoods, but the trees produce a gummy substance to protect themselves from the mistletoe’s seeds.
Head left, down the wash, to the next stop.
PHOTO BY STEVEN BILLER
Stop 7: Mesquite provided food and materials for the Indigenous people. They ate the sweet and nutritious beans raw or cooked, and fashioned its wood into shelter and furniture.
As you proceed down the wash, stop and rub the leaves of the green cheesebush to release an aroma some say resembles Roquefort cheese.
Stop 8: This is the palo verde, Spanish for “green stick.” In spring, its yellow flowers put on a beautiful display. Its wood is too soft to burn.
Stop 9: Native American petroglyphs date back about 10,000 years. Their meaning remains a mystery, although one theory suggests shamans created them to mark good hunting locations. An old east-west Indian trade route runs through Corn Springs.
Stop 10: These rocky outcroppings offer shelter and sunning spots for the chuckwalla, the mountain range’s chunky and harmless namesake lizard.
Stop 11: The low, rounded, silvery-gray shrubs seen on the ascent are brittlebush. They bloom with bright yellow flowers in the spring. Native Americans used brittlebush resin as a chewing gum, pain reliever, and incense base.
Stop 12: The desert willow, which loves washes and sports lavender, orchidlike flowers, marks the end of the trail.
From Interstate 10, take Exit 201 onto Chuckwalla Valley Road. Turn left on Chuckwalla Valley Road to reach Corn Springs Road. Turn right onto Corn Springs Road and drive 7.1 miles. You will see the Corn Springs Campground sign at the oasis. Turn right to enter. The fee to camp is $6 per vehicle.
