1881-Nicholas Cochran passed through the Valley on the train and recognised its agriculture! possibilities.
1883-The first artesian well in the Valley was sunk near the Southern Pacific track for locomotive use. Soon after this, several men from Sacramento, connected with a bank there and other businessmen of that city, purchased land from the railroad company and prepared to colonize the Valley.
1884-M. L. Wicks purchased 60 sections from the railroad company at two and one-half dollars an acre, laying out a townsite in streets and lots.
An English corporation called the Atlantic and Pacific Fibre Company, with Col. Gay and Mrs. Payne as managers and J. A. Graves of Los Angeles as attorney, contracted to furnish paper for the London Daily Telegraph. They bought up a good deal of yucca land around the Valley and sent a large number of Chinese laborers in to cut doum the trees…
The early streets of Lancaster were easy to find. Starting at 8th St., now Avenue I, continuing South, the streets were 9th and 10th (now Lancaster Blvd.), 11th and 12th streets. Starting at Antelope Avenue, now Sierra Highway, and going west were: Beech, Cedar, Date, Elm and Fern…
– Lancaster Celebrates a Century
There was snow on the Joshua trees. It rested on and between the spines. It was as if giant cotton bolls had grown thorns. Jonathan made Ira stop the car for yet another photograph. Jonathan photographed the clouds in the sky, the points of the spines, the snow on the ground. Jonathan shivered in shorts and a baseball hat with a short ponytail sticking out the back. He hopped back into the car with an actor's brown-legged spring, and a flash of a perfect smile.
"I'm a photo-realist actor," he said.
"You're playing a Joshua tree," said Ira. "Good. I'm glad. It's got to be better than most of those parts you play." Ira was a lawyer. He worked in offices and was plump and pale.
"Private or otherwise. Listen, just content yourself. I could have another hobby, like practicing the drums. Drive on, MacDuff."
"Jonathan?" Ira asked. "Mind telling me what we're doing here?"
Jonathan just smiled, gave his eyebrows a Groucho Marx wiggle. They both adored Groucho Marx. Ira adored living with Jonathan. It made life more interesting. Ira was very proud of living with Jonathan. The guy was maybe seven years older than he was, but already some people thought Jonathan was younger. He did strange, slightly mysterious things like this, drag Ira out to Lancaster, with a secret smile. Ira was so proud that he wished he could tell the people at work about Jonathan. But it was easier if they thought he lived alone and pitied him. Ira carefully looked over his shoulder before signaling and pulling out.
Ahead the road stretched straight for miles. The distant hills were either blue and smooth or rocky and craggy. There was nothing on them, not even a pimple of shrub. A perfect desert complexion.
"Why would anyone come to live here?" Ira asked.
"House prices," said Jonathan. "And anyway, it didn't used to be like this. There used to be grasslands and so many rabbits there was a plague of them. People came and it just stopped raining. The climate changed. They don't know why."
They came to a town called Pearblossom and another called Littlerod. There were tiny, wooden-frame houses that were like a child's stereotyped drawing of a house.
"Woe-hoe!" said Jonathan, which meant photo stop. Just outside of Littlerod, there was a stone ranch-style house with a low wooden front porch. The car's turn signal went click click click and Ira pulled the car over to the side. They kept pulling over. Jonathan scanned the landscape, scanned maps, his eyes fierce, his hair in spikes.
In Palmdale, Jonathan nearly killed them both. Hunched over a map, he suddenly shouted, "Turn! Turn here, now!"
With an illegal but magisterial sweep, the car did a U-turn. There was a screech of brakes and Ira found himself hemmed in by other vehicles in the middle of the intersection. Ira's breath was taken away. "This better be worth it," he said. As if embarrassed, the car crept forward into a broken, ordinary street.
"What's wrong with Highway 14?" Ira asked.
"It's not from Back Then," said Jonathan. "This is the old Sierra Highway. See? The old railway tracks run beside it." His voice was hushed with something like lust. The car tires hummed a broken melody on the road surface.
"Woe-hoe!"
Jonathan stopped to photograph an old water tower, perched on wooden beams, with a faded, flaking advertisement painted in a circle on it. They passed a low, stricken arcade of brick shops-"Happy Hocker Pawn Shop." Jonathan photographed that, too.
"Why?" Ira asked.
"It shows no one uses this road anymore."
Jonathan stopped to photograph a railroad sign.
"Doesn't it take you back?" he asked. "I haven't seen a warning sign like that in maybe ten years." The warning sign had a round black plate with a long, sheltering hood over the light. In front of the crossing, there was a wooden X painted black and white. Jonathan photographed that too. When Jonathan started to photograph the telephone poles, Ira felt compelled to ask him why again.
" 'Cause of this little plate on it, see, embossed? Pure thirties." The picture was taken.
"What I mean is why do you do this at all? This whole thing?"
Jonathan smacked his lips as if tasting something. "I'm trying to piece it together."
"But why?" Their feet crunched in companionable unison back along the soft shoulder toward the car.
"Oh," said Jonathan, bundling himself into the car. He looked preoccupied. He put on a pair of mirror shades. Somehow, Ira knew, he gave Jonathan the confidence to dress as he did, despite his age, despite himself. Ira knew Jonathan was shy; Jonathan was quiet.
Ira eased the car back onto the road. Jonathan answered the question.
"I do it so that I can see it. Back Then, I mean. I want to see it, so I can catch some of the flavor. Of the people."
"So you can act them?"
"Maybe sometime. I just get this strange feeling of something gone. It makes me love it. I even fancy the guys in the old sports photographs. It's because they're gone, now, or old."
"I get it," said Ira. "It's necrophilia."
"It's just that, in some of those old photographs, only a few of them, they're so clear, like they were taken yesterday, you could almost just walk into the street, with the wooden houses and the funny windows and the cars with canopies, and the guys with straw boaters. And some of the faces, only some of the faces, you can see who they were, what kind of people. And some of them-some of the old flinty-eyed kind-they might as well be Martians."
"They didn't like being photographed either." Ira hated photographs of himself.
They went first to the public library. They nearly always did on Jonathan's expeditions. The library was on Avenue J.
"Imaginative street names."
"Oh hey, that's nothing, you want confusion, it used to be that all the streets running east to west were numbered. Then they turned them around sometime so the numbered streets run north to south. So you can never tell from a photograph if Tenth Street means Lancaster Boulevard or not."
"So who wants to know?" Ira asked. "Except you?"
AIDS? asked a cheery poster inside the library. YOU'RE NOT ALONE.