Peter Lebeck Chapter #1866

So why start a town in the Mojave Desert far from any easy source of water, and whose absurd idea was this anyway? That Inyokern would survive at all must have seemed like a real long shot in 1909; but what makes this little burg all the more remarkable is that this year we are celebrating Inyokern's 100th year of life as a high desert community.

Way back in 1909, Inyokern began as no more than a wishful thought beside a Southern Pacific railroad siding, a mere dry spot about half way between the rail junction at Mojave and the much more promising farmlands of the Owens Valley. During its lifetime Inyokern has even had the improbable status of being a navy town though it is located well over 100 miles from the nearest blue water. Cogitate that.

Now consider this: Inyokern lies in the Indian Wells Valley, a treeless plain in the northwest corner of the Mojave. To its west are the towering walls of the Sierra Nevadas, a daunting stone curtain thousands of feet high that plays all kinds of havoc with weather conditions at Inyokern. The shading effect of the Sierras limits moisture from the west, and alternately reflects heat and cold back onto the entire Indian Wells Valley.

As a result Inyokern can boast that it is the sunniest place in North America, with an average of 355 days of sunshine a year, but it also has an average annual rainfall of only three inches and total annual precipitation of about five inches if you count snow and freezing rain. With winter nights that can drop down below zero and summer days that can soar into the hundred-teens it would hardly be anybody's first choice as a place to start a town -- or anyone's best bet for one to survive.

Yet here it was, and here it has stayed. To grasp why, you have to understand a bit about the history of the American Railroads. Once the Civil War had ended in 1865 and the first transcontinental railroad was finally completed in 1869, rail became the principal tool used by business and government to open up and establish the west, including the interior of California. It wasn't just that railroad entrepreneurs saw money in moving people more quickly and conveniently between places people already lived; the railroad barons who eagerly laid down thousands of miles of new tracks hoped to realize big profits by creating entirely new markets for transportation. Their plans were to use trains to establish new towns along these new lines, and one of those towns would turn out to be Inyokern.

From our comfortable spot in the 21stCentury the whole scheme seems very alien to us. To look at a map today it seems like no big deal to get to Inyokern, just get on SR 14 or US 395, crank up the Ipod and turn up the air conditioning. But in 1909 there was no air conditioning, and automobiles were expensive and unreliable. The art of road construction through the desert was still in its infancy -- not much beyond picks, shovels and scrapers pulled by mules; and the grand daddies of these modern highways -- when not washed out -- were still made of dirt. Even assuming that you had a horseless carriage that was up to the challenges of US 395, in 1909, travel by ox cart would have been a surer proposition. In contrast, a rail car, running on steel rails would have been the era's ultimate expression of effortless travel.

So by 1908 the Southern Pacific Railroad executed on its plans to build the Lone Pine or "Jawbone" Line, a 140 mile long standard gage rail line connecting the Southern Pacific rail junction in the town of Mojave with the settlement in Owenyo in the Owens Valley. From Mojave the line moved northeast for about 45 miles to Searles, then turned northwest for another 20 miles toward present day Inyokern until reaching US Highway 395. The rails then turned north and headed for the Owens Valley, passing Owens Lake, then Lone Pine and finally stopping at Owenyo.

Hoping to cash in on lucrative traffic from ranching, mining and homesteading, the Southern Pacific didn't just build track, it incorporated numerous "sidings" or side tracks where trains sharing a single set of rails could make room to pass each other as well as stop to load passengers, freight and supplies. Think of their use in the early 20th Century as you might think of a bus stop today, only managed using conductors' precision pocket watches and steam fired railroad whistles.

The site of Siding 16 eventually became the site of the town of Inyokern, and from the beginning, the place had the luck of geography and history on its side. You see despite its location on a piece of rather inhospitable desert, Siding 16 was located in an active mining region; and just as importantly, it sat due east of Walker Pass, which led over the Sierras to the Kern Valley, which had ranches and farms that raised cattle and other produce that had to go to market. This made Siding 16 an obvious place for commerce, and it attracted new settlers almost immediately.

By 1909, a man named Robert Thompson had drilled the first well near Siding 16, and the future town of Inyokern was born - "future" because at first Inyokern's founders called it "Magnolia" - but make no mistake, this was the one and only "Inyokern." By the following year the Inyokern post office had marked its first cancellation, and over a hundred families were calling the valley their home. In 1913 a school was built, followed by the Inyokern Social Hall in 1914.

The building of the Owens Valley Aqueduct, which occurred between 1905 and 1913 (and which ended up leaving Owens Lake dry as a bone as its waters left for Los Angeles), also coincided with Inyokern's first period of growth and helped get the town established. Building materials, men and other supplies made their way through Inyokern on their way to the construction sites.

By 1920, Inyokern had over 350 registered voters and could boast two stores, a hotel, a church, a telephone switchboard, and a train depot where there was daily two way service for both passengers and freight. In 1923, Inyokern resident Clarence Ives graded the first landing strip at what was to become the Inyokern Airport, and then by the 1930's the state paved and improved US 395 and SR 6 (which it later renumbered SR 14).

These nice developments were most significant because in December of 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy paid a not very nice visit to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the United States Navy went looking for a suitable place to develop and test rockets and bombs so they could drop really, really good rockets and bombs back on the Japanese.

By 1943, the U.S. Navy had settled on Inyokern as a remote but accessible place for its new Naval Ordinance Test Station ("NOTS"), and by November 1943, the Navy had established its NOTS Headquarters at the Inyokern landing strip and proceeded to turn the little runway into a full blown military airport it called Harvey Field. Quonset huts served as buildings, the nearby desert was used to test fire missiles, and hundreds of civilian scientist, engineers and technicians were brought in to help with all this work which turned out not to be such a temporary thing.

For while the Navy's immediate objective might have been to blow up the Japanese military, its long term goal was to create a permanent missile development center where the U.S. could pursue cutting edge technology. And while Inyokern was a nice place to visit, the Navy ended up having to settle for a permanent site eight miles to the east where it could establish an even larger airport, laboratories and other technical facilities, all adjacent to a really big piece of desert where it could fire missiles to its heart's content. A new town would spring up in a place we now know as Ridgecrest, and the new naval station would become the China Lake Naval Weapons Center.

But before any of this could happen the Navy put much wear and tear on the Inyokern welcome mat. Contractors who built NOTS and the facilities at Ridgecrest faced a desperate labor shortage. Even now it's not easy to get people to move out to the high desert for work, but in 1944 there was a war on and labor was extremely scarce. Contractors hired convicts, prospectors, local Indians and laborers whose past boom towns had gone bust (or whose towns had tossed them out on their ears). Consequently the Inyokern population soared to over 10,000 people and the place became a wild and wooly boom town in its own right. Running water, sewers and electricity came with this explosion, as did a Bank of America branch, a newspaper, a Catholic church, and a courthouse, but so did several dance halls, a navy beer hall and a jail - and plenty of patrons to fill them all.

As one resident put it, if you had to name the favorite activities occupying the residents of Inyokern at the time, they would have been drinking, dancing, and gambling; along with street fighting, knife fighting, gun fighting, lady street walking and robbery. Many residents carried side arms for protection, and Inyokern had the true ambiance of a lawless, Wild West, frontier kind of a place. And just don't take our friend's word for it. Veterans of other boom towns often remarked that Inyokern exceeded all such places for fun and excitement. These old sourdough recalled World War II Inyokern as the West's last true frontier.

But much to the relief of the original residents, the fun eventually came to an end. By the close of 1946 basic construction at China Lake had been completed and many of the base related hires moved to Ridgecrest, while many of the now out of work drifters went back to drifting. Harvey Field was decommissioned in 1946 and returned to civilian use in 1947. As it came under Kern County control, the former military installation took the name "Inyokern Airport" and has remained so ever since.

With World War II receding into memory, the fate of Inyokern still remained tied in many ways to the fortunes of China Lake as Inyokern settled into being a kind of bedroom community. Once the construction boom was over Inyokern's population normalized, and the town began a period of slow but steady growth, that is until the military downsizing of the early 1990's caused reverses.

Today Inyokern remains a nice place to live, a family kind of place, with a stable population of about 1000 people. Its airport also continues to thrive, and features daily commuter airline services to Los Angeles International Airport. Literally "freeway close," Inyokern still has its own business block, airport, school, utilities, and other amenities; but sadly, the old rail line that gave Inyokern its first breath of life is a thing of the past. In its stead US 395 is now the major transportation artery used to serve the upper Mojave and the communities of the eastern Sierras.

The northern two-thirds of the Jawbone Line that once passed through Inyokern on its way to the Owens Valley was abandoned piecemeal by the Southern Pacific starting about 1963, and ceased to run completely by the mid-1970's. In many places the steel rails have disappeared, and what was left of the line now operates no farther north than Searles, where it connects with the 30 mile long, independently owned Trona Railroad, used to haul borax from the Trona mines.

In 1996, The Union Pacific Railroad purchased what was left of the Jawbone line and completely absorbed the Southern Pacific transportation company, so that in the end it was Inyokern that survived both the rail line and the railroad that led to its foundation. One Hundred years later, Inyokern is still here, something that should be considered Most Satisfactory.

-- MGM, with contributions from Lauranna Daniels

Click for the Inyokern Community site and to download their flier.
http://www.myinyokern.com/index.html
http://www.myinyokern.com/files/Centennial.pdf