For years I wanted to write about a telegraph operator who ran a Southern Pacific Railroad station on the Salton Sea, at the same time raising her 12 children alone. Not only did she score a major legal victory for…
Growing up at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in Altadena, Tom Davis could look up and see roads heading up to the snowline and it filled him with longing—but he didn’t have a driver’s license yet. To fill…
After Mac (Mary Alice Cox) Schweitzer was found dead in her car on the Navajo Indian Reservation in 1962, her career as a modernist painter was largely forgotten. Through a turn of luck, her son Kit married an anthropologist named…
When Thomas Penniston wrote to ask if Agnes Pelton might have painted the painting he’d found online, of a fisherman in an Eastern stream, I doubted that she did. Would Hilma af Klint have painted a bear hunt in the…
Editor’s note: In a chapter from her forthcoming book, Sharman Apt Russell visits the Coso Rock Art Site near Ridgecrest. “Petroglyphs are something I travel toward,” she writes, describing the images as animate and full of Being. The Desert Dreams…
The 22-year-old traveling the stagecoach road from San Diego into the backcountry seemed destined to be a lady. Born Hazel Marguerite Finch, she was trained in piano and art in South Pasadena schools and was on her way to a…
