Buckthorn Publishing blogs

John Hockaday's Blogs

John — Sat, 25 Feb 2017 16:44:09 +0000

This section contains writings, photos, stories, and historical insights by John Hockaday. Occasionally, newspaper articles pertaining to John and/or Cajon Pass and Route 66 are included.

“John Hockaday is an accomplished photographer and historical researcher focusing primarily on the Cajon Pass. John has two successful books, The Man Who Built Camp Cajon and From Indian Footpath to Modern Highway both part of his Trails & Tales of the Cajon Pass series. John has written for such publications as Spanish Traces magazine, a periodical of the Old Spanish Trail Association as well as the San Bernardino Sun newspaper. John participated in the National Park Service’s mapping project of the Old Spanish Trail and has conducted numerous education tours through Cajon Pass.”
California State University at San Bernardino, 2008 promotional flyer

Footpath to Highway

John — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 16:40:27 +0000

Way back when how far I don’t know
The San Andreas Fault put on quite a show
Then it did it again and with a terrible blast
Ripped out the place we call Cajon Pass

The Earth’s crust in the San Bernardino/Cajon Pass area is about 22 miles thick and it has a great big crack in it called the San Andrea Fault. It marks the boundary between two large chunks of the earth’s crust called plates. Because the Pacific Plate is trying to move northwest two inches a year faster than the North American plate, the tremendous pressure built up by all this has pushed up two mountain ranges: the San Gabriels on the Pacific Plate and the San Bernardinos on the North American Plate. The gap between the two is known as the Cajon Pass.

Fossils can be found in the Pass that date back 9 million years, microscopic marine life to the more recent miniature camels and horses. In a Southern Pacific Railroad cut back in 1967, when they were building their Palmdale cut-off through the pass, they found a whale vertebra and the list goes on.

Then people showed up,
from where I don’t know
And started using the Pass
to get to and fro

Indian artifacts found in the Pass date back 5 and 10 thousand years. Ute legend has it there has been a trade route from their Utah Great Basin area to the Southern California coast for more than 10,000 years. The Mojave were the master traders. From their villages along the Colorado River near today’s Needles, California, trade routes struck out in every direction. These footpaths, for thousands of years, were the main arteries of that era. Artifacts from the southern California coast have been found all over the southwest and as far east as the Pecos River. Jogging is nothing new. Specially chosen individuals, sometimes called runners, could cross the vast Mojave Desert to the coast in less than five days. Although bitter enemies of some of the other tribes, the Mojave were tolerated only for the purpose of trading and were not to be molested in any way even in time of war.

From the Mojave villages, the trail to the coast went west across some of the driest parts of the desert before reaching the life-saving water of the Mojave River. Along the river, just eats of today’s Daggett, California, the Ute trail came in from the north. During the wagon era, this junction was called “Forks in the Road”. From here, two trails became one and followed the river to its source near the Indian ranchería Guapiabit on the west fork of the River near today’s Silverwood Lake.

From here, the old trail when up what is known today as Sawpit Canyon (elev.), crested the San Bernardino Mountains the down a long ridge into the San Bernardino Valley. After passing the Santisima Trinidad ranchería, sometimes called Amupke, and crossing Lytle Creek it rounded the east end of the San Gabriel Mountains with various trails leaving and rejoining the main trail as it made its way southwest towards the coast and the villages at today’s San Pedro harbor who traded with the Catalina Island people.

Slim

John — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 23:43:05 +0000

Here's a poem I wrote about retirement and I blamed it on a guy named “Slim”.

Slim

When it came to retiring

Here’s what he had to say.

It’s something you can do more than once

And in a lot of different ways.

But sometimes just thinking about it

Can get you in one hell of a mess.

You might find yourself

on a new quest.

With a lot more time to get

A lot less done

While racing along with the sun.

Some people start each day with nothing to do

And have it half done by noon

But that wasn’t for Old Slim I guess

He sometimes didn’t get started ‘til noon

But still loved a good quest.

He said, “All you are is what you’ve done,

So you better stay busy before the sun sinks too low

Or you might end up with nothing to show.”

He lived his life

Not like some of the rest

Right or wrong he did things

The way he felt was the best.

When it comes to Old Slim

A lot more could be said

He didn’t really retire

‘Til his life was all done.

He’d ran one hell of a race

With that old setting sun.

My Family and Early Years

John — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 23:05:48 +0000

Dad and his family came to Guthrie in a covered wagon from Saint Jo, Missouri in 1898 when he was 5 years old, 9 years after the famous land rush. Everything the family owned was on that wagon even Dad's pet rabbit.

While crossing the Cimarron River, the team balked and started settling in some quick sand. Grandpa's brother, Uncle Albert, who had come along on the trip to help out, saved the day. He jumped into the river with a terrible splash shouting and splashing water at the team with both hands. The startled team, not wanting to have anything to do with Uncle Albert, soon had the wagon high and dry on the Guthrie side.

Dad spent nearly forty years in Guthrie watching the town grow. He met mom in 1910 at the one room Prairie Grove School, when she was 12 years old. Mom and her family moved to California in 1920. They stayed in touch by mail. Mom was pretty much an old maid and Dad a successful bachelor and kind of a hermit when they got together more than ten years later. Mom found out that Dad might be getting interested in someone else. She panicked and headed for Guthrie in her old Dodge; her brother, John, came along as chaperone and co-pilot.

They decided to get married but Dad got cold feet and tried to back out of the deal on the courthouse steps. Uncle John said he grabbed him just in time before he got away and was able to convince him of the benefits of married life or I wouldn't be telling this story.

I left Oklahoma too young to get to know my Grandpa Hockaday. Dad eventually lost the two houses he owned in Guthrie and his Dad's farm mostly because of the move to California at the height of the Depression.

After living in California for ten years Mom hated Oklahoma. Dad said when we got to California he had only 50 cents in his pocket and had to start over. We lived an old one-room shack in the orchard behind Grandma and Grandpa Loofborrow's place in Pomona for nearly ten years. I got to know the Loofborrow clan real well.

Stepping back a bit for the Loofbourrow side of the story to catch up:

We’ll get started by going back to Oklahoma. This is my Mom’s side of the family, the Loofburrow clan on their Oklahoma farm in 1904 back when horses and mules were doing most of the pulling.

In 1920, Grandpa sold the farm, loaded grandma and their 7 ½ kids into two Model T Fords and headed for California camping at night along side the road or in city parks. Uncle John said the road that crossed the desert was just two ruts in the sand but when they got to the paved road at the summit of Cajon Pass, Grandma thought they’d finally got to California.

When they got to Pomona they camped in Ganisha Park for a week while Grandpa looked for some land with a house on it. He bought 3 acres and a house at 1408 West Grand.

Besides his family, Grandpa Loofbourrow loved to work, garden, go fishing, smoke his pipe and have a good laugh. His favorite song was, "Under the Double Eagle".

Because he saw me get my tricycle stuck in a big mud puddle once, he named me 'Stick-in-the-mud'. He showed me how to catch gophers and paid me 5 cents for each tail.

He sometimes rented one of Jobs' mules to help with the work around the place. One day I got a demonstration. He named the various parts of the harness and showed me how to put them on the mule and hook him to the plow.

While plowing he could drive the mule with the lines wrapped around him, one under his right arm and the other over his left shoulder and guide the plow with one hand while he thumbed the loose tobacco in his coat pocket into his pipe with the other. Then he lit it with one of those old wood matches all in one continuous motion without even slowing down.

One time when a car that wouldn't run blocked part of the driveway for three or four days, Grandpa got tired of it and hooked the mule to it and towed it away around back. Once when I accidentally broke one of his windows with my slingshot he charged me $2.50, gave me some work to earn the money then made me stand there and help him fix it.

I don't remember him ever having any teeth; he chewed his steak on the plate with his pocket knife. Split the kernels on an ear of corn with his knife so he could gum it off the cob. I think he only shaved once a year, he didn't look like my Grandpa until it grew back.

He loaned me $35 to buy my first car.

I only have seen him wear his false teeth twice, once for their 50^th wedding photo and when they buried him. There is a lot more but there probably isn't enough room for it here so I left a lot of stories out.

John Hockaday -December 2005

Cajon Pass: An Expert History

John — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:55:52 +0000

Written by Mark Muckenfuss, for Route 66 In the News, Press-Enterprise in summer of 2007

CAJON PASS, Calif. - Thousands of hikers pass through this section of the Pacific Crest Trail each year. Probably very few realize they are treading in the footsteps of early pioneers and ancient people.

This narrow cut that shoots off to the east just south of the truck scales on northbound Interstate 15 has been known as Coyote Canyon, East Cajon Canyon and Crowder Canyon. For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years it was a main American Indian thoroughfare between the desert and the San Bernardino Valley.

On his exploratory expedition for the Mormons in 1849, Jefferson Hunt and his small caravan struggled through the creek bed of the canyon on their way to the coast. And when commerce was established, John Brown blasted the first graded road, his toll road, through here. Remnants of the pavement laid over that original toll road still remain.

John Hockaday is quick to point out where the wagon road and, later, motor road entered the canyon.

"The road came along that ledge there," says Hockaday, pointing to the south side of the canyon where the concrete support for a long-gone bridge remains. The pavement peeking out from the dirt path, he says, "is some of the original road, a nine-foot wagon road built in '09."

Then he points to pavement of a lighter color, overlaying some of the darker asphalt.

"This is the evolution of the blacktop," he says. "By 1914, they were using a crushed limestone aggregate," which shows up as a medium gray against the black.

It's these kinds of layers that Hockaday peels back on a brief tour of the roads that run through the pass. His deeply lined face and wispy white beard give Hockaday, 74, the appearance of an old prospector. But the only treasures he's pulled from this region are historical nuggets. For decades he has explored the routes that connected the desert and the valley and the people that used them, producing two books on the subject. His most recent is "Trails and Tales of the Cajon Pass" (Buckthorn Publishing, $39.95), a book 15 years in the making.

Although fascinated with the archaeological history of the region, Hockaday has no formal training. He says he's just a former construction worker who loves history and became interested when a neighbor told him the original wagon road into the San Bernardino Valley crossed the property Hockaday lives on at the mouth of Lytle Creek Canyon.

He did some research. After he found out that the wagon road actually followed what had been the Mojave Indian trail into the region, he says, "I just kept going."

He and his late wife, Sandy, dug through collections as far away as UC Berkeley, gathering copies of documents and historical photographs. He gathered material from swap meets, garage sales and donations from friends. He took his own photographs, including a series of aerial views, some of which reveal not only the modern Interstate 15, but also its predecessors from Route 66 to the first wagon road.

At various stops in the canyon, Hockaday looks up and points to spots at the top of canyon walls and hills where he's taken photos in the past. He's hiked to just about every vista in the pass, he says.

Desert historian Cliff Walker says Hockaday is the expert on Cajon Pass.

"I don't know how you could get anybody that knows more about it," says Walker. "He's had it as a passion for 20 years."

Walker says Hockaday's book has added to the local historical record.

"We didn't know some of those things that he has compiled," he says, "He's uncovered some important documents."

Hockaday can even show you the routes when there were no roads. When Jefferson Hunt's expedition came through, it was following Indian footpaths. It had to navigate the rocky creek bed in Crowder Canyon.

"They said this was the toughest section of road anywhere between here and Salt Lake," Hockaday says. "When Jefferson Hunt tried to come through with wagons, they got in trouble and had to disassemble the wagons."

The wagon bodies were dragged through the creek and the wheels were put back on at a site that became known as the Willows, a lush area just on the other side of Interstate 15 from Crowder Canyon.

For the Mormon wagon trains and those that followed, this was the first watering spot after leaving the Mojave River at what is now Oro Grande. Prior to the white settlers, the small oasis was host to American Indians for centuries.

"There's thousands of artifacts here," Hockaday says, noting that the area provided not only water but food and materials the Indians needed for tools and houses. "This was their Home Depot, their Stater Bros. It was all right here."

Now owned by the San Bernardino County Museum, the area is closed off for renovation. An interpretive center is planned for the site.

This was a focal point for just about every pre-Route-66 road coming through the pass, and there were plenty of them.

"Cajon Pass is actually a box canyon with a series of notches," says Hockaday. "I can come up with eight ways to get out of Cajon Pass using some of those notches. The roads evolved by way of least resistance."

As technology developed, however, that was no longer the case.

Standing on the shoulder of the road in a section of old Route 66 known as Blue Cut, Hockaday points to a line of trees on the east side of the road. The trees follow the original bed of Cajon Creek. The early paved wagon road ran between the trees and the steep hillside behind them.

Highway engineers for Route 66 decided that rather than build two bridges to cross the creek in this area - there wasn't enough room to simply widen the existing road -- they would reroute the creek itself.

Half a mile north, Hockaday points out the erosion that has revealed layers of asphalt. The lower layer is the 1916 road, the upper layer the 1931 widening project.

Those who travel through the pass on a regular basis can easily relate to such changes. Cal Trans recently finished a widening project near the intersection of interstates 15 and 215. And a new rail line is soon to be added.

Hockaday says he doesn't like to think about the changes yet to take place and what Cajon Pass might look like in another 100 years.

"I like to go back instead of forward," he says. "Going forward is kind of scary."

2007-07-17

Man Unearths History

John — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:54:13 +0000

The following was written by Nita Hltner for the Press-Enterprise in the summer of 2011

A look back: Man unearths history of thoroughfare

Little did John Hockaday realize buying land and building a house on Lytle Creek Road 40 years ago would lead him to research the Spanish Trail and other landmark trails in the area. He recently presented his information to the San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society.

Hockaday said a local, Grandpa Gretchel, told him about an old wagon road, and soon Hockaday found that the Spanish Trail, Mojave Indian Trail and the Los Angeles to Cajon wagon road all went through his property.

He said that Ute legend tells of a trade route from Utah to the California coast, used for thousands of years. The Mojave Indians were master traders from their villages near Needles. The Ute trade route joined the Mojave Trail and followed the Mojave River to near today's Silverwood Lake.

The trail continued over the San Bernardino Mountains to near the mouth of Cajon Pass, past the Indian village, San Tissima Trinidad, in the lower end of the Glen Helen Hills. After crossing Lytle Creek, it rounded the east end of the San Gabriel Mountains toward the coast.

The Cajon Pass section became the west-bound favorite of the New Mexican traders, leaving the main trail and the river at today's Oro Grande and following the Oro Grande Wash to today's Summit Inn. It reached the main canyon at the Rancheria Muscupiabit, partly buried by the I-15 truck scales complex. The trail continued to Glen Helen Park before it turned west. Hockaday said the 16- to 18-inch wide trail can still be seen in the desert.

The famous have traversed the trail, including Father Garces, the first non-Indian to use the main trail, in 1776. Other famous travelers included mountain man Jedediah Smith in 1826 and trappers Ewing Young, Peg Leg Smith and Kit Carson in 1829.

After selling pelts to American sea captains along the coast, Peg Leg Smith terrorized the Los Angeles pueblo, stealing and driving 300 horses through the Cajon Pass to Utah, the beginning of the horse thieving industry.

New Mexico trade began in 1829 when Antonio Armijo put together the first mule train caravan loaded with trade goods to take to California. The caravan began in November, but by January the travelers turned to its horses, then its mules for food. The caravan passed the Cajon summit on Jan. 28 and reached the San Gabriel Mission Jan. 31.

New Mexican wool was traded for horses, mules and cattle, all more valuable outside California. Trade goods from ships along the southern California coast went through the Cajon Pass to New Mexico for the next 20 years. Horse thieves preferred the lush route between Cajon Pass and Summit Valley so they could fatten up the horses for the long desert trek.

In April1848, a caravan led by J. I. Martinez included one woman, 209 men, 4,500 horses and mules, the largest and last of its kind, crossed the desert on the 1,200 mile journey to New Mexico, the end of a "colorful era."