Jackrabbit Homesteads: How Ordinary People Came to Own the Mojave

by C. V. Wooster · October 5, 2026 · 4 min read

Drive through parts of the Mojave Desert today, especially around Twentynine Palms, Wonder Valley, and Landers, and you will see something strange: small, square cabins scattered across the open desert, many of them abandoned, each standing alone on its own patch of sand. They are the remains of one of the odder land programs in American history. People called them jackrabbit homesteads.

Mrs. Orcutt's Driveway is the story of one widow and her 100 acres east of Newberry, not a jackrabbit homestead. But the mid-century wave of people who moved onto desert land, often with little money and big hopes, is the background to her story. This post explains how that happened.

The Small Tract Act of 1938

On June 1, 1938, Congress passed the Small Tract Act. It allowed the Secretary of the Interior to sell or lease tracts of public land of up to five acres for use as a home, cabin, camp, health site, recreation site, or business site. The land had to be judged chiefly valuable for those uses rather than for farming or mining.

In practice, the Bureau of Land Management, created in 1946, ran the program. An applicant would lease a five-acre tract, usually for a modest fee. To buy the land, the lessee generally had to "prove up" by building a small structure within a set period. Once the requirement was met, the lessee could purchase the tract, often for a low price.

The program started slowly. After World War II, it took off.

Why the desert filled up

Several things came together in the late 1940s and 1950s. Southern California's population was booming. Veterans had savings and a taste for independence. Cars were cheaper and roads were better. And the desert had its own appeal: dry air that doctors sometimes recommended for respiratory illness, low land prices, and the promise of a quiet place of one's own.

The Small Tract Act made that dream affordable. Thousands of people applied for tracts in the Mojave, particularly in the Morongo Basin. Many built the minimum cabin required to prove up, often a simple wooden box of a few hundred square feet, sometimes without water or power. Some used them as weekend retreats. Some lived in them full time. Many were eventually abandoned when the owners aged, moved, or simply lost interest.

The program was repealed by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which changed how public land was managed across the West. The cabins remain as a strange, scattered monument.

Land ownership in the desert, more broadly

The Small Tract Act was only one route to owning desert land. Others bought from railroads, which had received large grants of land in alternating sections along their lines in the nineteenth century. Some bought from earlier homesteaders or from private developers who subdivided large holdings. Some acquired land through older homestead laws.

Each route left its own paper trail: patents from the federal government, deeds from private sellers, leases, and county records. When a highway project came through decades later, those papers determined who owned what, who had to be paid, and what access rights went with the land.

That is one reason the details of land records matter so much in a story like Bonnie Orcutt's. Who owned the driveway? Was it a private track or a public right of way? When was it created, and by whom? The answers lived in deeds and county files, and they shaped what an owner could ask for.

Women and desert land

One detail of the homestead tradition is worth mentioning. Under the older Homestead Act of 1862, single women and widows could file claims in their own names, and many did. Historians have documented thousands of women homesteaders across the West. The Small Tract Act was likewise open to anyone who could meet its terms.

That history makes a widow living alone on desert land in the 1950s and 1960s less unusual than it might first seem. What made Bonnie stand out, according to the people who knew her and the records the book draws on, was not that she lived there. It was how she responded when the interstate came. A neighbor described her as "a tiny thing, probably four feet seven. A real pistol."

Visiting the cabins

If you want to see jackrabbit homestead cabins for yourself, the Morongo Basin around Twentynine Palms and Wonder Valley has the most visible clusters. Some have become art projects, rentals, or restored homes. Many are still private property even when they look abandoned. Look from the road, do not enter structures, and do not take anything.

The Newberry Springs area has its own scattered desert homes and ranches along the old road. The same rules apply there. Bonnie's house is not a tourist stop, and the people living in the area today deserve their privacy.

Why this matters to the story

The interstate builders of the 1960s were not crossing empty land. They were crossing a patchwork of small holdings, many owned by people who had come to the desert for independence and cheap land. Those owners were often far from lawyers, newspapers, and government offices. When a freeway threatened their access, they had to figure out the system on their own.

Mrs. Orcutt's Driveway follows one of them. The book is built on her letters, her land, and her refusal to be moved.

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