Walker Pass, Freeman Junction, Coyote Holes & Robbers Roost

You're sitting at one of the busiest crossings in this grand desert we call the Mojave. Long before this ribbon of highway was laid running north south, this was a major junction of Indian trails fanning out from a desert spring. The Numu or Paiute tribe, the Kawaiisu, and Shoshone people all well knew the water here. Their bedrock mortars worn into nearby stone mark generations of camps and grinding of seeds.

In 1834 the explorer, trapper and frontiersman, Joseph R. Walker followed their and other tribes long used trails to surmount the southern sierras and drop into the desert valley on their eastern flank. Walker and his party came down through the pass that now bears his name and he crossed right here at what we call Freeman Junction today and he undoubtedly drank some water and filled his canteens.

Fifteen years later, parties of gold seeking forty-niners who had staggered their way out of Death Valley reached this same point and split up. Some went west toward the goldfields, and some south toward Los Angeles. This junction is as much a parting point as it is a gathering point.

Around 1873, an old forty-niner named Freeman S. Raymond built a stage station at the crossing and called it Coyote Holes. He was an oasis in the parched desert terrain and took to watering teams hauling up the Owens Valley and the Cerro Gordo silver mines, and the small but growing city of Los Angeles to the south with banks to hold and loan against the silver mined 200 miles to the north.

On a February day in 1874 the bandit Tiburcio Vásquez tied old Freeman to a tree and held up the freighters and stage, taking silver and a Wells Fargo box.

He and his fellow bandido, Clodoveo Chavez, had scouted the ambush from the stark granite outcrops just west of you — known ever since as Robbers Roost, and listed on the National Register in 1975. From those crags a lookout could see wagons coming for miles across the valley.

Raymond ran the station until his death in 1909; and the building burned soon thereafter.

Today the buried Los Angeles Aqueduct slips quietly below the sand at the same junction the first peoples, the freighters, and the bandits all toured before us.