In the closing years of the 19th century, the high desert east of the Mojave River remained an open, largely untamed range. Springs and seeps—few and far between—dictated the paths people could take and where livestock could survive. One of the men who learned to read that dry landscape was Albert “Swarty” Swarthout, a cattleman from San Bernardino. Around 1896, Swarthout bought the Box S Ranch at the western end of what would later be called Lucerne Valley. There was good water at Box S, but the grass was thin, and the open range could not sustain his herds for long.
Looking east, Swarthout and a partner explored beyond the dry lake and low hills that now separate Lucerne from Johnson Valley. About fifteen miles beyond, they found a wide basin where water seeped from the ground almost year-round. It was a known Indian campsite—Old Woman Springs—and the place offered what Box S lacked: forage and permanent water. By 1897, Swarthout had moved his main operation there, establishing Old Woman Springs Ranch as his winter headquarters.
The move set up a pattern that would define desert ranching for decades: cattle spent winters on the desert floor and summers in the cool mountain meadows. Each spring, Swarthout’s crews gathered the stock at Old Woman Springs and began the drive westward. They followed the route that would one day become Highway 247, skirting the edge of Lucerne Dry Lake and stopping at Rabbit Springs—the same place where Peter Davidson had once operated a way station. From there, the trail led on to Box S Ranch, where water and feed were still dependable.
The real challenge came next: climbing out of the desert. The herds were pushed up through Cushenbury Canyon, a steep, rugged cut that rose toward Baldwin Lake and Big Bear. Wagons and cattle alike took this path, which A.A. Taylor had opened in 1883 for freighting supplies. Later generations would know it as Cushenbury Grade, the same steep road that trucks still use today. Once the cattle reached the top, they grazed the Heart Bar range, south of Big Bear Valley, through the summer.
Come autumn, the drive reversed. The animals came down the grade, crossed the Box S lands, drank at Rabbit Springs, and spread out again over the open country eastward toward Old Woman Springs for the winter. This cycle repeated year after year, marking a time when the rhythm of ranch life was tied to the seasons and the availability of grass and water.
By the early 1900s, Swarthout joined with J. Dale Gentry, expanding their holdings and coordinating the mountain–desert drives between Heart Bar Ranch and Old Woman Springs. The route they used linked some of the most important water sources in the western Mojave—the same line that explorers, surveyors, and freighters had followed before them.
Through the 1910s and 1920s, the Lucerne Valley floor slowly changed. Homesteaders fenced small tracts, planted alfalfa, and built schools. Property lines gradually hemmed in the old cattle trails, and the long drives began to fade. Trucks started carrying cattle where once they had walked. By the 1930s, the Swarthout–Gentry partnership had dissolved, and open-range ranching gave way to more settled forms of agriculture.
Even so, the tracks left by those early drives didn’t vanish—they hardened into roads. The route from Box S east to Old Woman Springs became Highway 247, and the grade up through Cushenbury Canyon became Highway 18 leading to Big Bear. Together they trace almost exactly the path Swarthout’s herds once took between the desert and the mountains.
By mid-century, new industries had replaced the cattle camps. The Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant rose at the base of Cushenbury Canyon, where herds once gathered for the climb. Lucerne Valley grew into a modest agricultural and residential community. Yet the shape of the land still holds the memory of those early drives—the long slopes, the hidden springs, and the dusty crossings where men and cattle paused for water before pushing on toward higher ground.
This version ties the people, the land, and the road system into one continuous story—showing how the Swarthout trail evolved naturally into the modern Highways 18 and 247 that still mark his path across the Mojave.
