GOFFS, CALIF. — Out on the great swells of the eastern Mojave Desert, that vast sand sea lying between Barstow and the Colorado River, there is no crumb of history, no tall tale, no arcane bit of knowledge too small to escape Dennis Casebier's notice.
"I'm fascinated by who ate rabbits," he said, sitting inside a library that will soon hold his life's work. "Did they eat jack rabbits or cottontails? Did they fry them or roast them? Did they grind them up or make stew out of them?"
"You see, that's the level of history we get into here," he said.
The soft-spoken retired physicist is a legend in this harsh land, a sort of Willy Wonka of the desert who transformed 70 acres of rock and scrub into the Goffs Cultural Center, his personal Xanadu of history and imagination.
In this tiny hamlet of 23 on the barren edge of the Mojave National Preserve, he and a group of volunteers carved roads and towed in ore carts, a defunct wooden post office, a caboose, windmills and boxcars. He bought a collapsing 1914 schoolhouse and turned it into a museum. His own Tales of the Mojave Road Publishing Co. has produced 26 books, 16 of which he wrote.
Yet none of it compares to his masterwork, the recently opened $1-million Dennis G. Casebier Memorial Library. Housed in a replica of the old Goffs Railroad Depot, the two-story, climate-controlled collection of thousands of books, maps, photos and tapes is the exclamation point on his arid passions.
Steve Mongrain, president of the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association, a nonprofit group that has helped raise money for the project, calls it "the most extraordinary historical collection of Mojave Desert history and culture in existence."
"There is nothing like it in the world," Mongrain said. "Anything that pertains to the Mojave can be researched there. It is unprecedented."
The association's 800 members donated $250,000 for the library, and the California Cultural and Historical Endowment provided the rest in grants.
Casebier, 74, has assembled the lost voices and hidden histories of a place largely washed clean of its past. The homesteads are gone, the mines closed, the tiny towns swallowed by sand.
Freight trains, some 6,000 feet long, still lumber through to Needles and beyond, but they rarely stop anymore because there are so few towns to stop in.
Gone too are characters such as gunfighter Bill Hollimon, who, when he wasn't shooting rivals, liked to pour gasoline down anthills and set them alight.
