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.
"The history is just everywhere, yet nobody is here. It's empty," said Casebier, an especially polite man who speaks with great precision.
"The people have gone, their life ways ended somehow. We are gathering the history of this forgotten land, and we have done so with a vengeance."
On a recent morning, Casebier rattled around the library, dipping in and out of the new filing cabinets. Each one contained dozens of subject files filled with personal histories.
Harrison Doyle?
"He's the oldest guy I ever interviewed, 103 or 104," Casebier said. "He was walking the streets of Needles in the early 1900s."
Llewellyn Barrackman?
"Former headman of the Fort Mojave Indians."
Betty Ordway?
"She was like the Rosetta Stone," he said. "She came here in 1914 and knew everyone and remembered everything. She knew the gunfighters and the homesteaders and where the stills were. She was the belle of the valley."
Tucked away in library cabinets are 3,000 biographies, 1,000 taped oral histories, 108,000 photographs, 6,000 books and 6,000 maps, ready for perusal by those Casebier believes demonstrate "an advanced interest in the desert."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., consulted Casebier and used information from his collection when writing "Searchlight: The Camp That Didn't Fail," a book about his hometown.
"This book is better because of Dennis," he wrote in the preface.
Students working on master's degrees have come to study the homestead period and the military history of the region. Thousands of soldiers were stationed in the Mojave during World War II. Many of their personal accounts are on file in the library.
Casebier's own history in the desert began in 1954, after he left his home state of Kansas and enlisted in the Marines. He was stationed in Twentynine Palms and spent his free time poking around what is now Joshua Tree National Park.
"It was love at first sight when I saw the desert," he said. "It's different for everybody, but for me it was the wide open spaces and maybe the simplicity."
He returned to Kansas in 1956, got a degree in physics from Washburn University in Topeka, and returned to California in 1960. He worked on guided missile systems for the Navy and lived in Corona.
Meanwhile, his passion for the desert led him into the eastern Mojave, where he was smitten by what he dubbed "the forgotten country" encircled by the Colorado River and the I-40 and I-15 freeways.
There, he found an awe-inspiring emptiness.
