“Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles”

The extraordinary tale of old-school “primitivist” Marshal South. In the 1930s and 40s, he and his wife Tanya made the monumental decision to move to a hand-made home on a rocky outcropping in California’s desolate, yet eerily beautiful Anza Borrego desert. They started a family and lived there entirely “off the grid” for 19 years. South documented his family’s experiences in a long series of popular articles published by The Desert Magazine.

The stories are accompanied by incredible photos that speak volumes about the Souths’ family life. What must it have been like, scratching out a living in the middle of the American desert, at the dawn of the atomic age? At the time, many Americans were fascinated by the opportunity of “homesteading” in the desert, one of America’s last frontiers where land was cheap and there for the taking.

Accompanying the image gallery are a few issues of The Desert Magazine featuring South’s “Desert Refuge” column about his family’s adventures in the desert. The magazines are like a time capsule in the sand. I found them in a vintage shop in Joshua Tree, California, six decades after they were first published. It appears that these particular issues were mailed to a subscriber in Tempe, Arizona in 1944, according to the neatly typewritten labels on the back covers.