Barstow: Desert Junction of the Mojave

In the eighteen eighties this spot in the Mojave Desert was called Waterman Junction, a scrappy mining supply point where silver seekers heading for the Calico Hills caught the Southern Pacific. The Santa Fe Railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-eight and renamed the settlement Barstow, after William Barstow Strong, the railroad company's president. By nineteen eleven the Santa Fe had built the Casa del Desierto here, a grand Harvey House hotel in the Spanish Colonial style that fed and lodged rail passengers crossing the desert.

When Route Sixty-Six was designated in nineteen twenty-six, Barstow became the last significant California stop before Los Angeles, drawing Dust Bowl families and tourists alike. John Steinbeck's migrants in The Grapes of Wrath passed through this junction. Today Interstates Forty and Fifteen converge here, still making Barstow exactly what it has always been, a place where roads meet in the desert and travelers decide what comes next.