Sunrise at Yaquitepec

In a lonely corner of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in Southern California lie the ruins of one man's dream. Marshal South had his income as a poet, writer, and painter swept away by the Great Depression. So he brought his wife Tanya and their three children to a remote desert mountain, where they hand-built an adobe house which they called Yaquitepec. They lived there for more than a decade in the 1930's and 40's, gathering much of their food from the desert and collecting rainwater in cisterns.

This is the story of my search for the ghost of Marshal South.

In the predawn darkness of March 3, 1990, I hiked the trail to the ruins of Yaquitepec. Here are the thoughts I jotted down during my visit:

4:00 a.m.
I arise and begin preparations for my hike. Weather is very windy and mostly cloudy. But it is not raining and I decide to leave the comfort of my warm sleeping bag for a night-time ascent of Ghost Mountain. I begin to question my sanity -- only an obsession would get me out on a night like this!

4:15 a.m.
I begin the steep 1-mile hike to Yaquitepec. The trail is steep and rocky, but well-maintained and easy to follow. Ocotillos and agaves loom like specters in the cool light of my lantern.

4:40 a.m.
I arrive at the ruins atop the ridge of Ghost Mountain. Alone like this on a dark, cold, windy night, I begin to understand why Tanya South longed for less lonely surroundings. The ruins are in a fairly decayed state. A few door and window frames survive, but they will not last long. Too much longer than they have already lasted, that is. The water cistern appears solidly built, and will be here for many years to come.
The wind is even stronger here on the ridge, and the scant ruins offer little shelter. I am going to try a few exposures.

6:50 a.m.
I am sitting on a granite boulder above the ruins that forms a natural throne. The view is impressive yet somewhat sad in its loneliness. The wind has not abated; indeed, on the ridge it is strong enough to blow one over. I think this [throne] must have been a favorite spot for someone in the South family to sit. Mountain ranges stretch far away to the south past Agua Caliente. I believe the sun has risen, but it is too cloudy to the east to be certain. To my right, the ruins of the adobe shack are nestled on its small plateau. I can see how this place must have felt like home to the Souths, but I also sense a remoteness and loneliness that must have made life here very difficult for them at times.
What kind of a man would bring his family to such a place? I do not think I shall find the answer here, nor even at South's grave in Julian if I can ever find it. Without living his life oneself, the only understanding to be gotten is from the writings he left behind. That is where the next part of my search lies.

7:00 a.m.
The sun is rising over the clouds and I must prepare to hike back down to the car. I have only been here a couple of hours, yet I feel a need to return to civilization and other people. I begin to realize how long 16 years up here must have been.

7:10 a.m.
The sun is finally rising above the clouds. With it I must leave Yaquitepec behind.

For several years in the early 1940's, Marshal South described -- and justified -- his "experiment in primitive living" in monthly articles for a magazine called The Desert. From the crumbling, yellowed pages of this long-defunct magazine, his voice spoke to me across the decades:

"Deep down, the seed--the seed of freedom and simplicity which the Great Spirit implanted in every breathing thing--still sleeps. It is not dead. In good time, when man has battered himself weary and bleeding into the dust, it will waken again to save him and to set his feet anew upon the trail ...
"It was almost sunset when we got home. The great ball of day-fire was slipping to its western rest in a flaming glory of crimson and of gold. The long shadows of mountains were marching across the lowland desert. The children were tired as we came up over the last section of the trail and the little home-house, low crouched among the mescals and giant boulders looked wonderfully welcoming and friendly."
-- The Desert Magazine, May 1942

"In the first place we get freedom. Freedom of mind and freedom of body. In this sunlit desolation of rock and thorn, where the sun beats down through an unending march of days and the desert silence which broods among the boulders and ocotillos is broken only by the harpings of wind. We can spread freely the net of our minds to gather those priceless, fundamental stirrings of the infinite which are most easily come by when one is close to nature ...
"Further, our 'unnatural turning aside' has brought us peace and contentment. It has brought us to the state of consciousness where each day is a separate jewel to be lived and enjoyed for itself. Where each hour is a living thing, filled with the singing joy of fundamental life. Of the whispered mysteries of the drifting wind, of the glad notes of the birds, of the flinting sparkle of sunshine upon rocky pinnacle or upon swaying thorn. It has given us a deep kinship and understanding with all nature, the abiding sense of the oneness of all things, a clearer perception of the glory of the Great Spirit, as much in the jeweled eye of the desert lizard as in the majesty of the desert dawn."
-- The Desert Magazine, August 1945

Besides Marshal South's articles, few records exist describing life at Yaquitepec. For the rest of the family, the experience was apparently less than idyllic; it ended when Tanya South divorced her husband. Neither she nor their children ever spoke again of their days on the mountain.

My personal quest for the ghost of Marshal South ended ten years after my hike to Yaquitepec, in the Julian Cemetery. I did not find his grave. But standing there among the tombstones gazing down at the peaceful, old-fashioned town below, I realized that I had found the answer to my question. What drives a man to remove himself from civilization? It is simply the longing in all of us to cast off the pressures of society, to return to a simpler time, to heed the call of the wild. Perhaps, we imagine, the happiness we all seek lies there. In most of us it is just an errant dream, but at Yaquitepec one man and his family lived the dream.

Tracks of the Overland Stage
by Marshal South

There's a valley I know in the wastelands
Where, down through the greasewood and sage,
Like a dim, ghostly thread from the years that have fled,
Stretch the tracks of the Overland Stage.

Lone, ghostly and dim in the starlight;
Grey, desolate and pale in the dawn,
Blurred by heat-waves at noon--still o'er mesa and dune
Wind the tracks of the wheels that have gone.

Old coaches whose wheels long have mouldered,
Old stage-teams whose hoofs long are dust;
Still, faint and age-greyed, wind the old wheel-ruts made
By tires long since crumbled to rust.

And down where the silence lies deepest--
Like a lone, crumbling bead on a thread--
In the mesquite-grown sands the old stage-station stands,
Hushed with memories--and ghosts of the dead.

The desert rays wake not its brooding.
But oft 'neath the star-powered sky,
Round the walls on dark nights there move dim, ghostly lights,
As once more the old stages sweep by.

And again, across dune, wash and mesa,
As the dead years turn back on their page,
Pass the dim, racing teams from a ghost-world of dreams,
Down the tracks of the Overland Stage.

Update 2005:

January 2005 brought two major (and long overdue) developments in the story of Marshal South: a marker was placed on his formerly unmarked grave, and the story of his life was published in a book.

The placing of the grave marker, in the Haven of Rest Cemetery at Julian, was arranged by Rider South, the oldest of three children born to Marshal and Tanya South during the years they lived at Yaquitepec. The inscription reads Father, Poet, Author, Artist. For those who wish to visit the gravesite, the town of Julian is located 40 miles northeast of San Diego; the entrance to the cemetery is at Main and "A" Streets. David Baumann provides the following detailed directions:

Here’s how to get to the gravesite. Tramp up Main Street to the cemetery, where you will find a staired path with railroad ties for steps. Main Street turns into Farmer Road at that point. Follow the zigzag path to the asphalted road that passes through the cemetery. There are upper and lower sections to the cemetery ... the asphalt road separates them. At the top of the path turn right, walk about ten feet along the road, and look right. The grave closest to the road is marked “Pringle.” South’s burial place is the fourth plot in the row from the road ... site marker “MM 53” ... between Hutson and Farrell.

The book is Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles, edited by Diana Lindsay and published by Sunbelt Publications. It includes a biography of Marshal, reminiscences by Rider of growing up on Ghost Mountain, and reprints of every article Marshal wrote for Desert Magazine between 1940 and 1948. This wealth of fascinating material clears up many of the mysteries of Marshal South's unusual life:

Marshal was born Roy Bennett Richards in Australia in 1889, and took the pen name Marshal South early in his writing career.
He had one child from a brief first marriage, before marrying his second wife Tanya in 1923. They moved to Ghost Mountain and started building Yaquitepec in 1930 or 1931.
From the start, family life at Yaquitepec included many conflicts which ultimately led to the divorce. The root cause seems to be that Marshal was a dreamer with little concern for worldly goods, while Tanya expected her husband to provide financial security for her and the children.
Marshal died in 1948, only 2 years after Tanya divorced him and he moved out of Yaquitepec. The strain of these events probably hastened his death; he was only 59 years old at the time.
Tanya had written her own account of life at Yaquitepec, but then destroyed the manuscript; a short autobiography which does survive contains only a few bitter words about "those terrible years." Tanya also destroyed almost all of her unpublished poems shortly before her death in 1997 at the age of 99.
Paintings by Marshal still decorate the interior walls of two buildings in Julian. He painted a historic mural in the Julian Library (now the Julian Realty building, next door to the Julian Chamber of Commerce), and a scene downstairs in the building that is now the Julian Town Hall.

In the December 1948 issue of Desert Magazine, editor Randall Henderson eulogized his friend Marshal South. Henderson's words echo the sentiments I wrote above, perfectly conveying the universal nature -- and the ultimate lesson -- of the Ghost Mountain experiment:

He was a dreamer -- an impractical visionary according to the standards of our time, but what a drab world it would be without the dreamers. Marshal's tragedy was that he tried too hard to fulfill his dream. He would not compromise. And that is fatal in a civilization where life is a never-ending compromise between the things we would like to do and the obligations imposed by the social and economic organization of which we are a part.

Marshal wanted to live a natural life, and so he moved out to Ghost Mountain to be as close to Nature as possible. If he had been a hermit that would have worked very well. But Marshal was not a hermit by nature. He wanted to raise a family -- and impose upon his family his own unconventional way of life.

Therein lay the weakness of his philosophy. He despised the rules and taboos of the society he had left behind, and immediately set up a new and even more restrictive code for his own household. And therein lies the explanation of the break in the South family life ...

... Marshal's magazine stories were popular because of the beautiful prose with which he expressed the dreams which are more or less in the hearts of all imaginative people. Those of us who knew him well, felt for him the respect that is always due a man with the courage of his convictions.

We'll miss his stories of the desert trails. We will remember him for the artistry with which he expressed ideals we all share.

Update 2007:
[ghosts_01_1555.jpg]

On December 29, 2006, I visited the Julian Cemetery one last time. It had been six years since my unsuccessful attempt to find Marshal South's grave, and sixteen years since my nighttime ascent of Ghost Mountain. This time I was finally able to stand at the resting place of Marshal South and say my farewell. It was a sunny and pleasant winter day; other people were strolling among the historic tombstones. What would I say, I wondered, if they were to notice me paying my respects at this particular grave, and ask me, Who was Marshal South? Any answer would not do justice to such a complex man. Perhaps I would simply answer: Marshal South was a person unlike any other, but at the same time like all of us.

Update 2010:

The newly-renovated visitor center at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park has a small display of personal items that belonged to Marshal South. The leather bookmark is enscribed Reading Maketh A Full Man.