Lone Pine

Images of America: California

by Christopher Langley

Lone Pine's history is as dramatic and violent as the magnificent landscape in which the town is located. Long before the first white settlers arrived during the Gold Rush, small groups of Paiute-Shoshone Indians lived in the area. With the discovery of gold and silver, miners and ranchers supplying food for the mines came into violent conflict with the native inhabitants between 1860 and 1865. In the 1870s, the Cerro Gordo mines (the largest silver strike in the state) buoyed the growth of Los Angeles. At the turn of the century, the City of Los Angeles clandestinely bought up land and water rights and initiated a period of conflict with the Owens Valley. In the 1920s, Hollywood discovered the Sierra Nevada Mountains and high deserts of the area. Over 400 films and countless commercials have been filmed in Lone Pine, featuring such stars as John Wayne, Gene Autry, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Stanwyck, and Brad Pitt.

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2007

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second of the Images of America series I have read from Arcadia Publishing. There is something both endearing and amateurish about the series, especially if one has a special feeling about the place or event being described. I visited Lone Pine in January of 2010 and 2012. Instead of just passing through the area as I used to do when I did some camping in the Eastern Sierras decades ago, I begin to appreciate the town of and by itself.

The history of Lone Pine is not like that of other desert towns: In addition to the usual Indian Wars (with the Paiutes and Shoshone) and mining (Cerro Gordo in nearby Keeler was the biggest silver strike in California), Lone Pine impacted on the history of Los Angeles in two very special ways. First, Los Angeles rather sneakily bought up most of the land so that it could steal its water. (See Roman Polanski's film Chinatown for a fictional retelling of how William Mulholland engineered the L.A. aqueduct, bringing water over two hundred miles across deserts and mountains to the thirsty city.)

Secondly, Hollywood found in the Alabama Hills just west of Lone Pine an ideal location for filming Westerns. Beginning with Fatty Arbuckle in 1920's The Round-Up, made just before his career went south with scandal. From 1920 on, the Alabama Hills saw John Wayne, Tom Mix, Jack Hoxie, Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Randolph Scott and countless other Western stars making the trek to the Owens Valley to incorporate its vast and gorgeous scenery into their movies.

The L.A. Aqueduct is still flowing, but Hollywood seems to have developed hardening of the arteries, so Lone Pine must depend on a very uncertain flow of strange tourists such as myself for it to survive. I hope it does, because I want to go back.

[Sundry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love that this book series exists to collect photographs of small towns across America. I would like to give this one a higher star rating, but I can't quite.

I didn't grow up anywhere near Lone Pine, but I've spent the last ten years visiting the area and reading about the local history. There's an awful lot left out. It makes me question the other books about places about which I know less.

Given that these books aren't really meant to be comprehensive histories, you'd think that great care would go into captioning the photographs. Many of the images in this particular collection don't have even a guess about what year they were taken in, and the organization seems a little random in spite of the chapter headings.

I was first drawn to the area because of its rich geologic history, and my favorite pictures are of damage after the 1872 earthquake there and of the main street in less traveled days.

I found it amusing that the author, in captioning a photo of people camping in the back country in the mountains above Lone Pine, said that the kids enjoyed "shacking up." Ha! I don't think he understands the sexual connotations there!