Goffs & its schoolhouse: The historic cultural center of the East Mojave desert (Tales of the Mojave Road)

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2000-09-27
Summary: "A Gem in the Desert"

Goffs, like countless little towns sprinkled across the desert, refuses to go away. Located, according to the Hobbs Grade and Surface Guide, reproduced on the copyright page, at the "top of the hill out of Needles," and half way to Amboy, Goffs became a convenient stopping place for explorers, traders, miners, railroaders, and travelers of all kinds. The guide bragged of "garages, gasoline, groceries, and auto court, the Goffs Hotel, Wayside Inn, Goffs Café, and many other services" in Goffs.

And it could have added that Goffs had a schoolhouse, a mission style wood frame and stucco over steel mesh structure built in 1914 to serve Goffs and area ranches and mines.

Goffs & Its Schoolhouse is a beautiful book, expensively printed on glossy pages, with a handsome book jacket. It lists all the teachers as well as all the students who attended during the school's tenure from 1911 to 1937 (the school started in 1911, but the present structure was not built until 1914). Also the book of pictures of cowboys, miners local leaders, trains, a 1920's version of a Greyhound bus, schoolchildren (boys with cloth caps and bib overalls, girls in cotton dresses and long stockings), and of course, the schoolhouse in its various stages of use, neglect, and rebirth.

But Goffs & Its Schoolhouse is not entirely about the school. Casebier offers up many vignettes that give the reader a good sense of life at Goffs and surrounding areas.

The most interesting of the tales are his accounts of the several shootouts that took place in the 1920's. In one, two prospectors quarreling over a mining claim, Joe Larrieu and John A. Kousch, met High Noon style in the dusty street in front of the Goffs Hotel. They drew their six-shooters simultaneously, and let fly hot lead until all twelve combined chambers were emptied. The first bullet to take effect hit Larrieu's foot, and then another struck him in the calf of his leg. While on the ground Larrieu fired off a round into Kousch's thigh. A stray bullet ripped through the shoulder of a bystander scrambling to get out of the way, a woman identified by the news account as a Mrs. Richardson. In fact she was Mrs. John A. Kousch. Casebier's interviews with people who remembered the incident lead him to believe that the shooting was as much about the affections of Mrs. Richardson-Kousch as it was about a mining claim.

Mr. Casebier was born and raised in Kansas, but became fascinated with the Mojave Desert while stationed at 29 Palms Marine Base in the 1950's. Later working in Washington, D.C. he availed himself of the National Archives to compile a collection of historical materials that would later be the basis of his Mojave Desert Archives in Goffs. Casebier and his wife Jo Ann now own the Goffs schoolhouse. They are building a cultural center there focused on the history of the Desert West.