Artist and archaeologist Norton Allen drew 727 maps for Desert magazine over nearly 50 years, most for a below-market fee. Hips and spine fused from a childhood disease, he explored and worked standing up and occasionally lying down.
For nearly fifty years, Desert magazine was gritty and provocative and full of love for the American drylands
STORY BY STEVE CASIMIRO
Desert founders J. Wilson McKenney, left, and Randall Henderson, on one of their many Mojave outings
Ed Abbey wasn’t the first grumpy dude from back east to fall in the love with the desert and then spend the rest of his life writing about it obsessively, not by a long shot. Randall Henderson was born in Iowa in 1888 and headed west in 1907, a year before Model T automobiles were sold to the public, to study at the University of Southern California. For vacation money, he became a “fruit tramp,” riding on top of boxcars to pick cantaloupes in the Imperial Valley, where he got his first real taste of the Mojave, a desert seemingly without vanity. A gig with the Los Angeles Times in his senior year diverted him to journalism, and he moved from desert town to desert town, banging out copy for local newspapers, finding time in the middle to fly planes for the Army air service in World War I.
After Armistice, Henderson cajoled a local real estate agent named Ralph Seely
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