When twenty-two-year-old Dix Van Dyke arrived in Daggett, California, in 1901, the town was a wild and raucous frontier settlement, with barrooms and brothels, silver mines and land swindles, cattle drives, and shootouts at the Bucket of Blood saloon. Dix, who was a ranch boy with no formal education but whose father and uncle were successful writers, became the town's unofficial historian. Edited and introduced by award-winning poet and nature writer Peter Wild, this is Dix Van Dyke's account of how the twentieth century arrived in a California frontier town. Located a hundred miles outside Los Angeles and just east of Barstow, in the Mojave Desert, Daggett attracted a rich assortment of settlers lured by the wealth of nearby silver mines or the promise of cheap farmland conjured up by dubious irrigation schemes. With wit, humor, and a writer's eye for telling details, Dix describes the delicate beauty of the desert and the human hopes that often ended in folly there. Dix also reveals the Van Dyke ranch as an unlikely crossroads for intellectuals, some of them famous. Conservationist John Muir's visits included one memorable argument with Dix's Uncle John. Muir admirers may be surprised at the tangle of family relationships begun when Muir's daughter Helen married Daggett resident Buel Funk - a story never told in print before.