Mule teams delivered freight through Riverside County desert

In 1951, Belle Ewing, a Western author and researcher living in Riverside, got to spend a day traveling with a true local legend.

That person was Eugene Vandeventer, then 94 years old, who had “seen it all” so far as the Pass and desert regions of Riverside County were concerned. Among his many avocations was that of mule skinner, a term for a person who was in charge of mule teams delivering freight in the days before the railroad. In fact, Ewing titled her article about him “Muleskinner Vandenter,” and it appeared in the January 1952 edition of the Palm Springs Villager.

Mules were great in the desert because they were strong and could withstand the heat, but they were notoriously hard to deal with — hence the need for someone who specialized in working with them.

Vandeventer was born in November 1857 in Napa, but by 1861, the family was

living in San Bernardino. At age 17, according to Vandeventer, he was part of a freighting crew that was operating between Spadra and Prescott, Arizona. Spadra was a small town just south of present-day Cal Poly Pomona, noted in the 1870s as being the “end of the line” for

the Southern Pacific Railroad for a couple of years.

At age 94, when Vandeventer was interviewed by Belle Ewing, they took a car to retrace the steps he made more than 75 years before.

“It was 400 miles from Spadra to Prescott and it took us 30 days to make

the trip.”

The old mule skinner noted that, in those days, he made $65 per month, which included board.

“The sky was my roof. The driver always walked beside his team through the sand, keeping a pocket full of pebbles to throw at laggards.”

In addition, desert travelers were always armed, “for those were days of quick riches and sudden poverty, or wildlife and quick death. A man had to have a true eye and a ready trigger finger if he expected to live long.”

The route that Vandeventer and his cohorts took was essentially the Bradshaw route to La Paz, Arizona. Of course, at that time, it was only about a dozen years old.

Vandeventer reminisced about the days freighting. He said that, in large part, there was little to no sign of human habitation in the desert at the time. Instead, herds of antelope roamed what is now the Coachella Valley and big-horned sheep ran throughout the hills beyond Mecca in addition to the Santa Rosa Mountains.

He ended his day with Belle Ewing lamenting that, “We had something then that the world has lost today. We lived at a slower tempo. We did not brag about the speed we made, but rather about the things we had accomplished … Those were rough, hard days, but they were great days, too, when I was a mule skinner on this old desert.”

Eugene Vandenter died in Redlands in 1958 at the age of 101.

PHOTO BY STEVE LECH The desert area east of Indio looks today as Eugene Vandeventer would have seen it. Vandeventer led mule teams that delivered freight before railroads arrived.