When 22-year-old Dix Van Dyke arrived in Daggett, California, in 1901, the town was a wild and raucous frontier settlement, with bar rooms and brothels, silver mines and land swindles, cattle drives, and shootouts at the Bucket of Blood saloon. Dix, a ranch-boy with no formal education but whose father and uncle were writers, became the town's unofficial historian. Edited and introduced by the poet and nature writer Peter Wild, this is Dix Van Dyke's account of how the 20th century arrived in a California frontier town. Located a 100 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 of the promise of cheap farmland conjured up by dubious irrigation schemes. With wit, humour, and a writer's eye for the telling detail, Dix describes the delicate beauty of the desert and the human hopes that often ended in folly there.