Cow Camp

Cow Camp is a small historic site in a boulder-strewn valley of Joshua Tree National Monument, southwest of Twentynine Palms, California. Its importance began with a spring-fed natural pond in otherwise arid high desert. In the late 1880s and early 1890s the McHaney Gang, led by brothers William and James McHaney, used the camp to hold stolen cattle and change their brands with a running iron. Prospectors who camped nearby in 1893 found their horses missing and traced them to the camp, where an armed man pressured them to say nothing had been lost. Outlaw use apparently ended after 1894. In the 1920s William F. Keys used the camp as a line camp for legitimate stock raising and built a concrete dam, 22 feet high and 800 feet long, to increase the water supply. Today the ruins of one building, an old rock-lined well and the intact dam remain on the 80-acre property.