Ryan House and Lost Horse Well

Set near the southwestern base of Ryan Mountain in what is now Joshua Tree National Monument, this ranch complex includes an adobe house of roughly 30 by 40 feet, two smaller adobe buildings, a 70-foot-deep well with a windmill and pump, a graveyard of about ten graves, and the scant remains of a boulder corral. The Ryan family, led by brothers Tom and Jepp, arrived in the 1890s and, according to local tradition, raised the adobe residence during that decade. They took over the Lost Horse Mine in 1896, built a ten-stamp mill there, and piped water from Lost Horse Spring to the mine about three miles away. A well dug in 1905 changed the spring's name to Lost Horse Well. The site is valued as a surviving example of desert mining life and of the early, successful mining of the area. Weathering has worn the adobe, and one small building is close to ruin.