The posse is expected to reach Willie Boy’s lair by night. Sheriff Wilson has spread his men out to pick up straggling Piutes and also to prevent possible poisoning of water holes.
The classic advice, “Go west, young man,” is now being amended to “Go east, slightly.” For, in a saga of modern pioneering that sounds like Hollywood repeating itself, the movie makers are establishing a new frontier at Pioneertown, 125 miles east of Los Angeles and less than five miles up into the San Bernadino Mountains from Yucca Valley. There they are producing and will produce fittingly westerns.
With architecture and atmosphere of the colorful pioneer West, a new community already named Pioneertown, sponsored by motion-picture personalities, is envisaged for an area in the San Bernardino Mountains, according to announcements in the past week. Plans for its construction are being furthered.
This advertisement ran in the Los Angeles Times on October 31, 1947. Pioneertown was advertised as "Southern California's Newest and Most Unique Desert and Mountian Year 'round Community." The original price for a 1.25-acre lot was $1250.
Easterly from Mt. San Gorgonio, whose 11,485 feet make it the tallest mountain in Southern California, lies a vast and bewildering beautiful desert-mountain empire which curves like a horseshoe around the western end of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.
Pioneertown, San Bernardino County's Old West showplace, has been sold for $80,400 to two Los Angeles automobile dealers.
The faded store fronts, hitching rails, dirt Main St. and other mementos of early California are still much the same in Pioneertown, the movie and television shooting location 120 miles from Los Angeles just off the Twentynine Palms highway in the San Bernardino County desert.
Plans for new development, and a new board of directors of the in Pioneertown Corp., was announced yesterday by John Martel, new board secretary and counsel for Pioneertown Corp. The announcement followed the resignation from the board of Bill Murphy, Fletcher Jones and Charles L. Nichols, former officers in the corporation.
Should anyone know of a boulevardier without a boulevard, the local main street is for hire at $25 a day. In this home of the hoss opera, however, it is called Mane St. There is a big sign as you drive in from the desert hills and it says, “Please Do Not Drive on Mane St.” This is a sort of one-yak town.
Improvement of a short-cut road linking San Bernardino Mountain resorts with high desert towns is being sparked by an energetic group of citizens in the area west of Twentynine Palms.
