From 1926 to 1935, Susie Keef Smith was the postmaster in Mecca, California. An aspiring photographer, she spent much of her time at the post office admiring the popular picture postcards. In her free time, she trekked through remote desert areas with her Graflex camera to make and sell her own postcards. Smith was accompanied by her cousin Lulu Mae Graves, who had come to California from Tennessee to escape a troubled home life. Together they traveled unchaperoned by foot, burro, and Ford model T to places like the Salton Sea, Desert Hot Springs, and Mecca Mud Hills. Their photographs show a unique cast of characters working in the area including prospectors and surveyors, as well as the stunning desert landscape with its unique rock formations. Sometimes photographing each other, the women embody the spirit of the region, adventuring into new terrain wearing men’s clothes and cowboy hats, handling guns, kingsnakes, and cameras.
Palo Verde Tree at Box Canyon on the Sunkist Trail. Susie Keef Smith Collection
Roughly fifty years later in 1988, a large sack of old photo albums was dropped on the desk of archaeologist and historian Ron May. The environmental management specialist reviewed archaeology and history reports for San Diego County, but was occasionally asked by the Office of the Public Administrator to evaluate historic items from unclaimed estates. May looked through the albums that would later be identified as the scrapbooks of Smith and Graves and knew he had something special on his hands. His colleague who had shown him the albums mentioned that she had recovered them from the dumpster outside the Public Administrator’s and that there were many more still there. May, curiosity piqued, climbed into the dumpster to rescue the photographs among rotting food and newspapers.
Trail breakers of the West in Coachella Valley. Susie Keef Smith Collection
After careful review, May determined the photographer was Susie Keef Smith who had died that year (1988), leaving behind her extraordinary photographs and those of her cousin. Smith and Graves had documented an early era in Southern California’s Corn Springs from 1910-1920, an era for which historians have little primary source material. Each crumbling, black leather books combined the two women’s photographs so that it was difficult to determine which photographer made which images. These photographs, along with the artist’s portraits and photographs of prospectors, surveyors, and even a human skeleton found in the dirt, have made their way into historical archives published as a book titled Postcards from Mecca, The California Desert Photographs of Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves, 1916-1936. The book is edited by Graves’s grandson, Warner Graves III, and published by the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association.
Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves on the Bradshaw Trail in 1930. Warner Graves Collection
Mount San Jacinto at the northern gate to the Coachella Valley. Susie Keef Smith Collection
Horned toads and a chuckwalla on a bighorn sheep horn. Susie Keef Smith Collection
Skeleton found by aqueduct surveyors in Thermal Canyon. Lulu Mae Graves/Warner Graves Collection
A stormy day on the Salton Sea. Susie Keef Smith Collection
Man on a horse in 1930. Lulu Mae Graves/Warner Graves Collection
Susie Keef Smith and her camera (left), aqueduct surveyors in 1930 (right). Lulu Mae Graves/Warner Graves Collection
