Mesa Grande pioneer Ed Davis (1862-1951) was a friend of Jim Stone, who ran cattle in Lost Valley in the late 19th Century. Davis was also a photographer, author, resort owner, and recognized expert on the local Indians.

Davis visited Lost Valley a number of times over the years, beginning at least as early as 1892. He loved his trips into the backcountry, and left this account of an early Lost Valley cattle drive by way of Los Coyotes:
“These trips were the joy of my life, the freedom, the exhilaration of camping under the stars, either high up in the pines and cedars or on the desert in the cactus and ocotillo, but always the great unfenced open spaces. And then, cooking over a camp fire rabbit, quail or squirrel – baking powder pancakes or frying pan bread – it was glorious. The rolling out snappy mornings, washing in a cold creek or promising myself, if there was no water, feeding the nickering horses, saddling, packing our blankets and grub and off for a new camp.

“Never will I forget my first desert trip with Jim. We rode to Lost Valley about twenty-five miles, rounded up the cattle and got them headed for San Ygnacio, an Indian rancheria, on the divide, a lovely valley, bounded by rolling hills with some abrupt rocky pinnacles at one end. Through San Ignacio, over the desert divide. Through some heavy brush and then on a slender thread of a trail, notched into the slope of a great mountain.

“On all these cattle drives there is usually an old cow who takes the lead and all the others follow, one behind the other, like the joints of a long snake. Often some ornery brute would stop and then the whole herd behind would stop or begin to scatter in the brush. Then Jim would have to crowd through and punch the cow on and get the whole bunch started again. Sometimes a cow would hook another down the slope and we’d have a hard time getting her back in the trail. Looking from the rear, I could see the long string of 200 or 300 head strung out for a mile or more, winding in and out around ridges; now the leaders lost to view, now coming into sight again, lower down, a thin dark line, moving slowly and steadily toward the foot.

“Far over the mountains to the east we could see the great Colorado Desert faintly as a yellow haze – delicate tints, pastel shades of pink and yellow and blue, many miles distant, alluring the fascinating, but in the summer deadly. I wanted to see this region, to be in it, to feel that I was part of it, to know this place where so many people had perished from thirst. My horse kept the trail while I gazed spellbound at this vision of beauty until the mountains shut it out.” (Quoted in Charles and Elena Quinn, Edward H. Davis [1965])

Ed Davis left a record of several of his early trips to Lost Valley. He also confirms the name Wiatava – or “Wy-e-ta’ba” as he spells it in his field notes for 1907 – as the Indian name for the valley.

In July of 1911, Davis and some friends set off for Mt. San Jacinto, crossing Lost Valley along the old trail from Los Coyotes. In his journal he wrote:

“We soon struck Lost Valley, a beautiful little valley of a few hundred acres surrounded by mountains and fringed with pines and cedars and oaks. Two or three hundred head of cattle graze here in the summer months. There is a cabin of hewed slabs and the valley is noted for its rattlesnakes. We made our camp under a spreading pine tree and during the rest of the day we lay stretched out underneath listening to the music of the wind through its needles. However, not before we had unsaddled and unpacked and washed the backs of all our animals and staked them out in good grass.

“We are now around a fire made bright by piling on pitchy pine cones while the wind roars softly through the pines overhead. Suddenly the wailing of a mountain lion is heard across the valley and continues at intervals for quite a while.”

They left the next day over the Lost Valley Trail. Davis notes that he had been out that way only once before, back in the early 1890s.

His journal (now at the San Diego Historical Society) includes several sketches from his trip.

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