William Anthony Simon was born on August 2, 1875, and came to the desert by way of two military conflicts. He served in the Spanish-American War, then crossed the Atlantic to serve as a sapper — an engineer soldier — in the British Army during the First World War. These were not the credentials most desert hermits carried; most who retreated to the Mojave did so to escape something more domestic. Simon's military service gave him skills that proved useful in the desert: the ability to build and maintain shelters, to manage scarce resources, to work in difficult conditions without losing focus. After the wars he drifted, working as a cook and prospector, circulating through the loose economy of the western wilderness, before finding the cave near the Colorado River that would become his home.

Simon established himself as a prospector, though by most accounts the prospecting was more method than livelihood — a way of organizing movement through the desert, of having a reason to go from one place to another. He was also a cook, a trade that gave him currency in the remote camps and outposts of the desert southwest. The nickname Chuckawalla Bill attached to him from the chuckwalla lizard, a desert reptile that was presumably part of his landscape if not his diet. He lived in his cave for years, a kind of extreme version of the self-sufficiency that many desert residents of the era practiced, except that Simon's version lacked even the intermittent community of a small town.

When Colin Fletcher found the cave in 1968, Simon had been dead for eighteen years. He had died on January 11, 1950, and was buried at Los Angeles National Cemetery — a final institutional accommodation for a man who had spent his later years largely outside institutions. Fletcher's investigation into Simon's life took more than a decade, and the result was The Man from the Cave, published in 1981. The book retrieved Simon from obscurity and gave his life the narrative shape that his own existence had deliberately avoided. Fletcher was himself an accomplished writer and outdoorsman, best known for The Complete Walker, and he brought to Simon's story the curiosity of someone who understood what it meant to be alone in wild places and had thought carefully about why people chose it.

There is a spring named for Chuckawalla Bill in the desert north of Desert Hot Springs — Chuckawalla Bill Spring, a modest memorial that connects his name to the water source that was the defining resource of desert life. Springs were the organizing principle of the pre-automobile Mojave, the points around which movement and settlement arranged themselves, and attaching a person's name to one was a meaningful form of commemoration. William Anthony Simon — veteran, prospector, cook, cave-dweller — lived a life that did not produce records in the conventional sense, which is exactly why Fletcher's pursuit of it mattered. The book is one of the few places the full shape of that life becomes visible.