Before it was Stedman, this settlement in the Bagdad-Chase area of the Mojave Desert was Camp Rochester, named after Rochester, New York, hometown of many of the mine's investors. That name had to go when someone discovered a Rochester already existed in San Bernardino County. The camp was briefly called Stagg, after the superintendent, before becoming Stedman — the surname of one of the mine's investors. A nearby community considered calling itself Bagdad, after Baghdad, Iraq, and ultimately did, leaving the Mojave with a small constellation of exotic-sounding names stitched into the desert floor.

The Bagdad-Chase Mine that Stedman served was founded in 1898 by John Sutter. By November 1902, the town was at its peak, with forty cabins of varying sizes under construction. Stedman had a post office — established March 28, 1904 — a company store employees were barred from using, a telegraph, and eventually telephone service.

The Mojave Desert's most fundamental problem has always been water, and Stedman's founders solved it with engineering. Since no water existed at the site, they piped it in from Newberry Springs, miles away, storing it in a 10,000-gallon tank positioned on a hill above the camp. That tank still stands, rusted, its metal skin now covered in graffiti warning visitors to stay away from the deadly mine entrances that dot the surrounding ground.

The water supply was one sign of how seriously Stedman was taken as a going concern. Another was the rule against liquor and prostitution — unusual for a frontier mining camp, and a deliberate contrast to the looser atmosphere at neighboring Ragtown, just two miles to the north. A local celebrity known as Mother Preston operated a saloon and restaurant at Stedman, navigating whatever boundaries the camp management set. Life found a way.

When the mine went into receivership, the infrastructure that made Stedman possible began to dissolve. The Ludlow and Southern Railroad, which terminated near the Bagdad-Chase Mine, sold its track to the Philippines in the 1930s. Stedman was abandoned. A 1932 thunderstorm destroyed nearly a mile of that railroad before the sale was complete — the desert asserting itself against the works of human ambition with a single afternoon's rain.

By October 1971, Stedman had turned completely to ghost town. What vandals did not destroy with fire, scavengers dismantled for metal and wire. The ruins hold old mining equipment, dysfunctional cars, burned crucibles, and buried fuel tanks. When people first found Stedman in its desolation, newspapers reported gems and minerals scattered across the dirt — chrysocolla rocks glinting blue-green in the desert sun, remnants of the copper operation that once made this place worth building at all.

Foundations and crumbling walls remain. The cook shack and mess hall are partially identifiable, scorched by vandals attempting to erase what the desert had not already claimed. The water tank on the hill — the engineering solution that made Stedman possible — survives as an ironic monument: built to sustain life, now warning against it.

Stedman sits on Bagdad Chase Road, approximately 8 miles south of Ludlow and 2 miles north of Pacific Mesa. It is a quiet place in a landscape that has always been quiet between human uses, the creosote scrub reasserting its dominion over ground that men once called Copenhagen.