A crawler tractor sits on a hillside in the Mojave National Preserve, well off any road. It's a McCormick-Deering 10-20 TracTracTor, International Harvester's first production crawler, introduced in 1928.
The company had built experimental tracklayers a decade earlier, and outside firms had been bolting track units onto McCormick-Deering wheeled tractors since about 1924, but the 10-20 was the first crawler International Harvester built for sale.
My friend Francis Blake wrote the machine up in Farm Collector in 2012. He found the serial number stamped on the engine block and scraped the rust off it with his pocketknife: TT 573. Production started on October 1, 1928, at serial TT 501, and 1929 opened at TT 701, which makes this the seventy-third machine of the run.
It also has a bulldozer blade at least twenty-five years younger than it is. Somebody hauled a tractor that was already a quarter of a century old up a canyon to a mine that had quit producing before the Second World War. Then they bolted and welded on a blade plumbed with galvanized water pipe.
I'm not saying where it is. Blake left the location out of his article and asked me to do the same. It's fine exactly where it is.
History
The 10-20 was a small machine, with a four-cylinder engine of 284 cubic inches making 27 horsepower at the belt. It would run on gasoline or kerosene, and you can still read the choice on the manifold: a cast plate with GASOLINE at the top and KEROSENE at the bottom, and a lever between them. The steering levers pivot upward from the clutch housings, so you could drive it standing up.
The blade is a puzzle. It's hydraulic, not cable-operated, and hydraulic blades for International crawlers don't show up in the mining trade press until 1947. The control valve is cast GRESEN over MINNEAPOLIS in a plain oval. The earliest trace of Gresen hydraulics I can find is from 1953, and the company didn't file its first hydraulic valve patent until 1961.
The hydraulics look built rather than bought. Ordinary water pipe and elbows run alongside rubber hose, and the welds holding the push arms together are thick and lumpy, laid down by hand. The only mark on the blade is a small tag riveted to the back of the moldboard, stamped BD1816. I haven't been able to find out who made it. If you recognize the number, please let me know.
Most think the mine was for gold, but it primarily produced silver. Molten rock pushed up into older Precambrian granite gneiss. Around here, the gold veins lie in the intrusion and the silver veins in the gneiss above it. These workings are in the gneiss, which is why the ore ran tens of ounces of silver to the ton against under an ounce of gold.
The mine produced in four scattered years in the 1920s and 1930s and never shipped ore again. The Bureau of Mines allowed that the real output was probably several times what got recorded. Men working a small claim like this one weren't exactly careful bookkeepers.
No mining report I've found mentions a tractor. The Bureau of Mines surveyed the site in the 1980s and wrote down a trailer, a storehouse, a windmill, an ore bin, a mill foundation, a leach vat, a tailings pond, the roads, and a headframe over the main shaft. Nothing with an engine.
Who brought it out here, and when? Somebody was working here long after the ore stopped moving. New claims were staked over the old workings in the 1960s, and the claim holder ran leaching experiments on the dumps and the tailings. A worn-out tractor with a jury-rigged blade is exactly the kind of equipment a small outfit like that would scrape together.
Blake floated another possibility, that the crawler started life as a farm tractor and reached the mine secondhand. I think that fits, with one catch. A long drought in the 1920s drove the area's homesteaders out. Only three families remained by 1926, and the local post offices closed in 1926 and 1927, both before this tractor was built. But a few holdouts hung on into the 1940s. A tractor like this one could have stood abandoned in one of their fields for years before a prospector decided it still had work left in it.
The country around the machine burned in June 2005, in one of the fires that combined into the Hackberry Complex and took a little over seventy thousand acres. Before that, it was pinyon and juniper woodland. Now it's grass, low brush, and standing deadwood. When I hiked up there in May 2026, the machine sat in dry grass among blackened stumps. The paint has held up: the blade bright orange, the fuel tank cream, and the castings yellow.
The left track is still on. The right one is gone, and I found no sign of it anywhere nearby, not a shoe, not a pin. A crawler can't move under its own power on one track, so either the machine threw it right here and never moved again, or somebody stripped it off later.
The strangest thing is where it sits: in a gully on a hillside, away from the workings and away from any road. Nobody dug or graded anything above it, so it didn't roll down from anywhere. I can't think of a job that would have put a bulldozer in that gully.
I can't say much about the hike in. I've given you a couple of hints.
Everything here is protected. Even the tin cans. Leave the place better than you found it.
No directions or GPS to this site. Photos below.
Photos
Click to enlarge
