Death Valley: Where Legends Live

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

They had California gold fever those flatlanders who straggled into Greenwater Valley in the last few days of 1849. It was a fever fed by ignorance, impatience, stupidity and greed. It transcended common sense. It made the 100 men, women and children facing the mountain wall of the Panamints -- who could already smell, feel and taste gold -- believe anything including that the marks were authentic on the map one of them had. It showed a shortcut to California!

"The shortcut," said William D. Clark, a one-time naturalist in Death Valley National Monument, "cost them their wagons, their oxen, and almost their lives."

One small group, the Bennett and Arcane families, could go no further. The women and children were as worn out as their beasts and collapsed by a small water hole, prepared to face their makers. It was early January 1850 and bleak winter was upon the land. Two equally exhausted men who had traveled part of the way with them felt they all had a chance of survival if they, William Lewis Manly and John Rogers, tried to go ahead to find food, water and a path out of the valley.

They scratched and clawed a way through the mountains. It took them 25 days but they came back with a mule laden with supplies. The young men -- Manley was only 29 -- hurried to the camp, but it seemed deserted. Had Indians attacked? Were they too late? They had just passed the corpse of a Captain Culverwell, a member of another party. Would there be similar stiffening bodies in the silent wagons?

They fired a gun from a distance. A man struggled out from under a wagon, looked around in confusion, then threw his arms in the air. "The boys have come, the boys have come," he shouted. Manly and his friend had traveled an incredible 600 miles. But they were in time.

Later, Manly would write a book that graphically describes the elation that greeted their safe return.

"Bennett and Arcane caught us in their arms," he wrote, "and embraced us with all their strength and Mrs. Bennett fell down on her knees and clung to me, and not a word was spoken. If they had been strong enough, they would have carried us to camp upon their shoulders. As it was, they stopped two or three times, and turned, as if to speak; but there was too much feeling for words." 

A lot of information exists about all those unfortunates who, burned by the sun's blaze by day and frozen by the desert air by night, struggled into Death Valley that Christmas Day of 1849. In fear of Indians, hundreds of miles from California's gold fields, demoralized, lost, starving and thirsty, their pitiful diaries tell it all:

"We seemed almost perishing for want of water," wrote one. And another, "I dreamed of taking a draft of cool sweet water from a full pitcher and then woke up with my mouth and throat as dry as dust." Another notebook reads, "The sun shone very hot and with no water we suffered fearfully. We had been a whole year on the road between Wisconsin and California." 

One of those 49'ers who passed through Death Valley picked up a piece of metal ore hoping to use it as a new gunsight for the one he'd broken on his rifle. A gunsmith in California recognized the fragment as silver. Within a year people were pouring into Death Valley again, this time from the West, searching in vain for the "Lost Gunsight Mine."

The evidence of the prospectors' presence in the last century is all around in Death Valley.

Less than twenty miles north of Furnace Creek, up a dirt road lie the ruins of Keene Wonder Mine where in 1903 one Jack Keene found gold in the Funeral Mountains. So excited were his backers that the mine was sold for $150,000 even before development started. In this case investors did see something for their money: 74,000 tons of ore were brought out from the mine between 1903 and 1911, worth a total of $750,000.

Less lucky were those in the 1920's who believed in the glib tongue of one C. C. Julian. He let 300 people create an entire town, Leadville, in remote Titus Canyon, all based on his promises and his lies. The town even had a bank and a post office with none of its residents knowing that Julian had scattered lead ore amongst some rubble to make it appear a place here could have a future.

Says Clark, "The unscrupulous found it more profitable to mine peoples' pockets rather than a hole in the ground. During this half-century the wealth which was poured in the ground greatly exceeded the value of the ore extracted from it."

There was, however, "a white gold in the desert," an exception to those stories of failure -- borax. In 1881 when a prospector, Aaron Winters, struck a match to the white debris scattered all over Death Valley it burned green. He knew then he'd finally found the real treasure of Death Valley -- borate.

Borate has been known to man for 4000 years. It was first mined in the Gobi Desert in Tibet and finally in 1836 in California. Its uses in the past included metal working, pottery glazing and chemical fertilizing but today it is also much in demand in building construction, fiberglass production, and manufacturing trades as diverse as those making automobile antifreeze and nuclear reactor shields.

The borates of Death Valley came from the thermal and volcanic Mesozoic Era. Later when the vast inland sea that once covered Death Valley evaporated, crusts of salts, alkali and borates lay piled on the valley floor -- in some locations just west of Furnace Creek the layers are said to run 1000 feet deep. Winters sold out for $20,000 to William T. Coleman who then developed the Harmony Borax Works; the ruins are only a five minute drive from Furnace Creek. Visitors can walk over the terrain and inspect the remains of the famous factory that sent wagons laden with 37 tons of ore 165 miles to the railroad at Mojave, a load requiring the brute strength of 20 mules. On the road back, the wagons carried hay, dropped along the way, animal feed for the next journey out. The Borax Museum at Furnace Creek Ranch contains many artifacts of Twenty Mule Team Borax days. The wooden house, the oldest in Death Valley, was built in 1883 to serve as office and bunkhouse in 20 Mule Team Canyon, and later moved to the Ranch location.

The first stop for the tourist, however, should be as is true in all national parks, the Visitors Center at the Monument Museum.

Here a large scale three-dimensional model helps beginners get their bearings, and a series of exhibits educates them as to what they might see. If the Museum personnel are not too busy, one may volunteer the story of the former mining community of Skidoo -- now just a ghost town site - -apparently the only place in U. S. history that hanged a man twice. It seems a murderer was lynched, flung in a grave, then dug up and hanged again to let the press take pictures. The park rangers, however, are more keen to give out hot weather hints and information that will make a visit to Death Valley both interesting and safe.

"This park is bigger than many states, New Jersey for instance," said John Manning, one of the rangers. "Don't try to see it all in one day -- you can't."

The park officials find that people come to Death Valley for different reasons.

Some come because the Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch Resort are themselves worth a visit for those who love to hit the hot spots. Some come expecting seas of sand and are surprised to find the Sand Dune area is only five percent of the National Monument. Some come for their fascination with its history, and some because of their interest in its flora and fauna: They want to find Bighorn sheep and Kangaroo rats, roadrunner birds and sidewinder snakes. Some come because of the challenge of its harsh habitat and its extremes: They can stand 11,049 feet high on Telescope Peak and see both the highest point in the 48 lower states, Mt. Whitney, and 282 feet below sea level, the lowest land in the western hemisphere, Badwater.

And some come because the rock faces of Death Valley are geological time clocks showing that when earthquakes happened the land was often turned on its side and sometimes even upside down; that when immense glaciers persisted, only their ice could produce the 150 inches of water nature needed to match the annual evaporation of what may be the hottest place in the world. And when today's tourists drive 24 miles south of Furnace Creek to Dante's View, 5475 feet above the basin, they learn what they see below is not the true valley floor--it lies deeper covered with 8000 feet of rubble eroded from the mountains. They learn, and on such heights can readily believe it too, that the east side of the valley has sunk 20 feet in 2000 years and is still sinking just as the whole of North America is moving west four inches a year.

A mile high on Dante's View, a photographer is loading yet another roll of film. His long-suffering companion makes a half-hearted gesture.

"Just a few more shots," he pleads, "after all, when did you see anything like Dante's Leap?"

"It's called Dante's View," she says with a frown, "but if you don't call it quits, it may well be Dante's Leap."

The cameras are finally put away and they look down on the land below. The great salty basin shimmers in the distant haze. Stands of mesquite ripple at its edge. Creosote bushes on the ridge crackle in the biting wind. Dust whips across the slope. A raven hovers briefly motionless in the updraft from the cliff. A rock tears free from the edge and tumbles drunkenly down -- bouncing, bouncing till it lands in Badwater more than a mile below.

Badwater! What a name, what a destination for any adventurers of any era crossing this desert - -and if they made it thus far, there are other names to ponder: Mountains called Funeral, Last Chance and Dry; hills called Skeleton and Cinder; peaks called Coffin and Bear; canyons called Deadfoot, Desolation, Mud, Thirsty, Jail, Starvation and, ominously, Surprise; and places like Owl Dry Lake, Salt Springs, Burned Wagons Point, Hell's Gate, Deadman's Pass, and Devil's Hole.

The sun unimpressed by the history of man hesitates for a moment above the Panamint Mountains then drops from sight. Its Bristlecone Pines -- the oldest living thing on earth -- look down nonchalantly, as they have done for several thousand years on the brief moment of luminescence that makes the valley glow. Suddenly it is quite dark and quite cold. The land no longer seems so beautiful.

The people on Dante's View move back to their vehicles. One person stops to remember how the Bennett-Arcane party left the valley when they finally turned their backs on what might have been and should have been their graves: Staggering through the mountains on foot, the wagons abandoned, possessions left behind, all of them in their best Sunday clothes because Mrs. Arcane "thought they might as well wear them out as throw them away," the children now on Old Crump, the faithful ox who'd brought them this far, George and Melissa Bennett riding on his scrawny back and the little ones, Martha Bennett and Charley Arcane, swinging in newly made pockets slung on either side.

It was then that one of them murmured the phrase that gave the land its new name. Even in 1988 the words cause a chill. "Goodbye Death Valley."