Loafing Along Death Valley Trails

He was interrupted by a knock at the door. There stood a stranger who wanted dinner and lodging for the night. During the evening the guest disclosed that he was en route to his mining claim near a place called Shoshone, 38 miles south. It was near a spring with plenty of water, warm, but usable. He wanted to put 50 miners to work but first he had to find someone willing to go there and board them.

“Maybe we’d go,” Fairbanks said. “What’ll you pay for board?”

“A dollar and a half a day. Figures around $2250 a month.”

Ralph looked at Ma. She nodded. “It’s a deal,” he said.

The next morning the guest left.

Fairbanks turned to his wife. “I can haul these abandoned shacks down there in no time. Charlie’s not working, I can get him to help.”

Ralph Fairbanks had stayed with Greenwater to the bitter end. Now he hauled it away.

The road to the new site was over rough desert, gutted with dry washes. Brown slept in the brush, put the shacks up while Fairbanks went for others. Both worked night and day to get the place ready. Finally they had lodging for 50 men, a dining room, and quarters for the family. With $2250 a month they could afford a chef and Ma could take it easy. Stella could go Outside to a girl’s school.

Then like a bolt of lightning came the bad news. The Greenwater guest, they learned, was just an engaging liar, with no mine, no men. He was never heard of again.

Without a dollar they were marooned in one of the world’s most desolate areas. Stumped, Fairbanks looked at Brown. “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. But this is below the belt. What’ll we do?”

“I can get a job with the Borax Company,” Brown said. “But you?”

“We have that canned goods we brought to feed that liar’s hired men. I’ll figure some way to live in this God-forsaken hole.”

From the dining room, prepared for the $2250 monthly income, he lugged a table, set it outside the door facing the road. Then he went to the pantry, filled a laundry basket with the cans of pork and beans, tomatoes, corned beef, and milk brought from Greenwater. He arranged them on the table, wrenched a piece of shook from a packing crate and on it painted in crude letters the word, “Store.” He propped it on the table and went inside. “Ma,” he announced, “we’re in business.”

You could have hauled the entire stock and the table away in a wheelbarrow and every person in the country for 100 miles in either direction laid end to end would not have reached as far as a bush league batter could knock a baseball.

The wheelbarrow load of canned goods went to the Indians living in the brush and the prospectors camped at the spring. Another replaced it and the “store” moved then into the dining room prepared for the non-existent boarders. Powder, a must on the list of a desert store, was added. The desert man, they knew, needed only a few items but they must be good. Overalls honestly stitched. Bacon well cured. Shoes sturdily built for hard usage.

“If we sell a shoddy shirt, an inferior pick or shovel to one of our customers,” they told the wholesaler, “we will never again sell anything to him nor to any of his friends.”

Soon the prospectors were telling other prospectors they met on the trails: “Square shooters – those fellows. Speak our language…” The squaws and the bucks told other squaws and bucks. Soon new trails cut across the desert to Shoshone and soon the store outgrew the dining room in the Fairbanks residence.

From Zabriskie, now an abandoned borax town a few miles south of Shoshone, an old saloon and boarding house was cut into sections and hauled to Shoshone. It had been previously hauled from Greenwater where it had served as a labor union hall and club house. It was deposited directly across the road from the original store.

So began in 1910 an empire of trade that is almost unbelievable.

Charlie had at last coaxed the right answer from Stella but there wasn’t enough in the business at the start to support two families, plus the score of children and grandchildren of Fairbanks. At Greenwater he had known all the moguls of mining and he had only to ask for a job to get one. Retaining his interest in the Shoshone store he became superintendent of the Pacific Borax Company’s important Lila C. mine and thus formed a connection which grew into valuable friendships with the executives. The Shoshone business grew and soon required his entire time and that of Stella.

Born in Richfield, Utah, Stella Brown grew up in Death Valley country and a reel of her life would show an exciting story of triumph over life in the raw; in desolate deserts and in boom towns where bandits and bawdy women rubbed elbows with the virtuous, millionaire with crook, and caste was unknown. If a girl went wrong; if an Indian was starving; a widow in need – there you would find her. Some day somebody will write the inspiring story of Stella Brown.

Not all those who were told to see Charlie were seeking directions or suffering from toothache. When General Electric desperately needed talc, its agents were so advised. When Harold Ickes came out to promote President Roosevelt’s conservation ideas and officials of the War Department sought critical material, they too were given the old familiar advice and took it, and one day I saw the President of the Southern Pacific Railroad stand around for an hour while Charlie waited for a Pahrump Indian to make up his mind about a pair of overalls.

Today the store that started on a kitchen table requires a large refrigerating plant and lighting system, three large warehouses, two tunnels in a hill. About a dozen employees work in shifts from seven in the morning till ten at night, to take care of the store, cabins, and cafe. Three big trucks haul oil, gas, powder, and provisions to mines in the region. Out of canyon, dry wash, and over dunes they come for every imaginable commodity, and get it.

A millionaire city man who vacations there sat down on the slab bench beside Brown, aimlessly whittling. “Listen, Charlie,” he said. “Why don’t you get out of this desolation and move to the city where you can enjoy yourself?”

“Hell – ” Charlie muttered, and went on with his whittling.

The new store stands upon the site where Ma Fairbanks’ kitchen table displayed the canned goods brought from Greenwater. Modern to the minute and air-cooled it would be a credit to any city.

Again I heard the old familiar, “See Charlie,” and while he was telling someone how to get to a place no one around had ever heard of, I glanced over the Chalfant Register, a Bishop paper, and noticed a letter it had published from a lady in Wisconsin seeking information about a brother who had gone to Greenwater more than 40 years ago. She had never heard of him since.

When Charlie joined me I called his attention to the letter. “I saw it,” he said. “Nobody answered and the editor sent the letter to me. I have just written her that the brother who came to find out what happened, died suddenly at Tonopah, only a few hours by auto from Greenwater. The other brother was killed in a saloon. I knew him and the man who killed him.”

Chapter XVI

Long Man, Short Man

Before Tonopah, the first, and Greenwater, the last of the boom camps, Indians roaming the desert from Utah westward were showing trails to two hikos, who were to become symbols for the reckless courage needed to exist in the wasteland. They were known as Long Man and Short Man.

Previous pages have given part of the story of Long Man.

Coming into Death Valley country in the late Nineties, Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks wanted to know its water holes, trails, and landmarks. He hired Panamint Tom, brother of Hungry Bill, as a guide. Because Tom’s name was linked with Bill’s in stories of missing men, Fairbanks carried his six-gun.

Panamint Tom was also armed. When they reached the rim of Death Valley and started down, Fairbanks said, “Tom, this is Indian country. You know it. I don’t. You go first…”

Taking no chance on a surprise night attack, he directed the layout of the camp so that their beds were safely apart. Each slept with his gun. Around the camp fire, Tom nonchalantly confessed that he’d had to kill five white men.

The mission accomplished, they started back. When they came out of the valley Tom said, “Long Man, this is white man’s country. You know it. I don’t. You go first.” In after years, referring to their trip, Tom said, “Long Man, you heap ’fraid that time.” “I was,” Fairbanks confessed. “Me too,” Tom said.

When the Goldfield strike was made, Fairbanks saw that a supply station on the main line of travel was a surer way to wealth than the gamble of digging. He knew of a ranch with good water and luxuriant wild hay at Ash Meadows. Hay was worth $200 a ton. The owner had abandoned the ranch, however, and moved into the hills. Fairbanks could get little information concerning his whereabouts. “Up there somewhere,” he was told, with a gesture indicating 50 miles of sky line. But he wanted the hay and started out and by patient inquiry located his man just before daylight on the second day. “What will you give for it?” the man asked.

“Well,” Fairbanks parried, “you know it’ll cost me as much as the ranch is worth to get rid of that wild grass.” Having only a vague idea of its real worth he had decided to offer $4000, but sensed the man’s eagerness to sell and started to offer $1000. Suddenly it occurred to him that someone else might have made an offer. “I’ll go $2000 and not a nickel more.”

“You’ve bought a ranch,” the owner said.

Elated, Fairbanks wrote a contract by candlelight on the spot. Both signed and they started back to find a notary. “I determined the fellow should not get out of my sight until the deed was recorded. If he wanted a drink of water, so did I. If he wished to speak to someone, I wanted a word with the same man.”

Finally the deal was closed and Fairbanks started home. Outside, he met Ed Metcalf, chuckling.

“What’s so funny, Ed?”

Metcalf pointed to the departing seller. “He was just telling me about being worried to death all morning for fear a sucker he’d found would get out of his sight. He’s been trying to unload his ranch for $500 and some idiot gave him $2000.”

Fairbanks also operated a freighting service to the boom towns in the gold belt as far north as Goldfield and Tonopah. Rates were fantastic and he made a fortune. He opened Beatty’s first cafe in a tent.

Money was plentiful and after a trip with a 16 mule team over rough roads to Goldfield, he was ready for a relaxing change to poker. When the white chips are $25, the reds $50, and the blues $500 the game is not for pikers and he would bet $10,000 as calmly as he would 10 cents.

In such a game one night he found himself sitting beside a player who had removed his big overcoat with wide patch pockets and hung it on his chair. Fairbanks noticed the fellow had a habit of gathering in the discards when he wasn’t betting and his deal would follow. He also noticed intermittent movements of the fellow’s deft fingers to the big patch pocket and soon saw that every ace in the deck reposed in the pocket.

Later in the game, Fairbanks opened a jackpot. Every man stayed. The crook raised discreetly and most of the players stayed. Fairbanks bet $1000.

“Have to raise you $5000,” the crook said.

Fairbanks met the raise. “… and it’ll cost you $5000 more,” he said evenly.

With the confidence that came from the cached aces, the sharper shoved out the five, smiled exultantly as he spread four kings and a deuce and reached for the pot.

“Not so fast,” Fairbanks said as he laid four aces and a ten on the table.

The crook gave him a quick look. Fairbanks’ eyes were steady. Neither said a word. The crook couldn’t. He knew that Fairbanks’ long fingers had found the big patch pocket.

When three men and a jackass no longer made a crowd in Shoshone, Ralph Fairbanks became restless. With a population of 20 – half of it his own progeny, he felt that civilization was closing in on him. “Charlie, I’ve been in one place too long…” He had now become “Dad Fairbanks” to all who knew him.

The automobile was being increasingly used in desert travel and transcontinental trips were no longer a daring adventure or the result of a bet. Sixty miles south of Shoshone there was a wretched road that pitched down the washboard slope of one range into a basin, then up the gully-crossed slopes of another. Part of the transcontinental highway, it was a headache to the traveler. Radiators usually boiled down hill and up.

To this desolate spot went Dad Fairbanks. The hot blasts from the dunes of the Devil’s Playground and the dry bed of Soda Lake made summer a hell and the freezing winds from Providence Mountains turned it into a Siberian winter.

Here in 1928 Dad Fairbanks built cabins and a store and installed a gas pump. Water was hauled in. “Coming or going,” he said, “when they reach this place they’ve just got to stop, cool the engine, and fill up for the hill ahead.” The place is Baker on Highway 91.

Here, as at Shoshone, sales technique was tossed into the ash can. Stopping for dinner one day I met Dad coming out of the dining room. “How’s the fare?” I asked.

“Are you hungry?”

“Hungry as a bear…”

“All right. Go in. A hungry man can stand anything.” Then in an undertone he added: “Employment agent sent me the world’s worst cook. Take eggs.”

Later as we talked in the sheltered driveway a Rolls-Royce limousine drove up and a well-fed and smartly tailored tourist stepped out and spoke to Dad: “Do you know me?” he asked.

Dad looked at him hesitantly. “Face is familiar.”

“You loaned me $300, 25 years ago.”

“I loaned a lotta fellows money.”

“But I never paid it back.”

“A helluva lot of ’em didn’t,” Dad said.

The stranger reached into his pocket, pulled $1000 from a roll and handed it to Dad. “I’m Harry Oakes,” he said. “Where’s Ma?”

So they went over to Dad’s house and with Ma Fairbanks who had shared all of Dad’s fortunes, good and bad, they sat down and Oakes talked of the long trail that led from 300 borrowed dollars to an annual income of five million.

Harry Oakes had gone to Canada and learning that the legal title to a mining claim would expire at midnight on a certain date, he and his partner W. G. Wright sat up in a temperature of forty below, to relocate the Lakeshore Mine – Canada’s richest gold property.

Born in Maine, Harry Oakes became a subject of England and was at this time Canada’s richest citizen, with an estimated fortune of $200,000,000.

It was a long way from the Niagara palace back to Greenwater and Shoshone and as Ma Fairbanks and Dad and Harry sat in the plain little desert cottage, I couldn’t keep from wondering why a man with $200,000,000 would wait 25 years to repay that $300.

In his native town of Sangerville in Maine, Harry Oakes was criticized when, as a youngster with every opportunity to pursue a successful career according to the staid Maine formula, he became excited by gold. “Quick easy money.” “Just a dreamer.” He talked big, acted big, and was big.

But Harry Oakes started out in life to make a fortune by finding a gold mine and you can’t laugh aside the determination and courage with which he stuck to his purpose until he succeeded.

Dad Fairbanks spent nearly 50 years in Death Valley country and it is a bit ironical that at last, the Baker climate drove him from the desert to Santa Paula and later, of all places, to Hollywood.

“I should never have believed it of you,” I kidded.

“Hell – ” Dad retorted, “I wanted solitude. Haven’t you got enough sense to know that the lonesomest place on Godamighty’s earth is a city?”

He died in 1943 and at the funeral were the state’s greatest men and its humblest – bankers, lawyers, doctors, beggarmen, muckers and miners, and with them, those he loved best – sun-baked fellows from the towns and the gulches along the burro trails. No man who has lived in Death Valley country did more to put the region on the must list of the American tourist and none won more of the regard and affections of the people.

Chapter XVII

Shorty Frank Harris

No history of Death Valley has been written in this century without mention of the Short Man – Frank (Shorty) Harris – and none can be. Previous pages have given most of his story. After his death at least two hurried writers who never saw him have stated that Shorty discovered no mines, knew little of the country.

From a page of notes made before I had ever met him, I find this record: “Stopped at Independence to see George Naylor, early Inyo county sheriff and now its treasurer. We talked of early prospectors. Naylor said: ‘I have known all of the old time burro men and have the records. Shorty Harris has put more towns on the map and more taxable property on the assessors’ books than any of them.’”

I first met Shorty at Shoshone. Entering the store one day, Charles Brown told me there was a fellow outside I ought to know, and in a moment I was looking into keen steady eyes – blue as water in a canyon pool – and in another Shorty Harris was telling me how to sneak up on $10,000,000. Thus began an acquaintance which was to lead me through many years from one end of Death Valley to the other, with Shorty, mentor, friend, and guide.

Of course I had heard of him. Who hadn’t? In the gold country of western deserts one could find a few who had never heard of Cecil Rhodes or John Hays Hammond, but none who had not heard of Shorty Harris. Wherever mining men gathered, the mention of his name evoked the familiar, “That reminds me,” and the air thickened with history, laughter, and lies.

He was five feet tall, quick of motion. Hands and feet small. Skin soft and surprisingly fair. Muscles hard as bull quartz. With a mask of ignorance he concealed a fine intelligence reserved for intimate friends in moments of repose.

It is regrettable that since Shorty’s death, writers who never saw him have given pictures of him which by no stretch of the imagination can be recognized by those who had even a slight acquaintance with him. Authors of books properly examine the material of those who have written other books. In the case of Shorty this was eagerly done – so eagerly in fact, that each portrayal is the original picture altered according to the ability of the one who tailors the tale. All are interesting but few have any relation to truth.

Shorty Harris was so widely publicized by writers in the early part of the century that when the radio was invented, he was a “natural” for playlets and columnists. It was natural also that the iconoclast appear to set the world right. He employed Shorty to guide him through Death Valley. “I want to write a book,” he explained, “and I have only three weeks to gather material.”

The trip ended sooner. “What happened?” I asked Shorty when I read the book and was startled to see in it a statement that Shorty became lost; had never found a mine; and never even looked for one.

“Did he say that?” Shorty laughed.

“And more of the same,” I said.

“Well, let’s let it go for what it’s worth… He bellyached from the minute we set out.”

Those who knew Shorty best – Dad Fairbanks, Charles Brown, Bob Montgomery, George Naylor, H. W. Eichbaum, and the old timers on the trails had entirely different impressions. There was, however, around the barrooms of Beatty and other border villages a breed of later comers – “professional” old timers always waiting and often succeeding in exchanging “history” for free drinks. Though they may have never known Shorty in person, they were not lacking in yarns about him and rarely failed to get an audience.

There were also among Shorty’s friends a few who had another attitude. “What has he ever done that I haven’t?” the answer being that nothing had been written about them.

With variations the original pattern became the pattern for the succeeding writer. In the interest of accuracy it is not amiss to say that Shorty Harris was not buried standing up. The writer saw him buried. It is not true that he ever protested the removal of the road from the site of the place where he wished to be buried, because he never knew that he would be buried there. Nor did he have the remotest idea that a monument would be erected to him, because the idea of the monument was born after his death, as related elsewhere.

He did not leave Harrisburg on July 4, 1905 to get drunk at Ballarat. Instead, he went to Rhyolite to find Wild Bill Corcoran, his grubstaker.

He did enjoy the yarns attributed to him and their publication in important periodicals. But he was also painfully shy and ill at ease away from his home. Even at the annual Death Valley picnics held at Wilmington, near Los Angeles, he could never be persuaded to face the crowds.

One cannot laugh aside the part he played nor the monument that honors one of God’s humblest. His strike at Rhyolite brought two railroads across the desert, gave profitable employment to thousands of men, added extra shifts in steel mills and factories making heavy machinery and those of tool makers. The building trades felt it, banks, security exchanges, and scores of other industries over the nation – all because Shorty Harris went up a canyon. And it is not amiss to ask if these historians did their jobs as well.

At my home it was difficult to get Shorty to accept invitations to dinners to which he was often invited by service clubs, but in the Ballarat cabin he was as sure of himself as the MacGregor with a foot upon his native heath and an eye on Ben Lomond.

His passion for prospecting was fanatical. I asked him once if he would choose prospecting as a career if he had his life to live over.

“I wouldn’t change places with the President of the United States. My only regret is that I didn’t start sooner. When I go out, every time my foot touches the ground, I think ‘before the sun goes down I’ll be worth $10,000,000.’”

“But you don’t get it,” I reminded him.

He stared at me with a sort of “you’re-too-dumb” look. “Who in the hell wants $10,000,000? It’s the game, man – the game.”

Nor is the picture of his profligacy altogether true. Despite Shorty’s disregard for money he had a canniness that made him cache something against the rainy day. At Lone Pine Charlie Brown was packing Shorty’s suit case before taking him to a doctor. “Shorty, what’s this lump in the lining of your vest?”

“Oh, there was a hole in it. Poor job of mending I guess,” Shorty answered guilelessly.

“I’ll see,” Charlie said and ripping a few stitches removed $600 in currency.

Shorty’s last years furnish a story of a man too tough to die. He had had three major operations, when in 1933 I received the following telegram: “Wall fell on me. Hurry. Bring doctor. Shorty Harris.” It had been sent by Fred Gray from Trona, 27 miles from Ballarat, nearest telegraph station.

My wife and I hurried through rain, snow, sleet; over washed out desert and mountain roads. Outside the cabin in the dusk, shivering in a cold wind, we found two or three of Shorty’s friends and Charles and Mrs. Brown, who had also made a mad dash of 150 miles over roads – some of which hadn’t been traveled in 30 years.

Puttering around his cabin, Shorty had jerked at a wire anchored in the walls and brought tons of adobe down upon himself. He was literally dug out, his ribs crushed, face black with abrasions. With rapidly developing pneumonia he had lain for 60 hours without medical attention and with nothing to relieve pain. We learned later from Dr. Walter Johnson, who had preceded us, that if a hospital had been within a block it would have been fatal to move him. All agreed that Death sat on Shorty’s bedside.

“A cat has only nine lives,” Fred Gray said gravely, and outside in the gathering gloom we planned his funeral. Because of the isolation of Ballarat and lack of communication we arranged that when the end came, Fred Gray would notify Brown and bring the body down into Death Valley for burial. There we would meet the hearse.

Because bodies decompose quickly in that climate, time was important. While we planned these details, my wife, who had been at Shorty’s bedside, joined us. “Shorty’s not going to die,” she said. “He’s planning that trip up Signal Mountain you and he have been talking about.”

I tiptoed into the room. He was staring at the ceiling, seeing faraway canyons; the yellow fleck in a broken rock. Suddenly he spoke: “I’m losing a thousand dollars a day lying here. Why, that ledge – ”