Loafing Along Death Valley Trails

Shortly afterward he heard from her – just a little note saying she was a hello girl on a switchboard. “Knew she’d land on her feet,” Herman grinned, and having a bottle handy he gurgled a toast to Helen. He had to tell the news of course and with each telling he produced the bottle.

So he was in a pleasant mood when somebody suggested a spot of poker. To mention poker in Shoshone is to have a game and in a little while Dad Fairbanks, Dan Modine, deputy sheriff, Herman, and two or three others were shuffling chips over in the Mesquite Club.

Herman had the luck and quit with $700. “Fellows,” he said as he folded his money, “take a last look at this roll. You won’t see it again.”

“Oh, you’ll be back,” Fairbanks said.

But Herman didn’t come back. Instead he went to Los Angeles, found Helen at the switchboard. She confided excitedly that she had a chance to get into the movies as soon as she could get some nice clothes.

“Fine,” Herman said. “When can I see you?” He made a date for dinner, had a few more drinks and when he met her he had a comfortable binge and a grand idea. “… Listen Helen. You wouldn’t get mad at a fool like me if I meant well, would you?”

“Why Herman – you know I wouldn’t,” she laughed.

“I’m a little likkered and it’s kinda personal…”

“But you’re a gentleman, Herman – drunk or sober…”

“I’ve been thinking of this picture business. I nicked Dad Fairbanks in a poker game. You know how I am. Lose it all one way or another. You take it and buy what you need and it’ll do us both some good.”

The refusal was quick. “It’s sweet of you Herman, but not that. I just couldn’t.”

“You can borrow it, can’t you … so I won’t drink it up?”

The argument won and soon theater goers all over the world were clutching their palms as they watched the hair-raising escapes from death that pictured “The Perils of Pauline” – the serial that made Helen Holmes one of the immortals of the silent films. She died at 58, on July 8, 1950.

When Charlie Brown became Supervisor in charge of Death Valley roads, he wanted a foreman who knew the country. Herman Jones had hunted game, treasure, fossils, artifacts of ancient Indians all over Death Valley and knew the water courses, the location of subterranean ooze, the dry washes which when filled by cloudbursts were a menace. Brown made him foreman of the road crew.

At Shoshone, Herman Jones, grey now, was tinkering with a battered Ford when a big Rolls-Royce stopped. He looked around at the slam of the door, stared a moment at the man approaching, dropped his tools, wiped his hands on a greasy rag. “Well, I’ll be – ” he laughed. “Harry Oakes – where’ve you been all these years?”

“Oh, knocking around,” grinned Oakes. “Wanted to see this country again.”

They sat in the shade of a mesquite, talked over Greenwater days and the homely memories that leap out of nowhere at such a time.

Oakes noticed Herman’s Ford. Then he pointed to the $20,000 worth of long, sleek Rolls-Royce. “Herman, I’m going back to New York in a plane. I want to make you a present of that car.”

Herman Jones, dumbfounded for a moment, looked at his Ford, smiled, and shook his head. “Thanks just the same, Harry. That old jalopy’s plenty good for me.” No amount of persuasion could make him accept it.

Knowing that Herman Jones could use any part of $20,000, I marvelled that he didn’t accept the proffered gift. Then I remembered that the Redwing had produced only sweat and debts and Jones had paid the debts through the bitter years.

In the little town of Swastika in the province of Ontario, Canada, you will be told that Oakes was booted off the train there because he was dead-beating his way. The country had been prospected, pronounced worthless and nobody believed there was pay dirt except a Chinaman.

Harry Oakes had an ear for anybody’s tale of gold and listened to the Chinaman. He was 38 years old. Lady Luck had always slammed the door in his face but this time, (January, 1912) she flung it open. Eleven years later Oakes was rich.

He had always talked on a grand scale even when broke at Shoshone. With a taste for luxury he began to gratify it. He bought a palatial home at Niagara Falls and served his guests on gold platters. As his fortune increased he gave largely to charities and welfare projects such as city parks, playgrounds, hospitals. These gifts lead one to believe that the belated payment of $300 borrowed from Dad Fairbanks was a calculated delay so that Harry Oakes could enjoy the little act he put on at Baker.

During World War I he gave $500,000 to a London hospital, was knighted by King George V in 1939. He became a friend of the Duke of Windsor and at his Nassau residence was often the host to the Duke and his Duchess, the amazing Wallis Warfield, Baltimore girl who went from a boarding house to wed a British king.

Sir Harry Oakes was murdered in the palatial Nassau home, July 7, 1943, allegedly by a titled son-in-law who was later acquitted – a verdict denounced by many.

In connection with the story of Helen Holmes told above, it should be explained that the original title was “Hazards of Helen” and following an old Hollywood custom, Pathe produced a new version called “Perils of Pauline.” In this the heroine’s part was taken by Pearl White.

Chapter XIX

Death Valley Scotty

A strictly factual thumbnail sketch of Walter Scott would contain the following incidents:

He ran away from his Kentucky home to join his brother, Warner, as a cow hand on the ranch of John Sparks – afterward governor of Nevada. He worked as a teamster for Borax Smith at Columbus Marsh. He had a similar job at Old Harmony Borax Works.

In the Nineties he went to work with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He married Josephine Millius, a candy clerk on Broadway, New York, and brought her to Nevada.

He became guide, friend, companion, and major domo for Albert Johnson – Chicago millionaire who had come to the desert for his health. He did some prospecting in the early part of the century, but never found a mine of value.

America was mining-mad following the Tonopah and Goldfield strikes and Scotty went East in search of a grubstake. He obtained one from Julian Gerard, Vice President of the Knickerbocker Trust Company and a brother of James W. Gerard who had married the daughter of Marcus Daly, Montana copper king and who was later U.S. Ambassador to Germany.

Scotty staked a claim near Hidden Spring and named it The Knickerbocker. He gave Gerard glowing reports of a mine so rich its location must be kept secret.

Scotty appeared in Los Angeles unheard of, in a ten gallon hat and a flaming necktie and with the natural showman’s skill, tossed money around in lavish tips or into the street for urchins to scramble over.

This was the well-staged prelude to the charter of the famed Scotty Special for a record-breaking run from Los Angeles to Chicago. Though Scotty stoutly denies it, he was lifted to fame by a big and talented sorrel-headed sports editor and reporter on the Los Angeles Examiner, named Charles Van Loan, and John J. Byrnes, passenger agent of the Santa Fe railroad. Scotty meant nothing to either of these men, but the publicity Byrnes saw for the Santa Fe did, and the red necktie, the big hat, the scattering of coins, and the secret mine made the sort of story Van Loan liked.

Here Scotty’s trail is lost in the fantastic stories of writers, press agents, and promoters. Several years afterward when his yarns began to backfire, Scotty swore in a Los Angeles court that E. Burt Gaylord, a New York man, furnished $10,000 for the Scotty Special’s spectacular dash across the continent – the object being to promote the sale of stock in the “secret mine.”

More remarkable than any yarn Scotty ever told is the fact that although headlines made Scotty, headlines have failed to kill the Scotty legend.

You may toss our heroes into the ash can, but we dust them off and put them back. Likable, ingratiating, Scotty will brush aside any attack with a funny story and let it go at that.

In a law suit for an accounting against Scotty, Julian Gerard asserted he was to have 22½% of any treasure Scotty found. Judge Ben Harrison decided in Gerard’s favor, but the only claim found in Scotty’s name was the utterly worthless Knickerbocker and Gerard got nothing. The claim showed little sign of ever having been worked. A few broken rocks. A few holes which could be filled with a shovel within a few moments.

Passing the claim once, I stopped to talk with a native: “This is the scene of the Battle of Wingate Pass,” he told me. “In case you never heard of it, it was fought for liberty, Scotty’s liberty – that is. Gerard got suspicious about Scotty’s mine and decided to send his own engineers out to investigate. He ordered Scotty to meet them at Barstow and show them something or else. It worried Scotty a little, not long. He’d learned about Indian fighting with Buffalo Bill and met the fellows as ordered. When he led them to his wagon waiting behind the depot, the Easterners took a look at the wagon, another look at Scotty and one at each other. The wagon had boiler plate on the sides, rifles stacked army fashion alongside. Outriders with six-guns holstered on their belts and Winchesters cradled in their arms.

“‘Don’t let it worry you,’ Scotty said. ‘Piutes on the warpath. Old Dripping Knife, their Chief claims my gold belongs to them. Dry-gulched a couple of my best men last week.’

“The Easterners turned white and Scotty gave ’em another jolt. ‘Butchered my boys and fed ’em to their pigs. But we are fixed for ’em this trip. They sent word they aim to exterminate us. Maybe try it, but I’ve got lookouts planted all along. Let’s go…’ He shunted them aboard, shaking in their knees and headed out of Barstow.

“The party had reached that hill you see when suddenly out of the brush and the gulches and from behind the rocks came a horde of ‘redskins,’ yelling and shooting. Scotty’s men leaped from their saddles and the battle was on. The Easterners jumped out of the wagon and hit the ground running for the nearest dry wash and that was the closest they ever got to Scotty’s mine. You’ve got to hand it to Scotty.”

The story made front page from coast to coast and it was several days before the hoax was revealed. Unexplained though undenied, was the statement that Albert Johnson was in Scotty’s party listed as “Doctor Jones.” It is assumed that he had no guilty knowledge of the hoax.

The most astounding achievement of Scotty’s career was attained when he interested in an imaginary Death Valley mine, Al Myers, a hard-bitten prospector and mining man who had made the discovery strike at Goldfield; Rol King, of Los Angeles, bon vivant and manager of the popular Hollenbeck Hotel, and Sidney Norman who as mining editor of the Los Angeles Times knew mines and mining men.

These were certainly not the gullible type. But with a yarn of gold, Scotty induced them to hazard a trip into Death Valley in mid-summer when the temperature was 124 degrees.

Scotty may have missed the acquisition of a good mine when he failed to find one lost by Bob Black. While hunting sheep in the Avawatz Range, Bob found some rich float. “Honest,” Bob said, “I knocked off the quartz and had pure gold.” He tried to locate the ledge but he couldn’t match his specimen. Later he returned with Scotty, but a cloudburst had mauled the country. They found the corners of Bob’s tepee, but not the ledge. They made several later attempts to find it, but failed.

Bob always declared that some day he would uncover the ledge and might have succeeded if he hadn’t met Ash Meadows Jack Longstreet one day when both were full of desert likker. Bob passed the lie. Jack drew first. Taps for Bob.

All kinds of stories have been told to explain Albert Johnson’s connection with Scotty. The first and the true one is that Johnson, coming to the desert for his health, hired Scotty as a guide, liked his yarns and his camping craft and kept him around to yank a laugh out of the grim solitude.

But that version didn’t appeal to the old burro men. They could believe in the hydrophobic skunks or the Black Bottle kept in the county hospital to get rid of the old and useless, but not in a Santa Claus like Albert Johnson. “It just don’t make sense – handing that sort of money to a potbellied loafer like Scotty…”

Albert Johnson was able to afford any expenditure to make his life in a difficult country less lonely. He could have searched the world over and found no better investment for that purpose than Scotty.

Genial, resourceful, and never at a loss for a yarn that would fit his audience, Scotty was cast in a perfect role. As a matter of fact, whatever it cost Johnson for Scotty’s flings in Hollywood, or alimony for Scotty’s wife, it probably came back in the dollar admissions that tourists paid to pass the portals of the Castle for a look at Scotty. Of course they seldom saw Scotty – never in later years. Mrs. Johnson was an intensely religious woman and didn’t like liquor and that disqualified Scotty.

“This is Scotty’s room,” the attendant would say. “And that’s his bed.”

“Oh, isn’t he here?”

“Not today. Scotty’s a little under the weather. Went over to his shack so he wouldn’t be disturbed…”

Mrs. Johnson was killed in an auto driven by her husband in Towne’s Pass when, to avoid going over a precipice, he headed the machine into the wall of a cut.

In 1939 Albert Johnson testified that he first met Scotty in Johnson’s Chicago office when a wealthy friend appeared with Scotty, who was looking for a grubstake. Johnson said he gave Scotty “something between $1000 and $5000.” When the attorney asked him to be more definite, Johnson replied that at the time, his income was between one-half million and two million dollars a year and the exact amount consequently was of no importance then. “Since then,” Johnson testified, “I have given him $117,000 in cash and about the same in grubstakes, mules, food, and equipment.”

They went together into the mountains as Johnson explained, “because I was all hepped up with his … claims.” Further explaining his connection with Scotty, he said: “I was crippled in a railroad accident. My back was broken. I was paralyzed from the hips down. Through the years I got to have a great fondness for him.”

Albert Johnson, whose fortune came from the National Insurance Company, died in 1948, leaving a will that contained no mention of Scotty.

But one laurel none can deny Walter Scott. He did more to put Death Valley on the must list of the American tourists than all the histories and all the millions spent for books, pamphlets, and radio broadcasts.

The almost incredible case of Jack and Myra Benson proves that P. T. Barnum was not wholly wrong in his dictum regarding the birthrate of suckers.

Newly married in Montana they loaded their car and set out to seek fortune in the West. “We didn’t know anything about gold,” Jack confided. “If anyone had told us to throw a forked stick up a hillside and dig where it fell, we would have done it.”

Near Parker, Arizona, they were having supper in camp when another traveler stopped and asked permission to erect his tent nearby. Myra invited him to share their supper and during the meal the stranger told them he was a chemist and that he had prospected over most of the West. He had found a clay that cured meningitis, he said, and this had led to fortune. In one town he had found the entire population, including doctors and nurses down and out. The clay had cured them within a week. Among the cured, was the son of a rich woman who had given him $5000.

Grateful for the fate that had brought this man into their lives, the Bensons confided that they had hoped to reach the California gold fields, but car trouble had depleted their cash and asked if he knew of any place where they could pan gold.

“Go to Silver Lake, in San Bernardino County, California,” he advised them, “and your troubles will be over. On the edges of the lake is a thick mud. Get some tanks and boil it. You’ll have a residue of gold.”

Jack and Myra set out over the Colorado Desert; then climbed the Providence Mountains to worry through the deep blow sand of the Devil’s Playground. After three gruelling weeks they reached the lake. There they boiled the mud. Then an old prospector became curious about their unusual performance. The world slipped out from under the Bensons when he told them they were the victims of a liar.

With $5.00 they headed for Death Valley; found themselves broke and gasless at Cave Spring. Jack knocked upon the door of a shack he saw there. The woman who opened the door was Jack’s former school teacher, Mrs. Ira Sweatman, who was keeping house for her cousin, Adrian Egbert – there for his health.

Those who traveled the Death Valley road by way of Yermo and Cave Spring will remember that every five miles tacked to stake or bush were signs that read: “Water and oil.” This was Adrian Egbert’s fine and practical way of aiding the fellow in trouble.

Myra and Jack later acquired a claim near Rhodes Spring, a short distance from Salsbury Pass road into Death Valley and moved there to develop it. I had been away from Shoshone with no contacts and returning was surprised to find Myra there. I inquired about Jack.

“Why, haven’t you heard?” she asked, and from the expression in her eyes I knew that Jack was dead.

As best I could, I expressed my condolence, knowing how deeply she had loved.

She said: “He went up to the tunnel to set off three blasts. I heard only two. He was to come after the third blast. I knew something was wrong and went up. Bigod, Mr. Caruthers, Jack’s head was blown off to hellangone…”

Myra’s language failed to mask the grief her welling eyes disclosed.

Only once in her long, helpful life did Myra ever stoop to deception. The old age pension law was passed and Myra was entitled to and needed its benefits, but Myra wouldn’t sign the application. She made one excuse after another, but finally Stella Brown got at the bottom of her refusal. Myra had been married to Jack for 40 years and just didn’t want him to find out that she was a year older than he. Mrs. Brown at last persuaded her to put aside her vanity.

“Hell – ” Jack grinned when told about it. “I knew her age when I married her.”

On cold winter nights Myra could always be found in the Snake House where a chair beside the stove was reserved for her. One night I said jestingly: “You never play poker. What are you doing here?”

She whispered: “Wood’s hard to get. I’m saving mine.”

Then came one of those mornings when one’s soul tingles with the feel of a perfect desert day and Myra was up early. She came to the store.

“What got you up at this hour?” Bernice asked.

“I felt too dam’ good to stay indoors…”

There were a few old timers in the store and these surrounded her – because she was the kind who could tell you that it was hotter than hell, in a thrilling way. She bought a few groceries and started back to her cabin. Friendly eyes followed her passage along a path across the playground of the little school. Children sliding down the chute or riding teeter boards, waved affectionately. Myra was seen to falter in her step, then sag to the sand. The children ran to her aid and in a moment Shoshone was gathering about her. Myra Benson was dead.

Sam Flake, nearing 80, on the fringe of the crowd paid his simple tribute in a voice a bit shaky, but in language hard as the rock in the hills: “Dam’ her old hide – us boys are going to miss Myra…” He turned aside, his hand pulling at the bandana in his hip pocket and Shoshone understood.

Though she was buried 500 miles away, every man, woman, and child in Shoshone wanted a token of love to attend her and about the grave that received her casket was a wilderness of flowers.

Chapter XX

Odd But Interesting Characters

In these pages the reader has seen familiar names – the favored of Lady Luck – but what of those who failed – the patient, plodding kind of whom you hear only on the scene? They too followed jackasses into hidden hills; made trails that led others to fortunes which built cities, industries, railroad; endowed colleges and made science function for a better world. To these humbler actors we owe more than we can repay.

For nearly half a century John (Cranky) Casey roamed the deserts of California and Nevada looking for gold. His luck was consistently bad. Grim, tall, erect, with a deep slow voice, he was noted for picturesque speech which gained emphasis from an utterly humorless face. Congenitally he was an autocrat – his speech biting.

A prospector whom Casey didn’t like died and friends were discussing the disposition of the remains. “Chop his feet off,” suggested Casey, “and drive him into the ground with a doublejack…”

From others one could always hear tales of fortunes made or missed; of veins of gold wide as a barn door. But no trick of memory ever turned Casey’s bull quartz into picture rock. “Never found enough gold to fill a tooth,” he would say.

Casey’s leisure hours were spent over books and magazines, chiefly highbrow – particularly books and journals of science.

A tenderfoot was brought in unconscious from Pahrump Valley. A city doctor happened to be passing through and after an examination of the victim, turned to the men in overalls and hobnail shoes, who’d brought him in: “He’s suffering from a derangement of the hypothalamus.”

“Why in the hell don’t you say he had a heat stroke?” Casey barked.

A notorious promoter had a city victim ready for the dotted line. “Double your money in no time… Samples show $200 to the ton…” Assuming all prospectors were crooked he called to Casey sitting nearby: “Casey, you know the Indian Tom claim?” “Yes, I know it,” Casey thundered. “Not a fleck of gold in the whole dam’ hill.”

In the thick silence that followed, the beaten rascal flushed, looked belligerently at Casey but Casey’s big, hard fists he knew, could almost dent boiler plate and the long arms wrapped about a barrel, could crush it flat.

In time Casey acquired an ancient flivver. Only his genius as a mechanic kept it going. There were lean years when it bore no license and he kept to little-traveled roads. The car, like Casey, was cranky and phlegmatic. One day as he was coming into Shoshone it balked in the middle of the road, coughed, shivered, and died. Inside the store it was 120 degrees. Out on the road where Casey stopped it was probably 130. For two hours he patiently but vainly tried to coax it back to life. Finally he stood aside, wiped the grease from his gnarled hands, calmly stoked his pipe and shoved the car from the road. Then he gathered an armful of boulders and with a blasting of cussing that shook Shoshone he let go with a cannonade of stones that completed its ruin.

At the age of ten Casey had been taken from the drift of a city’s backwash and put in an orphanage. Nothing was known of his parentage or of relatives. He came to the desert after a colorful career as a conductor on the Santa Fe. The late E. W. Harriman, having gained control of the Southern Pacific system had his private car attached to a Santa Fe train for an inspection tour. At a siding on the Mojave Desert, Harriman wanted the train held a few moments. His messenger went to Casey, explaining that Harriman was the new boss of the Southern Pacific.

“This is the Santa Fe,” Casey bristled, looking at his watch. “I’m due in Barstow at 11:05 and bigod I’ll be there.”

Aboard his train he was a despot and a stickler for the rules, demanding that even his superiors obey them. This finally was his downfall and he came to the desert.

Elinor Glyn, who made the best seller list with “Three Weeks” in the early part of the century, came to Rawhide and Tex Rickard, spectacular gambler undertook to show her a bit of life a la Rawhide. He took her to the Stingaree district and later to a reception in his own place. The state’s notables were presented to the lady along with Nat Goodwin, Julian Hawthorne, and others internationally known.

Tex saw Casey standing alone at the end of the bar and knowing he was a voracious reader he went to Casey: “Come on and meet the author of Three Weeks…”

“I’ve read it,” Casey said. “They’ve hung folks for less.”

Casey’s method of getting a job when his grub ran out was unique and unfailing. He would storm into the store and turn loose on Charlie, in charge of the roads and long his friend. “Who’s keeping up these roads? Chuck holes in ’em big as the Grand Canyon … disgrace – ”