Loafing Along Death Valley Trails

“Been waiting for you to come in,” Charlie would say with a sober face. “Get a shovel and fix ’em.”

A good conscientious worker, Casey would put the road in shape, pay his debts and again head into the horizon.

You who spin through Death Valley or along its approaches owe much to Casey, who made many of the original road beds the hard way – with pick and shovel.

At last Casey got the old age pension and his latter years were the best. His home, a dugout in the bank of a wash near Tecopa. With no rent, with books and magazines and the solitude he loved, he lived happily. “When I croak,” he often said, “just put me in my dugout. Toss a stick of dynamite in after me. Shut the door and cave in the goddam’ hill.”

One night he went to Tecopa. Friends were doing a spot of drinking and far behind in his score with the years, Casey joined them. There was nothing out of line. Just yarns and memories and Casey had a lot of these. Tonopah. Goldfield. Rawhide. Ely. Foundling days.

“… They put me in a religious school. Had no relatives. In those days they whaled hell outa you just to see you squirm. ‘Casey,’ the teacher would ask, ‘who swallowed the whale?’ How did I know? Then he’d drag me off by the ear and blister my bottom. I shoved off one night. Been on the loose ever since.”

As he drank from his bottle of beer he suddenly slumped – and died instantly. Because of the intense heat, Maury Sorrells, now Supervisor but then Coroner, ordered immediate burial.

Someone recalled Casey’s wish to be put in the dugout and the hill blown up and started for the dynamite. But Whitey Bill McGarn warned that it would violate the law. One-eyed Casey – no relation, but long a friend, suggested a wake until the grave was dug. “It will be daylight then and we’ll plant him in the wash right in front of his dugout.”

This was done as the sun came over the hills and I like to think that somewhere in the after life, all is well with Casey.

Ben Brandt, previously mentioned, was a big blond man with child-like blue eyes, huge gnarled hands and the strength of an ox. He wore enormous boots, but when he bought new ones he always complained that they lacked traction and would go immediately to the dump, salvage an old tire casing and add two inches of reinforcement to the soles, with half a pound of hobnails. Ben then was ready for travel – provided he could find his burros.

Near remote Quail Springs Ben dug a 4×4 mine shaft 75 feet deep, without aid. Descending by ladder he would fill a 10 gallon bucket with dirt, climb out and bring it to the surface. Day after day, month after month Ben applied the power of two strong arms and two strong legs. “With an engine you could do it in half the time,” Ben was told. “I’ve got plenty of time,” Ben drawled.

Ben disdained gold in quartz formation. “I like placer. It’s a poor man’s game. If you find gold you put it in your poke and you’ve got spending money.”

Ben kept five burros and being industrious, never lacked a grubstake. He avoided argument except upon one subject, and that was burros versus Fords in prospecting. “I can get anywhere with my burros. I find stalled flivvers all over the desert and my burros drag ’em in.”

Ben believed that a burro had at least some of the intellectual powers of man. “Read a clock good as you,” he said. “I worked my burro, Solomon, on a hoist. He didn’t like it. I got up every morning at daylight, by an alarm clock. Slept out and kept the clock on a boulder at my head and got up when the alarm went off. One morning I woke up with the sun shining straight down in my eyes. It was noon. That burro had sneaked up and taken that clock down the canyon a mile away. Don’t tell me they can’t think! I sold him. Too smart.”

I asked Ben once what he would do if he suddenly found a million dollar claim. “I would build a monument a thousand feet high on top of Telescope Peak and dedicate it to burros.”

Such a monument would inadequately express the debt today’s world owes that little beast. Here are some of the things that link your life to the burro:

The springs and the mattress in the bed you were born on. The talc that powdered you. The soap that bathed you. The ring you slipped on the finger of the girl you love. The paint on your house. The glass in your windows. The tile in your bathroom. The enamel ware in your kitchen. The prescription your druggist fills. The fillings the dentist puts into your teeth. The coin and the currency you spend. The auto you ride in and finally the casket in which you leave this world.

Wars have been won or lost and the credit of nations stabilized because a burro carried a prospector’s grub into faraway hills.

Ben’s burros strayed and he’d just returned with them after a two days’ hunt. He was sitting on the bench mopping his brow when Louise Grantham, the girl with the mine in the Panamint, came up. She needed pack animals to get the ore down to the road. She’d tried before, to trade her Ford pickup for Ben’s burros, but he’d never shown a flicker of interest. In a voice pitched for Ben’s ears, she said to Ernie Huhn: “If Ben didn’t waste so much time hunting those jacks, he might find a mine.”

Ben cocked an ear, but made no comment.

“Now take that Quail Springs hole,” Louise went on. “If he had my pickup he could take off a wheel, put on a belt and haul up the muck in one tenth the time, and instead of hoofing it in the sun he could ride in a cool cab and haul his supplies in.”

There comes a weak moment in everyone’s life and this was Ben’s. He traded the burros for the Ford and one of the best prospectors on the desert was ruined forever.

Ben had a mortal fear of women and nothing could convince him that any unattached woman wasn’t always lying in wait for any loose man.

Ben went into the Johnnie country to prospect and passing through I looked him up. He was living in a tin shack in the canyon leading to the old Johnnie Mine. I asked Ben about his luck.

“Last prospecting I did was right out there.” He pointed to the slope in front of his house. “Good placer ground too.”

“Why did you quit?”

“Woman,” Ben grumbled. “Don’t know yet what come over me, but I took a woman for a partner.” He pointed to a boulder a few hundred yards away. “There’s where I wanted to start digging. It’s rich dirt. She wanted to start up there near her shack.”

“Well, what difference did it make?” I asked.

“I see you don’t know women. I hadn’t been working up there by her house no time before she called me to get her a bucket of water. Bucket was half full. Next day she wanted a board in the kitchen floor nailed down. Didn’t need any nail. ‘There’s some fresh apple pie on the table,’ she says. I told her I didn’t like pie. I’m crazy about pie but I knew her game. She calculated if I ate with her two – three times I’d be a dead pigeon. So I told her she could have the claim and walked off.”

Ben struck a happier note when he informed me that he didn’t need to work any more and at last had attained the one ambition of his life. “Come inside and I’ll show you.” Beaming as only a man can when he sits on top of the world, he approached a table and it flashed over me that I would see a certified check for a fortune.

There was a cloth over the table and he carefully wiped his big hands before touching it. He wet his big, broad thumb and forefinger and gave them an extra wipe on the sides of his shirt, a wide smile on his face and I had a vicarious thrill that a man who could barely read and write had at last achieved that which he most wanted in life. He started to remove the cloth, but paused. “Always said if I ever struck it rich, first money I spent would be for one of these dinkuses.”

He flipped the cloth aside. I stared incredulous. It was a portable typewriter.

He replaced the cover with the gentle care of a mother putting her baby to bed and I left him, sure that God was in his heaven with an eye on Ben.

Contemporary with Ben was Joe Volmer, who lived in a dugout in Dublin Gulch. I had seen royalty from afar and once I had dined with a sultan on horsemeat and fried bananas, but no king ever attained the majesty of Joe. He was tall, erect, wore a white sailor’s hat and carried a cane. His mustache was always waxed to a needle point, after the manner of Kaiser Wilhelm. Though he increased his small pension by selling home brew, he always managed to give the impression that he was descending to your level when he accepted the two bits you left on his table.

He was neat as he was lordly and forever scrubbing his pots and pans. He kept the dugout immaculate and when I first saw him standing on the ledge in front of his door, calmly surveying the valley below, he posed like an Alexander the Great, with the world conquered and trussed at his feet.

I had never seen him until one day a tourist came into the store and asked Charlie for a stop-watch. Charlie told him he didn’t carry stop-watches. Shortly after the tourist had gone, Joe came in for a stop-watch. “Don’t keep ’em,” Charlie said. “Helluva store,” Joe barked and strode out.

“A curious coincidence,” I said. “Two calls for a stop-watch in the same day away out here.”

“It’s no coincidence,” Charlie said. “Just Joe Volmer. He’s in every day asking for something he knows I haven’t got.”

After Joe left, Jack Crowley came for his mail. Brown was in the cage set apart for the post office. He had just received several sheets of six-cent stamps – twice as many as he needed. “Jack,” he said, “when you see Joe tell him I’m out of six-cent stamps.” Within an hour Joe shoved a five dollar bill through the window. “Give me five dollars’ worth of six-cent stamps,” he ordered. Brown picked up the bill, filled the order and never again did Joe ask for merchandise not in stock.

Joe sold a claim and decided he needed a refrigerator to keep the beer cold. So he picked up a Monkey Ward catalogue and ordered a big white enamel number large enough for a hotel. Joe thought a refrigerator was just a refrigerator and he strutted around telling everybody. He had to widen the dugout door and waiting customers were more than eager to help him get the machine in place. He loaded the shelves and told them to come back in a couple of hours and cool their innards.

They came with their tongues hanging out. Joe set out the glasses and passed the bottles. Herman Jones picked one up and shook it. The cork hit the ceiling. “Hotter’n hell,” Herman said. “What sort of cooler is that?” He went over and looked. “Gas. You dam’ fool. Nearest gas is Barstow.”

Until Joe’s death he used the refrigerator to store pots and pans.

Discovered in his dugout in a serious condition, Joe was rushed to Death Valley Junction 28 miles away, where the Pacific Coast Borax Company maintained a hospital which was in charge of Dr. Shrum, who was rather realistic and somewhat cold blooded.

Just as they had gotten Joe in the doctor’s office, another patient was brought in. Dr. Shrum looked at the new comer and then at Joe. “Take Joe out,” he ordered. “He’s going to die anyway.”

Joe was wheeled outside and a moment later was dead.

George Williams, a Spanish American war veteran, retired to Shoshone on a pension of $50. Since food was cheap, George had more money than he knew what to do with. He kept five burros. He never prospected, but roamed the country and thought nothing of taking a 300 mile trip across the roughest terrain in the region. After spending his summers in the high country, he would return to Shoshone in winter. There he had a five acre ranch fenced in and a neat cabin.

Every day George would come to the store and buy a pound of chocolates. “I’ve got a sweet tooth,” he would explain.

Charlie, sure that no one could eat as much chocolate as George bought, was a bit curious as to what George did with it and trailed him one day through the mesquite to find George feeding the candy to his burros.

George was not a drinker, but on one occasion he joined a party and went on a bender. He awoke next morning with a horrible hangover and was so humiliated that he left Shoshone and never returned. He went over to Sandy and died in the ’30s.

One day George started to tell me a story as we sat on the bench. His burros were grazing in the nearby salt grass. Every time he reached the climax of his yarn, he would jump up to go after a straying burro. When he retrieved that one, another would wander off and George would leave me again.

For one entire summer I listened to the beginning of that yarn and every morning would remind him of it.

“Where was I?” he’d say. “Oh, yes, I was telling you about the girl climbing out of the fellow’s window just before daylight. Well, she went – ”

Then George would jump up and start for a burro, and I never learned what happened to the torrid romance after the girl crawled out of her lover’s window.

Chapter XXI

Roads. Cracker Box Signs

Any resemblance that a Death Valley highway bore to a road was a coincidence prior to 1926, and few tourists traveled over them unless two cars were along. “Just follow the wheel tracks and keep your eyes peeled for the cracker box signs along the road,” was the usual advice to the novice who didn’t know that tracks left by Mormons’ wagons nearly a century before may be seen today.

One of these led me to the bank of a mile-wide gash made by cloudbursts. To locate the missing link I climbed the nearest mountain and on a lonely mesa came at last upon a piece of shook nailed to a stake and stuck into the ground. But it had nothing to do with roads. A crude inscription read:

Montana JimJuly 1888A dam good pal

Reverently I stepped aside. Never again would I see a finer tribute to man. A few rocks bleached white in the sun outlined a sunken grave. Crossed upon it were Jim’s pick and shovel. It was not difficult to recreate what had happened there. Jim and his friend looking for gold. Jim’s faltering and the sun beating him down. Jim’s partner knowing that Jim’s moniker would identify him better than a surname to anyone who passed that way interested in Jim. Out in the desert 100 miles from human habitation he couldn’t call an undertaker, so he dug a hole, wrapped Jim in his canvas, rolled him in and hoped that God would reach down for Jim.

At that period it was not an uncommon experience for the early tourist to lose his way by doing the natural thing at a crossroads and take the one which showed the sign of most travel. Often he would find later that he had followed a trail to a mine miles away. Often too, it led to disaster.

The story of roads begins at Shoshone with Brown. In his trips in and around the valley, he erected signs to prevent the traveler from losing his way and his life. “I would like to see Death Valley country,” people would say to him, “but everyone tells me to stay out.”

Inyo county had little revenue and that was used in the more populous Owens Valley 150 miles west. The east side (the Shoshone area) was totally neglected. Letters and petitions protesting the unfair distribution of county funds were tossed into the waste basket. “Roads in that cauldron? Who would use ’em? Nobody ever goes there but a few old prospectors.”

This was true but it was also true that on Owens Valley’s west side the lakes and forests of the High Sierras were attracting a paying crop of vacationists and the supervisors knew it would be political suicide to divert this traffic from its towns and resorts. The county-wide opinion as to chance for relief was expressed in the slang of the day by a loafer on the bench at Shoshone: “About as much as a wax mouse would have against an asbestos cat in a race through hell. They have the votes and elect the supervisors.”

The east side had never had a member on the board. In the Shoshone precinct were less than 40 voters. In Death Valley a few prospectors who would have battered down the gates of hell if they thought gold lay beyond, poked around in its canyons. A few Indians. A few workmen for the Borax Company. In 1924 Brown put his suitcase in his car, filled the tank and said to those about: “Fellows, I’m running for Supervisor.” “You’ll be the mouse,” quipped a friend.

“I’ll let ’em know somebody lives over here anyway…”

Skirting the urban strongholds of the gentlemen in office Brown knocked at every door in the district. He berated none nor claimed he had all the answers to an obviously difficult problem. “… Roads built there will lead here. Everybody will gain…” Then to the next cabin and the next canyon until he’d seen every voter.

Before the opposition knew he had been around, he was back in Shoshone selling bacon and beans.

When the votes were counted the overlords of the west side gasped. “Who the hell’s this Brown? Didn’t even know he was running…”

Taking office January 1, 1925, he found that the beaten incumbent had spent all the money allocated for road maintenance in his own bailiwick before retiring. Nevertheless, Brown convinced the new board his election proved that the people of the entire county agreed with him that the Death Valley area could no longer be neglected and managed to get a niggardly appropriation which would not have built a mile of decent mountain road, and his district had three challenging mountain ranges to cross.

With this appropriation he was expected to care for a mileage four times greater than that of the west side and was thus responsible for not only eastern approaches but maintenance of 150 miles of road from Darwin, all roads in the valley and those which furnished the north and south approaches. He managed to get $5000 after two years. With this he procured road machinery on a rental basis and succeeded in making a fair desert road. Then he began a one-man crusade to exploit Death Valley as a tourist attraction. “We need only roads a tourist can travel.”

He worked just as diligently for all of Inyo’s roads. “We have one of the world’s best vacation lands,” he told the west-siders. “You have an abundance of beautiful lakes and streams in a setting of mountains impressive as any in the world. On our side we offer the appeal of the Panamint, the Funeral Range, and spectacular Death Valley. Tourists will come to both of us if we give them a chance and they will be our best crop.”

By 1926 his crusade for roads had spread beyond Inyo county lines. San Bernardino county, through which passes Highway 66, a main transcontinental artery, joins Inyo on the south. Its board of supervisors was in session one day when Brown strode in. Most of them he knew. He wanted their advice, he told them. “Your county and mine need more roads to bring more people. The easiest way into Death Valley is through your county from Baker. The distance from Baker to the Inyo county line is 45 miles. If you will build the road to the Inyo line, I will build it from that point to Furnace Creek, 71 miles. Such a road would open Death Valley to the public and the tourists who will travel will spend enough money in your towns to pay your share of the cost.”

San Bernardino supervisors agreed to consider it but were not enthusiastic. One of America’s largest counties, San Bernardino had also one of its largest road problems.

Brown kept plugging, arranging meetings, convincing residents that the county’s portion of the road would be over flat country and over roads already passable, and its construction inexpensive.

Finally San Bernardino county supervisors agreed and by April, 1929, he had 71 miles of passable road. The result was that Death Valley was no longer remote as the Congo and tourists began to come.

To Shoshone it meant a few more windshields to wipe; a few more cars to crawl under. Another soft answer to frame for the sightseer cursing the desolation. Another shed for the store that started on the kitchen table.

In 1932 Brown went before the State Highway Commission and urged that all the roads he had built in Death Valley be taken over by the state. The law was passed.

Death Valley became a National Monument February 11, 1933, by order of President Franklin Roosevelt. At that time America was groping its way through depression, worrying about its dinner and its debts as a result of the stock market crash of 1929.

In the nation’s hobo jungles the seasoned “bindle stiff” made room for the newcomer who had always lived on the right side of the tracks. Freight trains carried a new kind of bum when the adolescent female crawled into a car alongside an adolescent male, vainly seeking work anywhere at anything.

To save them and others like them C.C.C. camps were organized and one of these recruited largely from New York City’s Bowery, was sent to Death Valley with headquarters at Cow Creek, a few miles north of Furnace Creek Inn.

The new park was under the supervision of Col. John R. White, later superintendent of the entire National Park System and to Ray Goodwin, assistant superintendent was assigned the task of building additional roads and trails to points of interest to connect with the State System which Brown had built.

Then began in earnest the flow of tourist traffic to the “God-forsaken hole” for which Brown had worked for 14 long and difficult years. But he soon found that to the problems of a small desert community he had added those of a whole county. They were the aftermath of what has since been called in a marvelous understatement by Morrow Mayo, historian of Los Angeles, “The Rape of Owens Valley.”

In the early part of the century, the city of Los Angeles had secretly acquired nearly all sources of water in Inyo and Mono counties. An amazed world applauded the engineering feat by which water was siphoned over mountain ranges to flow through ditches and tunnels, a distance of 259 miles.

The enterprise was announced by its promoters as the answer to the desperate need for water. It is now known that this need was only a mask to hide a scheme to make Los Angeles pay the cost of bringing water to 108,000 acres of waterless land in San Fernando valley so that the owners could make a profit of a hundred million dollars through its subdivision and sale. This they did.

The shameful story glorifies by comparison the cattle wars of the early West when one side hired its Billy the Kids to kill off the other – the only difference being that in the Owens Valley feud the Billy the Kids were the Big Names of Los Angeles who used unscrupulous politicians and laws cunningly passed instead of six-guns.

As a consequence, Los Angeles owns the towns, ranches, and cattle ranges so that merchants, householders, ranchers, and renters have no title except in a relatively few instances, to the land upon which they live or to the house or store they occupy. Los Angeles could sell or lease or refuse to sell or lease land to cattlemen, homes to residents or stores to merchants and sell or refuse to sell water to those who had lived all their lives and would die on the devastated land.

As a result, the relations between the city and the Displaced Persons of the two counties were those of victor and vanquished.

In 1935 the city succeeded in getting an act passed by the legislature which prevented any town from becoming incorporated without the consent of 60 per cent of the property owners. The purpose of the act seemed fair enough when it was announced that it was designed to save the towns from both political demagogues and crackpots running amuck in California and it became a law.

But there was more than the eye could see. Its real object had been to strengthen the strangle hold of the Los Angeles Water and Power board upon Owens Valley. Since it owned the towns it could now prevent their incorporation. There had been some feeling of security under a resolution of the Water and Power Board which had declared that merchants, cattlemen, and residents – all of them lessees, would be given preference in new leases and renewals of old ones.

In 1942 the resolution became a scrap of paper, and ranchers, cattle men and householders were advised that their leases would hereafter be renewed by a method of secret bidding.

Thus the residents of Owens Valley learned that the labor of years had brought no security. As one beaten old timer told me, “We’ve been kicked around so much I’m used to it. I helped blow those ditches two-three times, to turn that water loose on the desert. I know when I’m licked.”

Resentment in Mono county, which provided more of the water taken by Los Angeles than Inyo, was even more aroused and smoldering hatreds were ready again to blow up a ditch. The two counties constitute the 28th Senatorial district.