Loafing Along Death Valley Trails

We found, as Dan had predicted, that everybody in the country had come to Jack’s party. A long U shaped table was placed outside under the shade of a tree. From nearby pits came a tantalizing aroma of barbecue. A keg of bourbon encircled with glasses stood beside a bucket of dripping mint. Cigars and cigarettes were on top of the keg and Jack saw that his guests were always supplied.

There was an orchestra with capable musicians, Jack occasionally pinch hitting for the bull fiddler when the latter took time out for a drink or a dance. But when the snare drum player wanted his bourbon, Jack was like a kid pulling doodads from a Christmas tree. “It will last a week,” Dan said. “A few may pull out after a day or two, but others will take their places.”

“This must have cost Jack a year’s labor,” I said. “I told him that once,” Dan laughed. “He asked me what else would a fellow work a year for.”

Jack’s views of life and things were Mary’s, except that Mary knew lean years come and if any provisions were to be made for them she would have to make them. She tended the goats and the sheep, cut the deer and the mountain sheep into strips and hung them high, where the flies wouldn’t get them, to cure in the breeze. If Jack wanted to throw a party, so did Mary. “… Big party … kill fat steer. Five sheep. Heap good time…” To Jack’s everlasting credit, be it said that whatever Mary did, suited Jack.

“Oh, him fine man,” Mary would say. “Like home. Play with children. No get mad…”

There may be somewhere in this world a morsel approaching Mary’s barbecued mountain sheep, but I’ve never tasted it.

Jack told me later that the best meat is that from an old ram with no teeth. “He hasn’t eaten all winter, because his teeth won’t let him cut the hard, woody sage and being starved when spring comes, he gorges on the new sacatone. He fattens quickly and his flesh is tender.”

While Dan and I were walking about, a long limousine came across the valley and parked behind a screen of mesquite well away from the house and the guests. Dan and I happened to be nearby as a big, dark man expensively tailored stepped out. A lady fashionably dressed remained in the car.

“That’s Lem,” Dan explained. “When he was a kid he ran around in a gee string. I reckon his wife doesn’t want to meet the in-laws.”

We came upon him a moment later and while he and Dan talked of old times Jack rushed down and embraced Lem. “Come up,” he urged, but Lem’s interest was lukewarm. Mary was busy and he would see her later. No, he didn’t wish a drink. He had cigars. Just stopped in to see how Jack was and if he’d changed his mind.

Dan and I moved away and sat under a shed along the runoff of the spring and had no choice about listening to a conversation not intended for our ears.

Jack was squatted on his heels and his brother was sitting on a boulder. Lem was talking, his voice brittle: “Of course, we married squaws … but we are more white than Indian. I’ll give you all the money you need. Let Mary go back to her people. She’ll be happy. Look at Anna … she’s contented and better off with her own people and it will be the same with Mary.”

Lem lifted his hand, a big diamond ring flashing on his finger as he pointed to the squalid cabin where Jack’s fat squaw, her face beaming, was serving the guests. “Look at that hovel. Just a pig sty. If you prefer that to $10,000 a year, it’s your business. I’ve come out for the last time…”

Jack, bareheaded, rose, his hair rumpled in the wind as he glanced at the things about – the sagging roof, the shade tree beside it and following his glance I saw Mary smile at him and wave. Then he turned to Lem: “A pig sty, huh? Ten thousand a year. Mansion in the city.” His eyes traveled over Lem’s smart tailored suit, the diamond, the malacca cane pecking the gravel at his feet. I could see Jack’s fingers digging at his palms, the muscles rippling along his wrists and I sensed that he was seething inside.

“Pig sty… One year I recollect, no crop. No meat. No game. Nothing. I was down with fever. She was down too, but she got up and walked and crawled from here to Indian Springs. Through the brush. Over the mountain to get grub from her people. Why, sometimes I’d feel like going off by myself and bawling…” Jack turned again to his brother, flint in his dark eyes. “I ought to brain you. To hell with your money. She stuck with me and bigod, I’ll stick with her.”

Then Jack calmly strode back to his party, and somehow it seemed to me the hovel had suddenly become a holy shrine.

Chapter XIII

Sex in Death Valley Country

Sex, of course, went with the white man to the desert, but because there were no Freuds, no Kinseys stirring the social sewage, it was considered merely as a biologic urge and thus its impact on the lives of the early settlers was a realistic one. It was not good for man to live alone. The husky young adventurer found a water hole and a cottonwood tree and built a cabin. But he found it wasn’t a home. The lonely immensity of space he knew, was no place for a white woman and none were there. He faced the fundamental problem squarely and looked about for a squaw.

He paid Hungry Bill or some other Indian head man $10 for the mate of his choice and that sanctified the relation. She brought a certain degree of orderliness to the cabin, washed his clothes, cooked his meals. A child was born and the cabin became a home. The squaw could sharpen a stick, walk out into the brush and return with herbs and roots and serve a palatable dinner. She worked his fields, groomed his horses and relieved him of responsibility for the children. The progeny followed the rules of breeding. Some good. Some bad.

Said old Jim Baker, who married a Shoshone, pleading for a “squar” deal for his son: “There’s only one creature worse than a genuine Indian and that’s a half breed. He has got two devils in him and is meaner than the meanest Indian I ever saw. That boy of mine is a half-breed and he ain’t accountable.”

Almost all of the first settlers were squaw men and the matings were tolerated because they were understood. It was often a long journey to obtain the sanction of a Chief and the squaw was taken without formality. Many of these matings lasted and the offspring were absorbed without social embarrassment in the life of the community. Dr. Kinsey would have had little joy in his search for perversion or infidelities, though there is the instance of a drunken squaw who aroused the owner of a saloon at midnight on the Ash Meadows desert and shouted: “I want a man…”

Once Shoshone faced the desperate need of a school. There were only three children of school age in the little settlement and the nearest school was 28 miles away. Parents complained, but authorities at the county seat nearly 200 miles away, pointed out that the law required 13 children or an average attendance of five and a half to form a school district.

Like other community problems it was taken to Charlie, though none believed that even Charlie could solve it.

The time for the opening of schools was but a few weeks away when one day Brown headed his car out into the desert. “Hunting trip,” he explained.

In a hovel he found Rosie, a Piute squaw with a brood of children. “How old?” Charlie asked.

“Him five … him six now,” she said. “Him seven. Him eight.”

“How’d you like to live at Shoshone? Plenty work. Good house.”

“Okay. Me come,” Rosie said.

With the half breeds, the school was able to open.

Rosie was a challenging problem. She would have taken no beauty prize among the Piutes, but when along her desert trails she acquired these children of assorted parentage, Fate dealt her an ace.

With the few dollars Rosie wangled from the several fathers for the support of their children, she lived unworried. She liked to get drunk and the only nettling problem in her life was the federal law against selling liquor to Indians. So she established her own medium of exchange – a bottle of liquor. Unfortunately she spread a social disease and that was something to worry about.

“Rosie has Shoshone over a barrel,” Joe Ryan said. “If we run her out, we won’t have enough children for school.”

Then there was the economic angle – the loss of wages by afflicted miners and mines crippled by the absence of the unafflicted who would take time off to go to Las Vegas for the commodity supplied by Rosie.

Charlie arranged for Ann Cowboy to look after Rosie’s children and called up W. H. Brown, deputy sheriff at Death Valley Junction and told him to come for Rosie. Brownie, as he is known all over the desert, came and took Rosie into custody. “What’ll I charge her with?”

“She has a venereal disease,” Charlie said.

“There’s no law I know of against that…”

“All right. Charge her with pollution. She got drunk and fell into the spring.” Then Charlie called up the Judge and suggested Rosie have a year’s vacation in the county jail.

The paths that radiated from Rosie’s shack in the brush like spokes from the hub of a wheel, were soon overgrown with salt grass. She served her sentence and returned to Shoshone and the paths were soon beaten smooth again.

Eventually Brown declared Shoshone out of bounds for Rosie and she moved over into Nevada. There she found a lover of her tribe and one night when both were drunk, Rosie decided she’d had enough of him and with a big, sharp knife she calmly disemboweled him – for which unladylike incident she was removed to a Nevada prison where the state cured her syphilis and turned her loose – if not morally reformed, at least physically fit.

One of Rosie’s patrons was a man thought to be in his middle fifties. Always carefully groomed, his white shirts, spotless ties, and tailored suits were conspicuous in a place where levis were the rule. He was also a total abstainer. When he died suddenly and it was learned he was 82 years old, Shoshone gasped. An item in his will read: “To Rosie, $50 to buy whiskey.”

Living in a wickiup in the mesquite was the Indian, Tom Weed, who shared with his squaw a passion for liquor. Sober, Tom was industrious in the Indian way. He knew the country, when and where the mountain sheep were fattest; the herbs that cured and the best grasses for the beautiful baskets woven by his wife.

Tom filed on a deposit of non-metallic ore near Shoshone and forgot it. A subsequent locater found a buyer. Considerable capital was to be invested and the purchaser decided that Tom, if so disposed, could at least challenge the title. In order to dispose of Tom he sent the document to Dad Fairbanks together with a check payable to Tom for $1000 and asked Dad to get a quit claim deed from Tom.

Since $1000 was more than Tom ever expected to see in his life he was eager to sign. “You cash check?” he asked Dad.

“Sure,” Dad told him.

As Dad was getting the money he said, “Tom, long winter ahead. Hard to get work. Don’t you think you’d better leave money with me? Might come in handy.” Dad saw that Tom was impressed and added: “You told me yesterday you were going over to Las Vegas. That’s another good reason. Think it over.”

“Okay. Me think.” Tom stood for a long moment staring at the floor, studying every angle of the problem. Finally he thrust his palm at Dad and said gravely: “Might die…”

Dad gave him the money and Tom went to Las Vegas. In an hour he was drunk. In three he was broke and in jail.

One night he and his squaw got blissfully drunk. They were sleeping in a shed full of combustible junk when it caught fire. Other Indians attracted by their screams rushed to the scene but both were dead. From Tom’s wickiup, a few feet from the shed, they took Tom’s guns and saddles, his squaw’s priceless baskets – all the belongings of both – and tossed them into the flames. Thus the evil spirits were kept away and the souls of Tom and his squaw passed happily to the Piute heaven which is a place where there is a big lake and forests filled with game and the squaws are strong and plentiful.

The Johnnie Mine, an important gold producer, east of Shoshone, was located by John Tecopa, son of Cap Tecopa, Pahrump Chief.

Tecopa found the float; gave Ed Metcalf an interest to help him locate the ledge. Bob and Monte Montgomery bought the claim. They interested Jerry Langford, who induced the Mormon Church to get behind the project.

The Potosi was an early discovery on Timber Mountain between the Johnnie Mine and Good Springs. (It was here that Carole Lombard, wife of Clark Gable, was killed in an airplane accident in 1941.) From this mine came the lead which made the bullets used in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Jeff Grundy, a prospector of early days, said his father molded the bullets and delivered them to John D. Lee, who after 20 years was executed for the murder of the 123 victims of the massacre.

Lee was the owner of Lee’s Ferry, which was the only place where the Colorado River could be crossed in the Grand Canyon area until the present suspension bridge 500 feet high was built.

Near Johnnie are Ash Meadows and the beautiful Pahrump Valley, overlooked by the Charleston Mountains – the summer sleeping porch of Las Vegas, 35 miles south.

At Ash Meadows lived Jack Longstreet, who wore his hair long enough to cover his ears. He claimed kinship with the distinguished South Carolina family of that name. Easier to prove is that Mr. Longstreet came from Texas and as a 14 year old youngster was caught with a band of horse thieves in Colorado. The older ones were hanged but because of his youth Longstreet was released after his ears were cropped to brand him for identification by others. He lived and drank lustily for 96 years and died with a competency.

Near Johnnie also lived Mary Scott, who discovered the Confidence Mine, a landmark in Death Valley. Mary was a squaw who, after consorting with several white men, chose for her mate a half-breed named Bob Scott. On a hunting and trapping trip Mary picked up some ore which Scott decided was silver. Since silver could not be profitably handled because of transportation costs, Scott filed no notice.

Years after Scott’s death, Mary showed samples of the ore to her cousin, an Indian named Bob Black and Bob showed it to Frank Cole, a millwright at the Johnnie Mine. Cole and Jimmy Ashdown grubstaked Mary and Bob, who returned to Death Valley and located the property. Samples showed rich gold.

For a wagon with a canopy and a spavined horse Cole and Ashdown secured the interest of Mary and Bob. Cole and Ashdown then sold to the Montgomery brothers, who through Bishop Cannon secured backing for the venture from the Mormon Church.

Dan Driscoll built the road to the mine. Shorty Harris, Bob Warnack, and Rube Graham dug the well and mine shaft. It produced rich ore to a depth of 65 feet, where the vein was broken up.

Chapter XIV

Shoshone Country. Resting Springs

The country about Shoshone is identified with the earliest migration of Americans to California.

It is a curious fact that prior to the coming of Jedediah Smith who, in 1826 was actually the first American to enter the state from the east, the contented Spanish believed that the Sierras were insurmountable barriers to invasion by the hated American or any attacking enemy.

After Smith the first white American to look upon the Shoshone region so far as known, was William Wolfskill, a Kentucky trapper who left Santa Fe in 1830-31 on a trading expedition with stores of cloth, garments, and gimcracks.

Having had poor luck in disposing of his cargo, when he reached the Virgin River he decided to push westward across the Mojave Desert and entered California by way of Cajon Pass. After resting at San Gabriel he went north into the San Joaquin Valley. There he disposed of his stock at fabulous prices, taking in trade mules, horses, silks, and other items which he took to Taos and Santa Fe, receiving for this merchandise equally huge profits.

Wolfskill later settled in Los Angeles, one of the earliest Americans in the pueblo where he acquired large land holdings. There he established the citrus industry, planting a grove in what is now the heart of Los Angeles.

In 1832 Joseph B. Chiles organized a party at Independence, Missouri, and started for California. It numbered 50 men, women, and children. Upon reaching Fort Laramie, Wyoming (which was officially Fort John, but for some reason was never so called) Chiles met Joseph Reddeford Walker and employed him as guide.

Eighteen years before the Bennett-Arcane party came to grief, Walker had discovered Walker River and Walker Lake in Nevada, afterward named for him. After reaching the Sierras, his jaded teams were unable to cross and had to be abandoned, the party narrowly escaping death. Having heard of the southerly course over the old Spanish Trail, he turned back and over it guided the Chiles party.

Early in 1843, John C. Fremont led a party of 39 men from Salt Lake City northward to Fort Vancouver and in November of that year, started on the return trip to the East. This trip was interrupted when he found his party threatened by cold and starvation and he faced about; crossed the Sierra Nevadas and went to Sutter’s Fort. After resting and outfitting, he set out for the East by the southerly route over the old Spanish trail, which leads through the Shoshone region.

At a spring somewhere north of the Mojave River he made camp. The water nauseated some of his men and he moved to another. Identification of these springs has been a matter of dispute and though historians have honestly tried to identify them, the fact remains that none can say “I was there.”

In the vicinity were several springs any of which may have been the one referred to by Fremont in his account of the journey. Among these were two water holes indicated on early maps as Agua de Tio Mesa, and another as Agua de Tomaso.

There are several springs of nauseating water in the area and some of the old timers academically inclined, insisted that Fremont probably camped at Saratoga Springs, which afforded a sight of Telescope Peak or at Salt Spring, nine miles east on the present Baker-Shoshone Highway at Rocky Point.

Kit Carson was Fremont’s guide. Fremont records that two Mexicans rode into his camp on April 27, 1844, and asked him to recover some horses which they declared had been stolen from them by Indians at the Archilette Spring, 13 miles east of Shoshone.

One of the Mexicans was Andreas Fuentes, the other a boy of 11 years – Pablo Hernandez. While the Indians were making the raid, the boy and Fuentes had managed to get away with 30 of the horses and these they had left for safety at a water hole known to them as Agua de Tomaso. They reported that they had left Pablo’s father and mother and a man named Santiago Giacome and his wife at Archilette Spring.

With Fremont, besides Kit Carson, was another famed scout, Alexander Godey, a St. Louis Frenchman – a gay, good looking dare devil who later married Maria Antonia Coronel, daughter of a rich Spanish don and became prominent in California.

In answer to the Mexicans’ plea for help, Fremont turned to his men and asked if any of them wished to aid the victims of the Piute raid. He told them he would furnish horses for such a purpose if anyone cared to volunteer. Of the incident Kit Carson, who learned to write after he was grown, says in his dictated autobiography: “Godey and myself volunteered with the expectation that some men of our party would join us. They did not. We two and the Mexicans … commenced the pursuit.”

Fuentes’ horse gave out and he returned to Fremont’s camp that night, but Godey, Carson, and the boy went on. They had good moonlight at first but upon entering a deep and narrow canyon, utter blackness came, even shutting out starlight, and Carson says they had to “feel for the trail.”

One may with reason surmise that Godey and Carson proceeded through the gorge that leads to the China Ranch and now known as Rainbow Canyon. When they could go no farther they slept an hour, resumed the hunt and shortly after sunrise, saw the Indians feasting on the carcass of one of the stolen horses. They had slain five others and these were being boiled. Carson’s and Godey’s horses were too tired to go farther and were hitched out of sight among the rocks. The hunters took the trail afoot and made their way into the herd of stolen horses.

Says Carson: “A young one got frightened. That frightened the rest. The Indians noticed the commotion … sprang to their arms. We now considered it time to charge on the Indians. They were about 30 in number. We charged. I fired, killing one. Godey fired, missed but reloaded and fired, killing another. There were only three shots fired and two were killed. The remainder ran. I … ascended a hill to keep guard while Godey scalped the dead Indians. He scalped the one he shot and was proceeding toward the one I shot. He was not yet dead and was behind some rocks. As Godey approached he raised, let fly an arrow. It passed through Godey’s shirt collar. He again fell and Godey finished him.”

Subsequently it was discovered that Godey hadn’t missed, but that both men had fired at the same Indian as proven by two bullets found in one of the dead Indians. Godey called these Indians “Diggars.” The one with the two bullets was the one who sent the arrow through Godey’s collar and when Godey was scalping him, “he sprang to his feet, the blood streaming from his skinned head and uttered a hideous yowl.” Godey promptly put him out of his pain.

They returned to camp. Writes Fremont: “A war whoop was heard such as Indians make when returning from a victorious enterprise and soon Carson and Godey appeared, driving before them a band of horses recognized by Fuentes to be part of those they had lost. Two bloody scalps dangling from the end of Godey’s gun…”

Fremont wrote of it later: “The place, object and numbers considered, this expedition of Carson and Godey may be considered among the boldest and most disinterested which the annals of Western adventure so full of daring deeds can present.” It was indeed a gallant response to the plea of unfortunates whom they’d never seen before and would never see again.

When Fremont and his party reached the camp of the Mexicans they found the horribly butchered bodies of Hernandez, Pablo’s father, and Giacome. The naked bodies of the wives were found somewhat removed and shackled to stakes.

Fremont changed the name of the spring from Archilette to Agua de Hernandez and as such it was known for several years. He took the Mexican boy, Pablo Hernandez, with him to Missouri where he was placed with the family of Fremont’s father-in-law, U. S. Senator Thomas H. Benton. The young Mexican didn’t care for civilization and the American way of life and in the spring of 1847 begged to be returned to Mexico. Senator Benton secured transportation for him on the schooner Flirt, by order of the Navy, and he was landed at Vera Cruz – a record of which is preserved in the archives of the 30th Congress, 1848.

Three years later a rumor was circulated that the famed bandit, Joaquin Murietta was no other than Pablo Hernandez.

Lieutenant, afterwards Colonel, Brewerton was at Resting Springs in 1848 with Kit Carson who then was carrying important messages for the government to New Mexico. He found the ground white with the bleached bones of other victims of the desert Indians. Brewerton calls them Pau Eutaws.

The Mormons began early to look upon this region as a logical part of the State of Deseret, for the creation of which, Brigham Young petitioned Congress, setting forth among reasons for the recognition of such a state that: “… We are so far removed from all civilized society and organized government and also natural barriers of trackless deserts, including mountains of snow and savages more bloody than either, so that we can never be united with any other portion of the country.”

As early as 1851, the far-seeing Young decided to found a colony of Saints in San Bernardino, California, to extend Mormon influence. Sam Brannan, brilliant adherent of that faith, had already come to California with the nucleus of a Mormon colony in 1846, two years before Marshall discovered gold.

Brannan became an outstanding figure among the Argonauts. None exceeded him in leadership or popularity in the building of San Francisco and the state. He grew rich and unfortunately began drinking; finally abandoned Mormonism and died poor.

The colonizers sent out by Brigham Young were in three divisions. One under the leadership of Amasa Lyman, who brought his five wives. Another was headed by Charles C. Rich, who was accompanied by three of his wives. It is interesting to note that Rich became the father of 51 children by five wives.