William Caruthers - Loafing Along Death Valley Trails

When you travel through the desolation of Death Valley along the Funeral Range, you may find it difficult to believe that several thousand feet above the top of your car was once a cool, inviting land with rivers and forests and lakes, and that hundreds of feet below you are the dry beds of seas that washed its shores.

Scientists assert that all life – both animal and vegetable began in these buried seas – probably two and one-half billion years ago.

It is certain that no life could have existed on the thin crust of earth covered as it was with deadly gases. Therefore, your remotest ancestors must have been sea creatures until they crawled out or were washed ashore in one of Nature’s convulsions to become land dwellers.

Since sea water contains more gold than has ever been found on the earth, it may be said that man on his way up from the lowest form of life was born in a solution of gold.

That he survived, is due to two urges – the sex urge and the urge for food. Without either all life would cease.

Note. The author’s book, Life’s Grand Stairway soon to be published, contains a fast moving, factual story of man and his eternal quest for gold from the beginning of recorded time.

Camping one night at Mesquite Spring, I heard a prospector cursing his burro. It wasn’t a casual cursing, but a classic revelation of one who knew burros – the soul of them, from inquisitive eyes to deadly heels. A moment later he was feeding lumps of sugar to the beast and the feud ended on a pleasant note.

We were sitting around the camp fire later when the prospector showed me a piece of quartz that glittered at twenty feet.

“Do you have much?” I asked.

“I’ve got more than Carter had oats, and I’m pulling out at daylight. Me and Thieving Jack.”

“I suppose,” I said aimlessly, “you’ll retire to a life of luxury; have a palace, a housekeeper, and a French chef.”

“Nope. Chinaman cook. Friend of mine struck it rich. He had a female cook. After that he couldn’t call his soul his own. Me? First money I spend goes for pie. Never had my fill of pie. Next – ” He paused and looked affectionately at Thieving Jack. “I’m going to buy a ranch over at Lone Pine with a stream running smack through the middle. Snow water. I aim to build a fence head high all around it and pension that burro off. As for me – no mansion. Just a cottage with a screen porch all around. I’m sick of horseflies and mosquitoes.”

He was off at sunrise and my thought was that God went with him and Thieving Jack.

If you encounter scorching heat you will find little comfort in the fact that icebergs once floated in those ancient seas. It is almost certain that you will be curious about the disorderly jumble of gutted hills; the colorful canyons and strange formations and ask yourself what caused it.

The answer is found on Black Mountain in the Funeral Range. Here occurred a convulsion of nature without any known parallel and the tops of nearby mountains became the bottom of America – an upheaval so violent that the oldest rocks were squeezed under pressure from the nethermost stratum of the earth to lie alongside the youngest on the surface.

The seas and the fish vanished. The forests were buried. The prehistoric animals, the dinosaurs and elephants were trapped.

The result, after undetermined ages, is today’s Death Valley. A shorter explanation was that of my companion on my first trip to Black Mountain – a noted desert character – Jackass Slim. There we found a scientist who wished to enlighten us. To his conversation sprinkled with such words as Paleozoic and pre-Cambrian Slim listened raptly for an hour. Then the learned man asked Slim if he had made it plain.

“Sure,” Slim said. “You’ve been trying to say hell broke loose.”

The Indians, who saw Death Valley first, called it “Tomesha,” which means Ground Afire, and warned adventurers, explorers, and trappers that it was a vast sunken region, intolerant of life.

The first white Americans known to have seen it, belonged to the party of explorers led by John C. Fremont and guided by Kit Carson.

Death Valley ends on the south in the narrow opening between the terminus of the Panamint Range and that of the Black Mountains. Through this opening, though unaware of it, Fremont saw the dry stream bed of the Amargosa River, on April 27, 1844, flowing north and in the distance “a high, snowy mountain.” This mountain was Telescope Peak, 11,045 feet high.

Nearly six years later, impatient Forty Niners enroute to California gold fields, having heard that the shortest way was through this forbidden sink, demanded that their guide take them across it.

“I will go to hell with you, but not through Death Valley,” said the wise Mormon guide, Captain Jefferson Hunt.

Scoffing Hunt’s warning, the Bennett-Arcane party deserted and with the Jayhawkers became the first white Americans to cross Death Valley. The suffering of the deserters, widely advertised, gave the region an evil reputation that kept it practically untraveled, unexplored, and accursed for the next 75 years, or until Charles Brown of Shoshone succeeded in having wheel tracks replaced with roads.

With the opening of the Eichbaum toll road from Lone Pine to Stovepipe Wells in 1926-7 a trickle of tourists began, but actually as late as 1932, Death Valley had fewer visitors than the Congo. A few prospectors, a few daring adventurers and a few ranchers had found in the areas adjoining, something in the great Wide Open that answered man’s inherent craving for freedom and peace. “The hills that shut this valley in,” explained the old timer, “also shut out the mess we left behind.”

Tales of treasure came in the wake of the Forty Niners but it was not until 1860 that the first prospecting party was organized by Dr. Darwin French at Oroville, California. In the fall of that year he set out to find the Lost Gunsight mine, the story of which is told in another chapter.

On this trip Dr. French discovered and gave his name to Darwin Falls and Darwin Wash in the Panamint range. He named Bennett’s Well on the floor of Death Valley to honor Asa (or Asabel) Bennett, a member of the Bennett-Arcane party. He gave the name of another member of that party to Towne’s Pass, now a thrilling route into Death Valley but then a breath-taking challenge to death.

He named Furnace Creek after finding there a crude furnace for reducing ore. He also named Panamint Valley and Panamint Range, but neither the origin of the word Panamint nor its significance is known. Indians found there said their tribe was called Panamint, but those around there are Shoshones and Piutes. (See note Note. Early writers refer to Pau Eutahs, Pah Utes, Paiuches, Pyutes, and Paiutes. The word Piute is believed to mean true Ute. Bancroft claimed the Piutes and Pah Utes were separate tribes, the latter being the Trout or Ochi Indians of Walker River; the former the Tule (or Toy) Indians of Pyramid Lake. There was an undetermined number of branches of the original Utah stock. Besides the above, there was another tribe called by other Indians, Cozaby Piutes, Cozaby being the Indian name of a worm that literally covered the shores of Mono Lake. This worm was a principal food of the tribe. Though “Piute” is the spelling justifiably used throughout the region, “Pahute” was chosen a few years ago by a group of scholars as the preferable form. at end of this chapter.)

Also in 1860 William Lewis Manly who with John Rogers, a brave and husky Tennessean had rescued the survivors of the Bennett-Arcane party, returned to the valley he had named, to search for the Gunsight. Manly found nothing and reported later he was deserted by his companions and escaped death only when rescued by a wandering Indian.