Loafing Along Death Valley Trails

Slim watched the procedure awhile and with a sudden bright idea, sauntered out. A few moments later he returned through an alley with an auger wrapped in a tow sack, crawled under the house and soon a stream of gold and silver was cascading into Slim’s hat.

A lookout at a table nearest the cage, hearing a strange metallic noise, went outside to investigate and peeking under the floor, saw Slim without being seen. It was just too good to keep. Stealthily moving away, he spread the news and half of Goldfield was gathered about when Slim, his pockets bulging with his loot, crawled out only to face a jeering, heckling crowd.

Cornered like a rat in a cage, he couldn’t run; he couldn’t speak. He could only stand and grin and somehow the grin caught the crowd and instead of a lynching, Slim was handcuffed and led away and later the merciful judge who had been in the crowd declared Goldfield out of bounds for Slim and sent him on his way.

At no other place in the world except Goldfield, with its craving for life’s sunny side, could such an incident have occurred.

After greetings Slim confided that he was en route to a certain canyon, the location of which he wouldn’t even tell to his mother. There, not a cent less than $100,000,000 awaited him. No prospector worthy of the name ever bothers to mention a claim of less value. Not sure of the roads ahead, I asked him for directions.

“You’d better go down the valley,” he advised, pointing to a small black cloud above Funeral Range. “Regular cloudburst hatchery – these mountains.”

At a sudden burst of thunder we flinched and at another the earth seemed to tremble. Forked lightning was stabbing the inky blackness and I expected to see the mountains fall apart. “Something’s got to give,” Slim said. “Look at that lightning … no letup.” Another roar rumbled and rolled over the valley. “God – ” muttered Slim, “I haven’t prayed since I fell into a mine shaft full of rattlesnakes.”

As we watched the incessant play of lightning, Slim told me about his fall into the shaft: “Arkansas Ben Brandt was working about 100 yards away. Deaf as a lamp post, Ben is, but I kept praying and hollering and just when I’d given up, here comes a rope. You can argue with me all day but you can’t make me believe the Lord didn’t unstop old Ben’s ears.”

Slim gave me a final warning. “Take the road over the mountain when you come to the Shoshone sign. When you get there be sure to see Charlie before you go any farther.”

At every water hole where prospectors were gathered I’d heard someone tell someone else to see Charlie. At Furnace Creek I’d heard the vice president of the Borax Company tell an official of the Santa Fe railroad to see Charlie and only an hour before I met Slim I had stopped to give a tire patch to a young miner with a flat. While I waited to see that the patch stuck, I learned he was on his way to consult Charlie.

“My helper,” he confided, “jumped my claim after he learned I hadn’t done last year’s assessment work. That’s legal if a fellow’s a skunk but when he stole my wife and chased me off with my own shotgun, bigod – that’s different.” I suggested a lawyer. “I’ll see Charlie first…”

Naturally I became curious about this Charlie, who seemed to be a combination of Father Confessor and the Caliph Haroun Alraschid to all the desert. “Just who is Charlie?” I asked Slim.

“He runs the store at Shoshone. Tell him I’ll be down soon. I want him to handle my deal.” He slapped his burro and we parted – he for his $100,000,000, I to leave the country. Watching the spring in his step a moment, I got into my car and knew at last the why of those dark alluring canyons that ran up from the hungry land and hid in the hills. I knew why there are riches that nothing can take away and why rainbows swing low in the sky. The good God had made them so that fellows like Slim could climb one and ride.

Driving along I found myself trying to appraise the endless waste. Was it a blunder of creation, hell’s front yard or God’s back stairs? It was easy to understand the appeal of vast distances, of desert dawns and desert nights but what was it that made men “go desert”?

The answer was becoming clearer. Fellows like Slim had found God in a snake hole, or if you prefer – a way of life patterned with infinite precision to their needs. It is easy enough to tear into scraps, another’s formula for happiness and recommend your own but that is an egotism that only the fool will flaunt and I began to suspect that the Slims and the Shortys had found a freedom for which millions in the tired world Outside vainly struggled and slowly died.

“I wanted the gold, and I got it —Came out with a fortune last fall —Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,And somehow the gold isn’t all.It grips you like some kinds of sinning;It twists you from foe to a friend;It seems it’s been since the beginning;It seems it will be to the end.”– Robert W. Service.

Rounding a sharp turn in the road that led over and around a hill jutting out from a mountain of black malpai, I saw a sign: “Shoshone” and just beyond, a little settlement almost hidden in a thicket of mesquite. A sign on a weather-beaten ramshackle building read, “Store.” A few listing shacks on a naked flat. An abandoned tent house, its torn canvas top whipping the rafters in the wind. Whirlwinds spiraling along dry washes to vanish in hummocks of sand.

The presence of three or four prospectors strung along a slab bench either staring at the ground at their feet or the brown bare mountains, only emphasized the depressing solitude and I decided if I had to choose between hell and Shoshone I’d take hell.

Reaching the store through deep dust, I guessed correctly that the big fellow giving me an appraising look was Charlie. He was slow in his movements, slow in his speech and I had the feeling that his keen, calm eyes had already counted the number of buttons on my shirt and the eyelets in my shoes. I asked about the road to Baker.

“Washed out. Won’t be open for two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” I gasped. “Long enough to kill a fellow, isn’t it?”

“Well, there’s a little cemetery handy. Just up the gulch.”

Impulsively I thrust out my hand. “Shake. You win. Now that we understand each other, have you a cabin for rent for these two weeks?”

“Yes, but you’d better take it longer,” he chuckled. “In two weeks you’ll be a native and won’t want to get out.”

The showing of the cabin was delayed by a lanky individual who was pawing over a pile of shoes. “Charlie, soles on my shoes are worn through. These any good?”

“Not worth a dam’,” Charlie said. He picked up hammer and nails, handed them to the lanky one. “Some old tires outside. Cut off a piece and tack it on. I’ll have some good shoes next time you’re in.”

A miner in an ancient pickup stopped for gas. As Brown filled the tank he noticed a tire dangerously worn. “Blackie, you need a new casing to get across Death Valley.”

“These’ll do,” Blackie answered as he dug into all his pockets, paid for the gas and got into the car.

“Wait a minute,” Brown said and in a moment he was rolling a new tire out, lifting it to the bed of the pickup. He handed Blackie a new tube. “If you use them, pay me. If you don’t, bring ’em back.”

Blackie regarded him a moment. “How’d you know I was broke?” he grinned, and chugged away.

A man stopped a truck in front of the door, came in and asked how far it was to Furnace Creek. Charlie looked him over, then glanced at the truck. “Fifty-eight miles the short way. Nearly 80 the other. You’ll have to take the long way.”

“Why?” the fellow bristled.

“Your load is too high for the underpass on the short route. Road’s washed out anyway.”

The man frowned and turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” Charlie called. He reached for a sack of flour, laid it on a counter. Then he stood a slab of bacon on its edge and cut off a chunk. “You’ll stop at Bradbury Well – ”

“I won’t stop nowhere,” the truckman said.

“You’ll have to. Your radiator will be boiling.” He got a carton, put the flour and bacon in it and reaching on a shelf behind, got coffee, sugar, and canned milk and put these in. “Old Dobe Charlie Nels is camped there. Poor old fellow hasn’t been in for two weeks…”

The man looked at Charlie, uncertain. “You want me to drop it off, huh?”

“Yes,” Charlie said and lugging the carton to the truck, he shoved it in.

With squinted eyes the driver watched. “Mister, I’ll surely fill up here on my way back,” and with a friendly wave, climbed into his cab and I began to understand why all over the desert I’d heard of Charlie.

The cabin assigned me was the usual box type, shaded by the overhanging branches of a screwbean mesquite.

“Cabin’s not much,” Charlie said, “but you’ll have a Beauty Rest mattress to sleep on. My wife says folks’ll put up with most anything if they have a good bed.” He looked the room over and I noticed that nothing escaped him. Wood and kindling. Oil in the lamp. Water in the pitcher – an ornate vessel with enormous roses edged with gilt. He opened a closet door, saw that the matching vessel was in place and went out. After arranging my belongings, with time to kill, I returned to the store, hoping to learn something about nearby trails.

A short woman who preceded me slammed a can of coffee on the counter, removed her long cigarette holder, blew a ring of smoke at the ceiling and asked Charlie where he got the coffee. He told her that it came in a shipment.

“Well bigod, you send it back.”

Charlie laughed and turned to me: “This is Myra Benson. You want to stay on the good side of Myra. She has charge of the dining room.”

My remark that good coffee was my early morning weakness led to an invitation to sample her brew. “Mine too,” she said. “The pot’s on the stove before daylight, if you’re up that early.”

I soon discovered that Myra’s language was just a bit of color Death Valley imparts to speech, for she was deeply religious if not in all its forms, in all of its essentials and the occasional use of a two-fisted phrase did not in the least detract from the eternal feminine of one of Death Valley’s most remarkable women.

Guided by the light in her kitchen, I joined her the next morning while Shoshone still slept, and over a delicious cup learned something about people and places.

The man with the wide Stetson was Dan Modine, deputy sheriff. Liked poker. The quiet, squat fellow with the blue pop eyes was Billy de Von. “College man. Works on the roads. Taught in the University of Mexico before he came here. Siberian Red? Oh, that’s Ernie Huhn. No place on Godamighty’s earth he hasn’t been. As soon bet $1000 as two bits on a pair of jacks.”

“The tall thin fellow they called Sam? Must be Sam Flake. Here before Noah built the ark.”

Knowing that Mormons had pioneered in the area, I was curious about an undersized man pushing an oversize baby carriage loaded with infants and a dozen youngsters trailing him. “Does he happen to be one of the Faithful who has clung to his wives?” I asked.

“That’s Eddie Main,” Myra laughed. “Bachelor. Just loves kids. He was born in San Francisco in the days when a nickel just wasn’t counted unless it had a dime alongside. His folks sent him to New York to be educated. Eddie didn’t like it. ‘It’s a nickel town,’ Eddie said. ‘Cheapest hole on earth.’ He came to the desert and the desert took him over. When he’s not hauling kids around he’s reading. Don’t get out on a limb in an argument with Eddie. You’ll lose sure. Every now and then Eddie goes East for a vacation. It’s awful on the mothers. They have to take care of their own children and the children want Eddie.”

“Who is Hank, the fellow that came in with the pickup Ford?” I asked.

“Our bootlegger. Comes Wednesdays and Saturdays. Regular as a bread route. Always tell when he’s due. Bench is crowded. Didn’t you notice the tarpaulin over his truck? Always two kegs and a sack of empty pints and quarts. Rough roads here. Siphons out what you want. Death Valley Scotty? Around yesterday. Lit up like a barn afire.” The short man with the black whiskers was Henry Ashford who, with his brothers Harold and Rudolph owned the Ashford mine.

“How does such a little store in a place like this make a living for the Browns?”

“I wonder myself, at times,” she said. “Everybody around here takes their troubles to Charlie or Stella. Maybe you noticed their home – the cottage with the screen porch a few steps from the store. Stella was telling me yesterday she needed a new carpet for her living room. I said, ‘I’m not surprised. You’re running a nursery, emergency hospital, and a domestic relations court.’ Sometimes young couples find their marriage going on the rocks. The woman goes to Stella to get the kinks out. As for Charlie, if you’re around long enough you’ll see him most every morning strolling over to the shacks in the jungle or up to the dugouts in Dublin Gulch. He thinks nobody knows what he’s doing or maybe they figure he’s just taking a walk. I know. Some of these old fellows are always in a bad way. Just last week Charlie came in here and told me to send something a sick man could eat over to old Jim. ‘I’ll have to take him to the hospital soon as I can get my car ready,’ he said. Three hundred miles – that trip.

“And there’s Phil. You’ll see him around. Fine steady chap. Lost his job when the mine he worked in shut down. Long as he was working he was the first in the dining room when I opened the door. He began to miss a breakfast, then a dinner, and finally he didn’t show up at all. I supposed he was cooking his own and didn’t mention it. Kept his chin up. You could hear him laughing loud as anybody on the bench, but Charlie noticed that once a day Phil would follow his nose over into the mesquite where somebody was sure to share a mulligan stew.

“One day when Phil was sitting alone on the woodpile just outside my kitchen, Charlie sat down beside him. They didn’t know I was there. ‘Phil,’ Charlie says, ‘the ditch that carries the runoff up at the spring needs widening. Could you spare a few days to put it in shape?’

“Phil left that bench running, got a pick and shovel and went singing up the road and to this day he doesn’t know that Charlie just created that job so he could eat.”

I mentioned the fellow with black hair and blue eyes. “He complained of rheumatism and slapped his knees a lot.”

“Oh, that’s Dutch Barr. It isn’t rheumatism. Just a sign he’s going on a drunk.”

The lanky man with the blond eyebrows and sombre face which lighted so easily to laugh, was Whitey Bill McGarn. “… Never had a worry in his life…”

I learned also that the mountain of malpai which lifts above Shoshone was a burial place for a race of Indians antedating the Piutes and Shoshones. “They buried their dead in a crouching position on their knees, elbows bent, hands at their ears. Old Nancy, who was Sam Yundt’s squaw wife before he got rich, says they were buried that way so they would be ready to go quick when the Great Spirit called.”

The first rose of dawn was in the sky when I left Myra. “You’ll have time enough to look around before breakfast,” she told me and recommended a view of the valley from the flat-topped mesa above my cabin. “You can reach the top by climbing up a gully and holding on to the greasewood. You can see the dugouts in Dublin Gulch too. Some real old timers live there.”

A sweeping view of the little valley rewarded the climb.

Below, Shoshone lay, tucked away in the mesquite. No honking horns, no clanging cars. No swollen ankles dragging muted chains to bench or counter, desk or machine. Soon faint spirals of smoke leaned from the shanties. Shoshone was awakening. It would wash its face on a slab bench, eat its bacon and eggs, and somebody would go out to look for two million dollars.

After breakfast, I joined the old timers on the bench. “No – nothing exciting happens around here,” Joe Ryan told me and stopped whittling to look at a car coming up the road. A moment later the car stopped at the gas pump and three smartly tailored men stepped out. I heard one say, “Odd looking lot on that bench, aren’t they?” Then Joe said to the fellow at his side, “Queer looking birds, ain’t they?”

“How much is gas?” one of the tourists asked.

“Thirty cents,” Charlie said.

“Why, it’s only 18 in the city,” the man flared. “How far is it to the next gas?”

Charlie told him, and Big Dan sitting beside me muttered: “Dam’ fool’ll pay 50 cents up there.”

The driver climbed into the car and Charlie asked if he had plenty of water.

“A gallon can full…”

“Not enough,” Charlie warned.

A fellow in the back seat spoke, “Aw, go on. He wants to sell a canteen…”

As the car pulled out, Joe called to Charlie: “You’re sold out of canteens, ain’t you?”

“Yes. But I was going to give him one of those old five gallon cans on the dump.” He went inside and Joe Ryan said, “Won’t get far on a gallon of water.” He waved his knife toward the little cemetery at the mouth of the gulch. “Lot of smart Alecs like him up there, that Charlie dragged in offa the desert.”

It was five days almost to the hour when Ann Cowboy, a Piute squaw came to the store with an Indian boy who couldn’t speak English; nodded at the boy and said to Charlie: “Him see…” She pointed to the big black mountain of malpai above Shoshone, whirled her finger in a circle, shot it this way and that, then patted the floor. “You savvy?”

Her dark eyes watched Charlie’s and when she had finished Charlie called Joe Ryan and together they went across the road, climbed into a pickup truck and left in a hurry. Even I understood that somebody on the other side of that mountain was in trouble, but I had no idea that in three or four hours the pickup would return with a cadaver under a tarpaulin and a thirst-crazed survivor whose distorted features bore little resemblance to those of man.

Big Dan helped lift the victim from the truck. “There were three,” Dan said. “Where is the other fellow?”

“We looked all over,” Joe shrugged.

“The one that’s missing,” Dan said, “is the fellow that griped about the canteen. I remember his black hair.”

They carried the still-living man over to Charlie’s house and left him to the ministrations of the capable Stella. Charlie returned to the store, got a pick and shovel from a rack, handed one to Ben Brandt and one to Cranky Casey. Not a word was spoken to them. They took the tools and started toward the little cemetery at the mouth of Dublin Gulch.

I joined Dan on the bench. “Well,” Dan said, “they saved the price of a canteen.”

Two spinsters – teachers of zoology in a fashionable eastern school for girls – came in search of a place they called Metbury Springs. Brown told them there were no such springs in the Death Valley region. Obviously disappointed, one produced a map, spread it on the counter, ran her finger over a maze of notes and looking up asked what sort of rats lived about Shoshone. Charlie told them that very few rats survived their natural enemies and were seldom seen.

“What do they look like?” the teacher asked.

“Just regular rats,” Charlie told her.

Again she consulted her notes. “Do you mean to say the only rat you’ve seen here is Mus decumanus?”

“Mus who?” Charlie asked. “Only rats around here besides the two-legged kind are just plain everyday rats.”

The ladies gathered up their papers, went outside, looked over the hills, consulted their maps, and returned to Brown. “Sir, this is Metbury Spring,” one announced, “and for your own information we may add that in no other place in the world is there a rat like the one you have here.”

The amazing feature of this incident is that it is true. The rats in some unexplained way had disappeared.

The spinsters remained for weeks but failed to find the specimen they sought, but Charlie learned that the first man known to have settled at Shoshone was a man named Brown and Shoshone’s first name was Metbury Spring.

Death came to Shoshone that week-end. George Hoagland, prospector, reached Trail’s End. Charlie announced the news to the bench and asked for volunteers to dig the grave. Bob Johnson, another prospector, jumped up. “I’ll help.”

The others gave Bob a quick look and exchanged slow ones with each other, because it was known that Bob had not liked Hoagland. “I’ve been in lots of deals with that bastard,” he had often said. “Came out loser every time. Always left himself a hole to wiggle out of.”

Right or wrong, Bob’s opinion was shared by many. Herman Jones glanced after Bob, now going for a pick and shovel. “That’s sure white of Bob, forgetting his grudge,” Herman said and all Shoshone approved.

I joined the little group that filed up to the cemetery at the mouth of the gulch for the graveside ceremony. We stood about waiting for the box that contained all there was of George.

They take death on the desert just as they do any other grim fact of nature. They talked of George and the hard, chalky earth Bob had to dig through in the hot sun. There were mild arguments about whose bones lay under this or that unmarked grave. “Dad Fairbanks brought that fellow in…” “No such thing. That’s Tillie Younger – member of Jesse James’s gang. I helped bury him…”

Presently there was a stir and I saw Charlie over where the women were. He had another chore and was doing it because there was no one else to do it.

“Usually reads a coupla verses,” Joe Ryan told me. “But somebody stole the only Bible in Shoshone.”

The box was lowered, the grave filled and Charlie stepped forward. He held his hat well up in front of his chest and I suspected that he had a few notes pasted in the hat. Those about were listening intently as people will to one who has something to say and says it in a few words.

Suddenly I was conscious of mumbling and the tramping of earth and seeing Brown flick a glance out of the corner of his eye toward the disturbing sound, I turned to see Bob Johnson jumping up and down on the earth that filled the grave – careful to miss no inch of it. When he had tamped it sufficiently he stepped aside and muttered angrily: “Now dam’ you – let’s see you wiggle out of this hole!”

Yet, when the hills are covered with wild flowers one may see on the unsodded graves of the little cemetery a bottle or a tin can filled with sun cups or baby blue eyes and in the dust the tracks of a hobnailed shoe.

I soon discovered the bench was more than a slab of wood. It was a state of Hallelujah. For the most part those who gathered there were a silent lot, but as one unshaven ancient told me, “Too damned much talk in the world. Two-three words are plenty – like yes, naw, and dam’.” Some of them had beaten trails from Crede or Cripple Creek, Virginia City or Bodie. “It’s a clean life and clean money,” was an expression that ran like a formula through their conversation.

“Of course, few keep the money they get,” Joe Ryan said. “Jack Morissey couldn’t read or write. He struck it rich. Bought a diamond-studded watch and couldn’t even tell the time of day. Went to Europe; hit all the high spots; came back and died in the poor house. But he had his fun, which makes more sense than what Nat Crede did. He hit it rich. Built a town and a palace. Then blew his brains out and left all his millions to a Los Angeles foundling.”

One oldster remembered Eilly Orrum of Virginia City. “She had followed the covered wagons and made a living washing our clothes, but she got into our hearts. Everybody liked her. Some say she forgot to get a divorce from her second husband before she married Sandy Bowers. Nobody blamed her. She and Sandy ran a beanery. Eilly would feed anybody on the cuff. John Rodgers ran up a board bill and couldn’t pay it. He had a few shares in a no-count claim and talked Eilly into taking the shares to settle the bill.

“Within two weeks Eilly was getting $20,000 a month from that deal. It wasn’t long before she was giggling happily and telling everybody she didn’t see how folks could live on less than $100,000 a year.”

“Julia Bulette? Ran a snooty fancy house. But she taught Virginia City how to eat and what, and soon the rich fellows wouldn’t stand for anything except the world’s best foods.”

“Oh yes, everybody knew Old Virginny. Gave the town its name. Always drunk. Discovered the Ophir. Swapped it for a mustang pony and a pint of likker to old Pancake Comstock. When he sobered up he discovered the pony was blind. Pancake swapped an eighth interest in the Ophir to a Mexican, Gabriel Maldonado, for two burros. The Mexican took out $6,000,000. Pancake was quite a lady-killer. Ran away with a miner’s wife. Fellow was glad to get rid of her, but decided he’d beat hell out of Pancake. Found him in new diggings nearby and jumped him. ‘You don’t want her,’ Pancake says. ‘Be reasonable. I’ll buy her.’