The Story of Death Valley

Illustrated Sketches of Death Valley was a book authored in 1891 by a feature writer for the New York Sun newspaper, named John Randolph Spears. John was hired by borax entrepreneur Francis Marion Smith to go to Death Valley and write the book as a means of promoting his borax empire. This was after Stephen Mather, a brilliant fellow who was one day to become the founding director of the National Park Service, convinced Smith of the value of such a book.

John set out on his adventure, eagerly talking to nearly everyone he could find out here at the time, and finally gathered enough material to write the most comprehensive accounting of the region at that time. The complete title is Illustrated Sketches of Death Valley and Other Borax Deserts of the Pacific Coast. In its 226 pages, we find engaging facts up through the later 1800s, yet it also contains material that does not quite meet the standard of factual reporting, further leading to the legend and lore of this territory. A couple of publishers refused to take on the title because it also contained promotional information about Francis Smith’s Pacific Coast Borax Company, but eventually it was released to the public by another publisher for 25 cents a book.

A few years after John’s book had hit the stores, William Lewis Manly, well-known pioneer from the Bennett-Arcan gold seeking party of 1849-50, wrote his book called Death Valley in ‘49. One of his goals was to set the record straight about the myths, yet some figured that he must be incorrect in portions of his writing because it conflicted with the wilder accounting that had preceded it. What follows below is one chapter from John’s book. The chapter was titled: The Story of Death Valley.

Here it is in its entirety:

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THE STORY OF DEATH VALLEY

by John Randolph Spears, 1892

It is a gruesome story of a rugged country. More than a score of lives were lost in a day when the valley was christened, and its history from that day to this has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with rarely aught to relieve its harshness.

It is a story, too, of apparent paradoxes and of wonders. Nature, if unkind in a way, has been lavish in her gifts to this desert pit. Well has the valley been named, and yet for more than half of the year it is one of the healthiest spots on the Pacific Coast. It is a place where rain-storms are well nigh unknown, and yet one where the effects of cloud-bursts are almost unparalleled. It is the hottest spot on earth, and yet ice often forms there. It is a place where the air becomes so arid that men have died through lack of moisture when abundant water was at hand, and yet the stopping place of hundreds of ducks, geese, and other migrating water-fowl. It is a region where the beds of lakes are found on the pointed peaks of mountains. It is a region where a mountain system of the most gorgeous-colored rocks is known as the Funeral Range. It is a rent in the earth, the bottom of which, in spite of the washings of centuries, is probably deeper below the level of the sea than that of any other valley in the world.

Surely the story of Death Valley should have been preserved, but, unfortunately, although scores of articles have appeared in print on the subject, they have usually been imaginative, and even so thorough and accurate a work as “Bancroft’s Pacific Coast History” contains only a brief and unsatisfactory reference to the matter. The history of Death Valley is found only in tradition. As I gathered it, here it is:

In the year 1850 the number of parties of emigrants bound to California from the Eastern States was so great that their trains of wagons formed what may be called almost a continuous procession from the Missouri River to Salt Lake City. It is said that many a lone traveler, bound overland on horseback, with perhaps a single pack animal, found a hospitable welcome every night of his trip at the camp of some party of emigrants, and yet never stopped twice with the same party until he reached the Mormon settlement. The similarity to a procession would, indeed, have been found west of Salt Lake, but for the fact that the parties commonly divided at that point, some going on by the route which was afterward followed by the Central Pacific Railroad, while the rest struck down through Utah, Nevada, and Southern California, bound through the Cajon Pass for the regions of which Los Angeles was then, and is now, the metropolis.

There was a great variety among these emigrant outfits, but the majority of the parties had huge prairie schooners drawn by oxen. The outfit was one that had been found best for such journeys by explorers like Fremont and the early Santa Fe traders. Oxen were not only able to live on the grass that grew along the trail; they got fat on it. And in an emergency, such as an attack from the Indians in which animals were killed, the dead animals were by no means wholly wasted. It was easy and comforting to cure and eat dead oxen, but mules were different.

Among the parties in that long procession was one that was destined to give Death Valley its name. The facts we don’t know about that party would make an interesting book, no doubt; but this much tradition tells: On reaching Salt Lake they struck off to the south, because the northern, or Truckee River, route had been traveled so much that feed and fuel (the land being a desert) were scarcer than to the south. There was nothing unusual about that move, however, for a good many parties did the same thing, traveling along the trails leading near the west bank of the Colorado River for a few hundred miles, and then striking across the desert, by the way of several well-known springs, to the Mojave River, that sinks in the sands of the Mojave Desert. But this party was not content with what seemed to them a roundabout route. They were bound to get to the land of gold a little ahead of the others, so somewhere in Nevada, perhaps near Duck Lake, but maybe farther south, near Clover Valley Canyon, they left the trail to follow the compass. The western part of Lincoln County, Nevada, is well cut up with trails in these days, and there are many springs to be found there around the Pahranagat Range. The emigrants had no trouble there. The lava beds south of the Kawich Valley naturally turned the party to the south still farther, and then, seeing the bare mountains before them, they got down into the Amargosa River valley and the vicinity of Ash Meadows.

They were still safe. They had found springs of water at such intervals that, with the aid of kegs and barrels, they had been able to keep their animals in condition, fit to work in spite of the heat, but their situation was rapidly becoming desperate. The country was becoming more rugged, the valleys were narrower, the mountains were precipitous, the canyons more obstructed with the debris of tornadoes and cloud-bursts. They now began to write in the sand, with abandoned equipages, the story of their accumulating misfortunes. Article after article of household furniture — everything not necessary for the immediate use of the party — was cast aside to lighten the loads, and the women as well as the men walked beside the wagons rather than burden the worn-out cattle.

Finally, the Funeral Mountains rose across their pathway, and with weary toil they followed up a torrent bed between two peaks, to find themselves, when on the summit, overlooking a deep and narrow valley, whose walls were more precipitous and rugged than any they had yet seen. In the glare of the sun the long, narrow salt marsh that winds down the center of the valley looked like a cooling river of water, but the emigrants, after their experience in crossing Nevada, were in no way deceived by the mirage. It but added to their anxiety and apprehensions, as they unyoked the cattle and prepared with ropes and chains to lower the wagons by hand down to the mesa at the foot of the ridge on which they were standing. It was a fearful task in that atmosphere. The men were now not only worn out by the long journey over the deserts they had crossed; they found the lassitude, due to the lack of moisture in the air, almost too much for even the will of a pioneer to overcome. But they succeeded at last in reaching the mesa, and there night overtook them. Then while a few searched without success for a spring of water, the rest, with prudent forethought, made an orderly camp, stretching out the chains before the wagon-tongues and putting the yokes in place across them, while the cattle were turned loose to graze.

Fires were made from the scant fuel of the desert — the grease-brush — supper was cooked and eaten with little or nothing to drink, and then all prepared for the most pitiful experience that comes to the traveler, the passing of a night in a dry camp — a camp without water — a camp in which the cattle bawl, the men toss about, and mothers with breaking hearts vainly strive to soothe the little ones wailing for want of drink.

Wretched as was that last camp, its sufferings were but the prelude to the terrors of the coming day. With the first streak of light, the search for water and a pass into the snow-capped range in the west were sought for. It was a hurried search from the first, a search that under the smiting rays of the sun quickly became feverish and at last delirious. Abandoning camp and wagons in their frenzy, the party separated, and in groups spread out to the north and the south along the face of the Panamints, walking over sand so hot that even the desert Arab, inured to its terrors, wraps his boots in sacks. when obliged to cross it at mid-day; over a marsh, covered with a crust through which the foot breaks to sink in corroding brine; climbing up gulches where the black rocks seared their hands and the stirring of the air was like a blast of flame.

There were thirty souls in that party, of whom perhaps a dozen got beyond the Panamints. Of this number, a man named Towne, with his wife and one or two others, reached the Argus Range, and camped there while they killed a couple of oxen and dried the meat, saving one animal that Mrs. Towne might ride it. Bones of men who had tried to follow them across the Slate Range, but were unable to do so, were afterward found by prospectors. Sidney P. Waite, another one of the party, eventually escaped, and in 1890 was living at San Bernardino, Cal. Last of all was a man named Bennett, and he it was who really gave the valley its notoriety.

Of the rest, several skeletons of men were found by Dr. S. G. George, while prospecting in 1860. The men had fallen down and died within 300 yards of a spring of good water. Their bones were buried where they fell. Where the rest lie, nobody knows.

But pitiful as was their fate, it would long since have been forgotten, and the valley to which their fate gave a name would have been still a land unknown, had not Bennett, some time after reaching a civilized community, asserted that he had found a ledge in which pure silver cropped out. It came about in this way: As he stumbled along in a canyon in the mountains west of the valley, he found a spring of water, and stopped to drink and rest. His life was saved, for the time at least, and here he remained until he had regained somewhat of his old-time strength. While sitting idly by the water, he broke off a bit of an exposed rock, and was surprised to find it of metallic weight. So, thinking it might be something of value, he put a small piece in his pocket, and eventually carried it to the settlements. There he got a gun that needed a front sight, and for the sake of making a memento of the metal-like stone he had carried, he asked a gunsmith to make the sight of it.

To the astonishment of everybody who knew the circumstance, the bit of rock was found to be silver, and thereat the story of the Gunsight lead was created, and floated up and down the coast aimlessly until the famous strikes made at Virginia City turned the mining world upside down and shook it. There never was such a time in the history of the nation as the Bonanza era. Men with costly outfits, and men with scant rations as well, wandered off wherever there was a mountain or hill to be found, their eyes forever on the rocks about them and their minds on a mirage of delights which a bonanza strike, ever to be made in the next canyon, would bring them. They were drunk with the thought, insane with their greed. What were the terrors of the Mojave Desert, or even of Death Valley itself, to men like that?

In May, 1860, ten years after the emigrant party had perished in Death Valley, Dr. Darwin French made up a party in Butte County, California, to go in search of the Gunsight lead. They traveled by the way of Visalia, the south fork of the Kern River, and Walker’s Pass to Little Owens Lake, and thence easterly across the head of the valley next west of Death Valley, and through a rocky pass to Death Valley itself. They had planned the route so well that they arrived in the valley at the very camp where the emigrants had passed their last night together. They found wagons, yokes, chains, guns, revolvers, cooking utensils, even the toys of little children, lying about as they had been left ten years before. No rain had fallen to wet them, no sand had covered them, and the passing Piute Arab, knowing the fate that had overtaken the party, had hurried away in superstitious terror.

Some few things were gathered for relics, and these eventually found place in the State Museum in San Francisco. A creek running into Death Valley from the Funeral Mountains was found and named, as told elsewhere, Furnace Creek, because they found old lead-smelting furnaces there which the Mormons had used during the troubles of 1857. But the season was not propitious for Dr. French’s party. The hot weather was at hand, and in spite of abundant water, they found it expedient to get out quickly to avoid the fate of the emigrants.

In October of the same year (1860) came Dr. S. G. George, with others, in quest of the Gunsight lead. They followed the same route as Dr. Darwin French’s party had, and reaching the old emigrant camp, found it still undisturbed. They had come well prepared, and prospected the mountains very thoroughly in all directions. They found excellent water in several places, by digging wells. The emigrants might have got it had they known. Following an Indian trail through the Panamints they reached what is known as Wild Rose Spring, and on Christmas day discovered a mine of antimony, which they named the Christmas Gift. But they did not find the Gunsight, nor did their Christmas gift make them rich.

This party found quite a different climate from that depicted by the emigrants and the previous visitors, and they were rather inclined to scout the idea of Death Valley being very deadly. Ducks and other birds abounded, while jack-rabbits and cotton-tails bobbed about. There was nothing particularly bad about Death Valley, so far as they could see, and, therefore, widely-varying stories about the region went up and down the coast.

Meantime, and as long ago as 1856, a gold vein of low-grade ore had been found near the Amargosa River bed, east of Death Valley, and in 1861 a party of eight Mexicans went to it and started in to work it. They got on fairly well for a time, but when they had built a small mill the Piutes came along in force, killed all the men, and burned the mill. This is referred to only to illustrate another danger that hung over Death Valley. The hardy prospectors had to pack rifles, and go in parties and keep watch for the signs of the treacherous Piutes.

In March, 1861, when the Mexicans were starting in at Amargosa, Mr. Hugh McCormack went to Death Valley. He discovered a spring, known as McCormack’s Wells on some of the maps of California, and near where Mesquite Well now is. At the lower end of the valley he found the skeleton of a woman, with part of an old calico dress wrapped about it. It had been buried in a shallow grave, but the wind had uncovered it.

A month later (April, 1861), when the nation was aflame with the first powder burned in the great war, Mr. W. T. Henderson entered Death Valley, looking, as the rest had done, for the Gunsight lead. He did not find it, but he did what no man had done before — he climbed to the top of the highest of the Panamints, and standing there looked off over such a landscape as can be seen nowhere else on earth. To the west lay the Slate, the Argus, and, blue with the distance, the Sierra mountains. To the south rose Pilot Butte, the Calicos, and far away the San Bernardino Range. To the north were the snowy White Mountains, while to the east, beyond the Funerals, were the Ivanwatch, the Granite, and range after range that had never been named. Between them all lay the valleys, yellow with sand and grease-bush, spotted with black lava buttes and brightened with the beds of soda, salt, and borax, that gleamed snow-white to the eye, or turned to mirage lakes, with dancing waters and leafy borders, according as the sun’s rays fell upon them. It was the picture of a desert, but if it be true that a picture is masterful in proportion to its power to stir the emotions, then the picture from that peak of the Panamints is not to be compared with any tawdry scene that needs the colors of vegetation to make it attractive.

Mr. Henderson, because of the vast space which the eye could cover there, named the mountain Telescope Peak.

After the visit of Mr. Henderson, Death Valley was abandoned to the Piutes and the renegade whites who lived with them. Very likely the Mormons may have crossed that way, now and then, en route from Utah to Southern California, but the American citizens had all they could do to preserve their homes and settle, once for all, a trouble that nothing but blood would settle. And when the war was over, it took so long to adjust themselves to the old-fashioned prospecting again, that it was not until about the year 1870 that the hunt for the Gunsight lead was resumed with pristine vigor.

At last the time came when the prospector thought he had it, or the next thing to it, and in 1873 was organized the Panamint Mining District, while a roaring camp of thousands sprang into existence in what was called Surprise Canyon, on the west side of the Panamints.

There never was a canyon more appropriately named. The prospector was surprised when he found the lead, the mining sharps were surprised to hear of his luck, the growth of the camp was more surprising still, while the way the bottom dropped out later on fairly took the breath of everybody concerned. While the fun lasted, however, the mountains round about were pretty well tramped over and perhaps prospected. Many traversed Death Valley in all directions, and a few left their bones there because they were the ignorant or foolhardy.

Then Death Valley had another rest from the rush of prospectors, though one “Cub” Lee, a white Arab with a Piute wife, and his brother Philander “held a bunch of cattle about Furnace Creek for a year,” or more, while “Bellerin “ Teck took a ditch full of water out of Furnace Creek and made a small ranch on which “he raised alfalfa, barley, and quails.” “Bellerin” Teck got a reputation for being a bad man. He traded a part of his ranch to a Mormon named Jackson for a yoke of oxen, and then within a week ran the saint out of the valley with a shotgun. Then “Bellerin” moved out himself and, sad to say, faded out of Death Valley history. A man who rejoiced in such a name, who was handy with a shotgun, and who withal was the first citizen of Death Valley, must have had an interesting biography.

Then there was the exploring trip of Lieut. Wheeler in 1871. No story of Death Valley would be complete without reference to the Lieutenant. While in the valley, in the heated term, if one may believe what “Cub” Lee says, he ordered his guide to go across the valley afoot, on some errand which the guide declared impossible. So the Lieutenant called two soldiers, who, with their bayonets, compelled the guide to start. Inside of two hours one of the soldiers staggered back into camp, just able to walk. A relief squad carried the other soldier, but the guide had become insane, wandered away, and never was found.

Last of all came the discovery of borax by Aaron and Rosie Winters, as told elsewhere. When the claim of Winters had been purchased, W. T. Coleman and F. M. Smith, being partners in some borax operations, started in to work the deposit north of Furnace Creek, while the Eagle Borax Company, of which J. Daunet, mentioned elsewhere, was president, began on the deposit near Bennett’s well. Surveyors to stake out the claims of the borax people were sent to Death Valley, and then, for the first time, definite and accurate statements began to reach a limited part of the public. First of all, there was a statement about a previous survey supposed to have been made by the Government. Says Mr. J. J. McGillivray:

“The San Bernardino meridian line traverses the valley, running due north. It is supposed to have all been surveyed once, and the Government paid large sums to contractors for the work. I attempted to retrace the fifth standard parallel, which is supposed to have been surveyed, but found that the work had never actually been done. None of the townships had been staked out, and what is described on the Government maps as low and level land, is 8,000 feet high, and at an angle of forty-five degrees. There has always been more politics than straight lines in California surveys.”

On getting their claims in shape, the borax manufacturers went to work to develop the deposit. Pans in which to boil the material, vats in which to crystallize the product, pipes to bring water from a spring, and lumber for houses, stables, etc., had all to be hauled out to the valley from San Bernardino, 250 miles away, over the desert, with never a house, and scarce a spring between. It cost 8 cents a pound to carry the stuff across the desert; moreover, men had to be secured to do the work in the valley. But to the Californian, such difficulties as these problems presented were matters of common occurrence, though it must be admitted that Death Valley was a little worse than any other proposition the coast miner had had presented to him. The works were erected, a mile and a half of good water-pipe put down, houses for men and animals were built, and the work of making borax went right along.

Nor was that all. The company imitated, or rather followed, the example of Mr. “Bellerin” Teck, Death Valley’s first settler, and established a ranch, and named it Greenland. That was a descriptive name, in a way, certainly, though the ranch in no way resembles the frozen country to which the mind turns when the name is spoken. Perhaps had they been versed in Greenland lore, they might have called the ranch Ivigtut, for that is the Greenlander’s term for a green vale in a barren region. Anyhow, a green spot was, and is, the ranch in Death Valley, with its half-acre pond, its thirty acres of alfalfa and trees, its ‘dobe house with a wide veranda and its running water on all sides. For five years the ranch and the works were run, beginning in 1883. Then Coleman went broke and the works shut down, and only one man now lives in Death Valley —James Dayton— whom the Arabs call a sailor, because he was once cook on a Sacramento River steamer.

The story of the valley during those five years is quickly summed up, because it was devoid of special incident. On the average, forty men were employed; teams were coming and going all the time, and the tramp and other prospectors made the works, as far as allowed to do so, a center of operations. The men had the best food obtainable, and were housed as men are in all mining camps. On the whole, Death Valley was a pretty fair camp, considering the fact that “Piute ladies,” as an Arab said to me, were the only women who visited the place. But the men could never be made contented, even in the winter season. It was healthy then, and the pay was good, but the miner, even the desert placer miner, is a gregarious animal, and Death Valley, from a social point of view, had its drawbacks. The man who had lived there six months was an old citizen, while one who remained from September, when the work for each season began, until June, when the heat compelled the closing of the works, was a marvel to the rest.

How thoroughly the region was prospected during this time can not now be told, but the Gunsight lead was never found. As a rule, mining men scout the idea of there ever having been a Gunsight lead. Silver is rarely found pure, or approximately so, and men who are flying for their lives out of a desert land do not weigh themselves down, even with rocks that seem to have metal in them. But others say that while the mine was found, it can not now, and probably never will, be located, because the spring and the cropping have been buried out of sight by some cloud-burst.

The topographical features of Death Valley, as will be inferred from what has already been said, are interesting even to the tourist, who, like myself, is not versed in geological lore. A good map of California would show Death Valley in the southeast corner of Inyo County. A good map of California and Nevada combined would show that extensions of the mountain ranges which inclose Death Valley on the east and the west, really continue the valley far into Nevada — that the Funeral Mountains are practically a part of the range called the Red Mountains, in Esmeralda County, Nevada, while the Panamints really join the White Mountains, and the fertile and well-watered Fish Lake Valley of Nevada is an extension of the terrible and arid Valley of Death. However, Fish Lake Valley lies at about a mile higher altitude above the sea, and this makes all the difference in the world between the climates of the two valleys.

There is a narrow extension of Death Valley to the southeast. One can drive down the west side of Death Valley until Mesquite Well is reached, and then by taking on water for himself and animals, may continue on to the southeast, keeping well to the right of the lowest depression, bearing eventually in a curve to the east and northeast, and so reach a spring called Saratoga, in the valley of the Amargosa. The truth is that this extension of Death Valley is but the ancient bed of the Amargosa River. The waters of the Amargosa, when it had any, used to flow into the pit of Death Valley, which was then a lake, and some say that even in comparatively recent years a rain-storm has been known that filled the river bed for a brief time and sent a roaring stream into the old sink. But at Saratoga Springs, as in Fish Lake Valley, the altitude is much higher than in Death Valley proper, and the climate, though bad enough to be dreaded by all, is not as bad as that of Death Valley.

Death Valley proper is unique. It is about seventy-five miles long, running from north to south, and from five to fifteen miles wide. At its lowest point, where its climate is worst, the width is not above eight miles from foot-hills to foot-hills. It is to the west of, and opposite to, this depression that the Panamints reach their highest altitude, while on the east, the Funeral Range is practically one huge ridge, with almost a vertical precipice on the side next to the valley. A few miles to the south, a mountain range running east and west shuts in the foot of the valley, so that at its lower end Death Valley is walled in on all sides but one.

Just what the depth at the lowest depression is, I do not know. A California mining bureau report, written by Prof. Henry G. Hanks, puts the lowest depression at 110 feet below the sea. One of Dr. C. Hart Merriam’s party of Government experts, who went into the valley in the summer of 1891, said the depression was 200 feet below the sea. I have seen one statement in print which placed the depression 400 feet below the sea. No doubt that was an exaggeration. Whatever the real depression is, it is interesting to note, as Surveyor McGillivray pointed out, that fifteen miles to the west of this depression was Telescope Peak, rising two miles above the sea, while within an equal distance easterly, was a Funeral Peak rising 8,000 feet above the sea. Where can two such mountains like these be found, with such a rent, as this between them?

Unique as is this little pit of desert in its depth and surroundings, the reader should be told, in case he ever visits it, that it is likely to disappoint him, because the eye does not realize how high the mountains are, nor does it see that the bottom of the pit is below the sea; nor do the mountains on either side look to one in the old trail to be so extremely precipitous as they are. One has to wander around, try to scale the mountain-faces, and compare what he sees with other mountain wonders, to fully comprehend Death Valley as a valley.

The foot-hills, wherever they occur on the east side of the valley, but especially for several miles north of the mouth of Furnace Creek, are such that no tourist could fail to give them attention. They are, for the most part, clay buttes and lava peaks, with here and there a butte covered with water-worn pebbles — shingle from some old-time beach. The wonderfully contrasted colors and the wind-worn, perhaps water-worn, forms of clay make one stop to gaze involuntarily. A natural curiosity, too, is Mushroom Rock, a singular block of lava, that has been worn, probably by sand, until it resembles the most common form to be found in cakes of ice floating off the coast of Greenland late in the summer — a form best pictured by putting a bunch of cauliflower on a mirror.

A very great part of the bed of the valley is formed of the pebbly wash from the inclosing mountains, but down its axis runs a salt marsh interesting to contemplate. In three or four places along the salt artery, where the higher land adjacent slopes down almost imperceptibly to it, wide fields of crude borax-borate of soda are formed in sandy crusts. But elsewhere the salt marsh is crusted over with the salt that is chloride of sodium. In most places this crust is very thin — neither man nor beast could cross it without snow-shoes. But in one place it is so thick and strong that a roadway was formed across it, making of it a bridge, of which a description is given in another chapter.

In its general aspect, Death Valley is gray and sombre; it is even desolate and forbidding. To admire the scenery from any point in the valley, one must have a taste for Nature in her sternest moods. The natural vegetation is scant and stunted, and there is not a green thing that grows there naturally. The thorny mesquite trees are of a yellowish-green tinge; so, too, are the grease-bushes, while the sage-brush and weeds, of which there are several varieties, are either yellowish-gray, or the color of ashes. A little round gourd grows in some of the canyons. It turns yellow, when ripe, and has a thin meat within that is exceedingly bitter. It is called the desert apple. The cactus that grows beyond the valley in abundance is rare here. In short, the vegetation of Death Valley is terribly scant in comparison with that of even the Mojave Desert.

Arid as the valley is throughout its whole extent, there are two running streams within its confines. One comes in at the north end, where it forms a marsh that gives out volumes of sulphureted hydrogen. Some who have seen it believe that the water comes through a subterranean passage from Owens Lake, beyond the Panamint Mountains. The water of this stream is like that of the lake, and the flow never varies from one season to the other. Incredible as the proposition seems, this brook may be an outlet of the lake.

The other stream is Furnace Creek, mentioned elsewhere, which rises in springs in the Funeral Mountains, has pretty good — if warm — water, and is the only possible support of the ranch that was made by the borax people. But more interesting to the tourist than all that can be seen or said about the lay of the land, are the stories told about its climate. As was said at the first, the story of Death Valley is full of apparent contradictions. Here was a ranch, for instance, on which three men found work in caring for the meadows and stock; a little over a mile away were the buildings where forty men were employed, most of them in the open air, wholly unprotected from the sun’s rays, and some engaged about a furnace where a great heat was maintained. How could these things be if it were true that men died from heat and lack of moisture when they had water in their hands? It was a curious case, but both statements of facts were true.

With the prevailing wind from the west, Death Valley, deep and narrow, is guarded on the west by the lofty and precipitous Panamints, while four other ranges and four valleys, for the most part absolutely arid, lie between it and the sea, the only source of moisture. Even west of the Sierras, the plains of Tulare County must be irrigated to make them productive. Imagine now what the condition of the air must be, when having been drained of its moisture by the ranges near the sea, it sweeps inland over the wide and undulating desert east of the Sierras, where the sun’s rays beat down relentlessly from above, and are reflected back up from yellow mesas and white hot salt beds! It becomes not only so hot that it strikes the face like a blast from a furnace; it is well-nigh devoid of moisture. People who talk to the weather sharps of the Signal Service Bureau, are told that with 90 per cent. or more of humidity in the air in summer, the weather is insufferably oppressive; with 70 per cent., the air is about right; with but 60 or 50 per cent., as when the air in a room is heated by a stove or furnace, the moisture is taken from the body in a way to produce headaches, but should the percentage be reduced to 40 or to 30, the air becomes positively dangerous to health. In Death Valley the air, raised to furnace heat by its passage over the deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea level, till the percentage of moisture is at times said to be less than 1.

Of the effect of this heat, abundant and trustworthy testimony may be had.

While making the ditch which supplied the ranch with water, J. S. Crouch and O. Watkins slept in the running water, with their heads on stones to keep their faces above the fluid, although the work was not done in the hottest season. Philander Lee, an old desert Arab, well accustomed to the heat, while at work on the ranch, regularly slept in the alfalfa where it grew under the shade of some willows and was abundantly irrigated.

Other effects of the arid air are found in the utter ruin, within a few days, of every article of furniture built elsewhere and carried there. A writing desk curled and split and fell to pieces. Tables warped into curious shapes. Chairs fell apart. Water barrels, incautiously left empty, lost their hoops in an hour. One end of a blanket that had been washed, was found to have dried while the other end was manipulated in the tub. A handkerchief taken from the tub and held up to the sun, dried in a flash — quicker than it would have done before a red-hot stove. Meat killed at night and cooked at 6 in the morning had spoiled at 9. Cut thin, dipped in hot brine and hung in the sun, it is cured in an hour. Flour breeds worms in less than a week. Eggs are roasted in the sand. Fig trees bloom and produce fruit near the house every spring, but the figs never mature. Though water flows about the roots of the trees, the figs dry up and fall off in July. Surveyor McGillivray said, after running out the land for the borax companies:

“The heat there is intense. A man can not go an hour without water without becoming insane. While we were surveying there we had the same wooden-case thermometer that is used by the Signal Service. It was hung in the shade on the side of our shed, with the only stream in the country flowing directly under it, and it repeatedly registered 130°, and for forty-eight hours in 1883, when I was surveying there, the thermometer never once went below 104°.

“Several of our men went insane. One of them was a Chinaman, who had wandered away as soon as he had lost his senses. We hunted for him awhile, and were then forced to give him up as lost. A few days afterward we went to a town sixty or seventy miles from there to get some provisions, when an Indian came into the town leading our lost Chinaman, still insane, and performing all sorts of strange tricks, to the infinite delight of the Indian, who thought he had found a prize clown, and regarded it as the best joke of the season.”

The human body, when suffering from a fever, is dangerously hot at 105° Fahrenheit. It has been known to reach 112°, but death quickly followed. A thermometer hanging under the wide veranda on the north side of the adobe house on the Death Valley ranch, has registered 137°. It is in such weather as this that the sand-storms in their deadly fury sweep through the valley, and even desert birds, caught away from the saving spring, fall down and die. It is a fact that since the ranch was established, one man has died from the heat while lying still in the house; and another, while riding, with a canteen in his hand, on top of a load of borax bound down the valley, fell over and expired. “He was that parched, his head cracked open over the top,” said a man who saw the body.

Such is Death Valley in the heat of summer. No work worth mentioning was done there, or ever will be done there, at that time of the year.

On the other hand, Death Valley in October becomes a dreamy, sunny climate, the home of the Indian summer. The change of climate which the whole desert country undergoes in the course of a year is remarkable. One reads in the authentic reports of the California Mining Bureau about snow falling in the mountains west of Death Valley to a depth of three feet, while Superintendent Strachan, of the Teels Marsh Borax Works, in Esmeralda County, Nev., noted a temperature of 120° in the shade of his house in August, and yet, before the winter was over, saw mercury freeze and the temperature sink to 50° below zero. There is probably no place on earth where a wider variation of the thermometer than this has ever been observed, just as no place so hot as Death Valley has been found, the greatest recorded heat of the arid region about the Red Sea being less than 127°.

But one feature of Death Valley weather remains to be noted here, though much more of its history will be told in the following chapters. It will not do to say that rain never falls in Death Valley; it rarely falls there, but cloud-bursts — concentrated storms of the utmost fury — are often seen about the mountain tops, as well as around the mountains throughout the desert region. As described by the desert men, they come in the hottest weather, and usually when least expected. Right in the clear sky appears a cloud, black and ominous, streaked with fire, growing with wonderful rapidity, and eventually sagging down like a great sack. The cloud is always formed above the mountains, and after a time its bulbous, sagging body strikes a peak. Floods of water are released on the instant, and in waves of incredible size, they roll down the cliffs and canyons. Precipices and peaks are carried away, gulches are filled with the debris, mesas and foot-hills are covered. The face of a mountain may be so changed in an hour as to be scarcely recognizable, and even the lighter storms rip the heart out of a canyon so that only jagged gulches and heaps of broken rock are found where once, perhaps, a good trail existed.

“Cub” Lee tells of sleeping near the mouth of Furnace Creek Canyon one night, years ago, with “a bug hunter”(as the desert-tramping scientists are called) in camp. It was so hot that the bug hunter could not sleep. About midnight, he heard a roaring noise up the canyon, which, as it kept increasing in volume, caused him to look up that way. To his surprise he saw, as he supposed, the sky that appeared between the canyon walls grown suddenly white. At that moment Lee rolled over and the “bug hunter” asked him what ailed the sky. Lee gave one glance and then yelled :

“Cloud-burst, climb !”

They scrambled up the steep wall, as best they might, just in time to save their lives. Lee thinks the foaming wall of water that had whitened the sky was not less than 100 feet high.