DEATH VALLEY

DEATH VALLEY PHOTOGRAPHS by ANSEL ADAMS TEXT by NANCY NEWHALL

Unearthly and immense, Death Valley so seizes the imagination that its history during the century white men have known it, is a history of illusions.

At first sight, it seems more an apparition than a reality. Spectacular mountains and deserts surround it, yet somehow you are never quite prepared for what lies before you. Suddenly you notice that the distances are no longer serene and lonely. The mountains darken, sharp and turbulent as waves under an approaching storm. Pale mudhills, torn by gullies, crowd the narrow road. Pale shrubs grow in the steepening washes. Towering peaks loom ahead. Then, beyond shimmering fins and pinnacles, the ghostly gleam of the salt flats opens below.

Thousands of people, on first looking into Death Valley, have seen the landscape from a nightmare, there is no life, no water visible. Thousands have seen in the naked chaos of rocks and sediments untold wealth waiting to be mined. Geologists and naturalists have seen mysteries worth a lifetime's work to solve. And nearly all, shocked by the strangely intense beauty before them, have felt they were looking into another world.

From the bare crest of the Black Mountains, you look down dark, plunging spurs more than a mile to where the salt flats, sloping down to two hundred and eighty feet below sea level, glimmer for forty miles through the deepest sink in the western hemisphere. North and south Death Valley reaches into the distances, one hundred and thirty miles long, widening and narrowing between vast alluvial fans poured from the mouths of mountain canyons. Beside you, the eastern ranges, the Black, the Funeral, and the Grapevine, rear up in a sombre wave six thousand to eight thousand feet high. Ahead, to the west, the Panamints rise thousands of feet higher, to summits bright half the year with snow, and the eleven-thousand foot peak of Telescope. Overhead, in the intense and blazing blue, nearly always there float a few remote and delicate wings of cirrus cloud.

The Indians called it Tomesha the Ground Afire.

When summer began to burn and shimmer, the Shoshones climbed out of their wickiups in the mesquite clumps and followed the ripening of fruits and seeds higher and higher up into the Panamints. On the lower slopes there were also lobes of prickly pear to dry, seeds of devil' pincushion to save, and crickets, grasshoppers and grubs to eat. Then rabbits and quail. Thousands of feet up, pinon nuts to gather. Perhaps a mule deer to roast, or, with luck, a bighorn sheep. Then, with cold returning, and snow frosting the heights, back down to the balmy warmth of the valley floor, to pick the beans of the honey mesquite, now hanging ripe, to ambush and dry the ducks alighting from their migrations in Salt Creek. All winter there were the mice, packrats and other small inhabitants of the dunes to catch, and now and then a chuckwalla, a big harmless lizard, to corner in a crevice of the rocks, deflate with a sudden jab, and eat raw. Uncertainties hung over this wandering, hand-to-mouth existence. If winter brought no rain, there would be few seeds to ripen, no succulent buds to attract rabbits and sheep, no nuts to shuck from the dry cones of the pinon. Delay might spell hunger or even famine In the winter of 1848, the Shoshones saw their valley invaded by frightening beings: white men with long beards, great horned beasts, creaking wagons.

A lying map had brought a wagon train of forty-niners to the unsuspected brink of Death Valley. Fear of dying from thirst and starvation in this vast and unknown desert had already split the train into several groups, the young men pushing ahead, the men with families struggling behind. A young Vermonter named William Lewis Manly, who stayed behind to help the families as scout and hunter, wrote years later of his first look at Death Valley country after a night's vigil on a high butte: I was glad enough to see the day break over the eastern mountains, and light up the vast barren country . . . it seemed as if pretty near all creation was in sight . . . and from anything I could see it would not afford a traveller a single drink in the whole distance or give a poor ox many mouthfuls of grass. In a due west course from me . . . the high peak we had been looking at for a month . . . glistened in the morning sun.

A day or so later he climbed a peak probably in the Funerals: . . . and had the grandest view I ever saw. I could see north and south almost without limit. The surrounding region seemed lower, but much of it was black, mountainous and barren. On the west the snowpeak shut out the view . . . To the south the mountains seemed to descend for twenty miles . . . It was the most wonderful picture of grand desolation one could ever see.

I remained on this summit an hour or so bringing my glass to bear on . . . anything that might help us or prove an obstacle to our progress. The more I looked the more I satisfied myself we were yet a long way from California, and the serious question of our ever living to get there presented itself to me... I might be forced to see our party choke up and die, powerless to help them. It was a darker, gloomier day than I had ever known could be, and alone I wept aloud,... I believed I could escape at any time myself, but all must be brought through or perish.

Scouting ahead, Manly camped one night on the salt flats with the young men who called themselves the Jayhawkers. They had slaughtered some of their starving oxen, and were burning the now useless wagons to smoke the meat.

One fellow said he knew this was the Creator's dumping ground where he had left all the worthless dregs after making a world, and the devil had scraped these together a little. Another said this must be the very place where Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and the pillar must have been broken up and spread around the country . . .

It seemed as if there were not bad words enough in the language to express their contempt and bad opinion of such a country as this.

On that first invasion, only one man, a Captain Culverwell, is known to have died in Death Valley itself. But of the journey

through the Western ranges, Captain Asa Haines of the Jayhawkers scribbled in his diary: East 4 miles, layed by; thence south 24 mile, no water, 10 o'clock at night.

Thence west 10 mile, no water.

Thence south 12 mile, no water.

Thence southeast 8 miles, got weak.

Thence due south 20 mile, no water.

Left wagons, packed cattle, six days wandering.

Stayed in canyon three days, Indians stole horses, all but two.

18 miles southwest, no water, one death, Fish from lowa, starvation. William Ischam died same day at evening.

William Robinson and McGowan got through desert but died at foot of mountains. Frank, a Frenchman, wandered off.

Offered Brian Byron $5 for a biscuit, but he refused. Old man Townshend left. Bill Rude and Dow Stephens bake flour and offer me food.

Luther Richards found water; snowed same night. One man laid down. Made coffee, went back, and he was dead.

Found body of Townshend; scalped.

Manly and a friend named John Rogers, leaving the families camped beside a well near the salt flats (where in summer they could not have lived a day), trudged on over the ranges to Owens Valley, then south through the Mohave Desert towards Los Angeles. Returning after an absence of 26 days, they roused the despairing camp, where only the families of Asahel Bennett and J. B. Arcane still waited, with a rifle shot and the sight of their one-eyed mule bearing beans, flour and jerked meat. They succeeded in bringing even the exhausted women and sick chilWanderer through to the coast. On the dawn of that journey, from a crest in the Panamints: Just as we were ready to leave . . we took off our hats, and then overlooking the scene of so much trial, suffering and death, spoke the thought uppermost, saying, 'Goodbye, Death Valley!' Searching for water, the forty-niners found the first of the great Death Valley illusions: a mountain streaked with silver. As the free gold to be panned from the running streams gave out, men listened more and more to rumors of silver. One rumor told of a piece of bright metal picked up in Death Valley and used as a gunsight; a gunsmith found it to be virgin silver.

In 1860, a physician named Darwin French, after talking with Manly, led a party into Death Valley to search for the Gunsight Lode. They started in May, and came out a couple of months later seared and dried almost to the bone the first white men to experience the Ground Afire. They had found an inferno, and they had found water in it: waterfalls in the dry Panamints that they named Darwin, a warm creek below the Funerals that they wallowed gratefully in and called Furnace Creek, and the well where the Bennett and Arcane families camped, the abandoned wagons and ox-yokes still intact around the charred fire, and the footprints of men, women and children still clear on the sand. They also passed without seeing them the silver ledges that would start a boomtown called Darwin, but they did not find the Gunsight.

In October, another physician, S. G. George, led another Gunsight expedition. They found the climate ideal. They found Charles Alvord, a famous prospector, looking for a cliff of silver he had glimpsed up a canyon he called Surprise. At his heels was an angry party, increasingly exasperated by his inability to find, in this country of canyons, the canyon with the cliff of silver. In that party was one of the men Manly had rescued in '49 Asahel Bennett. The George party went on looking for the Gunsight. On Christmas Day, up in Wildrose Canyon, they found a mine of antimony and named it the Christmas Gift. They encountered a young Indian, who admired them so much he began to call himself George. Trying to answer their sign language, he led them to the biggest, brightest thing he knew the huge peak, then glittering with snow, that one of them climbed and named Telescope. Still trying to understand, he took Dr. George up a narrow canyon with perpendicular walls through which, surprisingly, there rushed a torrent. In Dr. George's opinion, the surprise might be silver or it might be murder. He turned back, and had Indian Geoge precede him all the way to camp. The George party decided to go home.

On the way, they found Alvord, feeble and starving, abandoned by his party. Helping him along, and also starving, was William Lewis Manly. Chancing to meet Bennett and shocked by his story, Manly had persuaded him and a third man named Twitchell to return, and found himself once more bound for Death Valley out of mercy. Alvord, when they found him, was too weak to travel; Manly sent the others back with the mules for more supplies. They never returned. The George party helped both men out to civilization. Years later, Manly heard from Twitchell that he and Bennett were delayed six weeks by a storm, and then decided it was too late to go back for what were undoubtedly dead men. Manly wrote, "It required some grace to become reconciled to this yarn."

Yet Alvord went back, looking for his cliff of silver, and vanished; a rumor came back that he was murdered. A skeleton found at the mouth of Surprise Canyon with a bullet hole in its forehead may have been his. Dr. George went back, but three men he left at the Christmas Gift were killed by the Indians. Dr. French went back, looking for a place where the Indians used bullets of gold, to find most of the Indians still using bows and arrows. In 1861 came the first official survey. Politicians hoped that Lt. J. C. Ives would find that a strip of land rich with potential mines lay within the California boundary. Along with eleven mules, Ives brought three camels. The camels were pleasantly indifferent about water, and swift on sands and clays, but no match for mules on rocky ground. East of the Black Mountains, the survey found itself lost in a land without grass or water. Men lost looking for water were sought by other men who also got lost; after a frightening session at hide-and-seek, the survey was somewhat amazed to find itself reassembled and alive at Furnace Creek. It headed home. Crossing the alkali desert of Panamint Valley, it was shocked to find where, as it reported, "there is not a blade of grass and not a foot of land where any agricultural artifice could induce one to grow," monumented with surveyors' markers for homesteading and settlement. Surveyors received a thousand dollars in gold for reporting and laying out such townships; doubtless it was the same hardy grafters who similarly laid out the floor of Death Valley itself ten years later. The stakes, at least, appear to have served many a prospector as firewood.

Then, in 1864, one Jacob Breyfogle was found bleeding and crazy, his bald head so sunburned it looked scalped, with specimens of a fabulously rich gold ore in his pockets. He had no memory of where he had been or what had happened to him. The ore set mining men in a blaze of excitement. Again and again Breyfogle returned with parties of prospectors looking for his lost mine. He never found it, but the mystery continued to haunt prospectors. Singly and in groups they hunted for the Breyfogle so diligently and for so many years that prospecting itself became known as "breyfogling." And the Lost Breyfogle joined the Lost Gunsight among the illusions of Death Valley. More expeditions came and went, but not until 1875 was a thorough and reliable exploration made of Death Valley. In July and August that year, Lt. Rogers Birnie Jr. came with seven men, combed the heights and depths of the Ground Afire, and got out a comprehensive report in which hardships are barely mentioned. But truth could do little then to curb popular fantasy.

Death Valley was still remote, two hundred dry and torturous miles from anything that could be called a road. Rumors drifting back told of an awful pit, undarkened by so much as the shadow of a hawk, where no life could exist or, one variant ran, only the most repulsive life snakes, scorpions, carrion crows; of terrible heat and poison springs surrounded by bleaching skeletons; of corpses uncannily preserved for eternity by the salt flats. Mountains of any ore you liked floated about in the heat. Death Valley became for Americans a folklore hell.

back told of an awful pit, undarkened by so much as the shadow of a hawk, where no life could exist or, one variant ran, only the most repulsive life snakes, scorpions, carrion crows; of terrible heat and poison springs surrounded by bleaching skeletons; of corpses uncannily preserved for eternity by the salt flats. Mountains of any ore you liked floated about in the heat. Death Valley became for Americans a folklore hell.

Criminals that even the mining camps would not tolerate, along with a number of characters merely too pungent for ordinary society, found in the folklore hell asylum from men, if not from Death Valley itself. How many men have actually died there will probably never be known. For differing reasons, neither prospectors nor outlaws stuck to the familiar trails. A prospector might go up a wash where no one had passed for ten years, and find a skeleton. Or he might see the buzzards and ravens circling ahead. If the dead man were someone he knew and felt was worth the trouble, which was rather infrequent, he might get a headboard set up, such as the one to Such a headboard, browning, silvering, and finally disintegrating in the dry air, might serve as landmark to such directions as an old desert rat once gave a traveler: "The road is plain for ten miles; then you come to a salt well. Six miles further you'll come to Tim Ryan, Aug. 9, 1905, and two and a half miles southeast of him you'll find plenty of good water."

If the corpse were not someone the finder knew, reporting the incident depended first on the state of the corpse, and what identification, if there was any, he felt like searching for, second on the state of his relations with legal society, and third on the state of his sobriety when next in town. Whiskey helped Death Valley kill many men, who started forth from town groggy or elated, too late to cross in the cool hours, or wearing new boots, which soon became torture, were removed, and left the wearer barefoot on the Ground Afire. Men have been found, like Breyfogle, still alive but insane. Some have thrown away their clothes; others, with the delusion they are wading through high water, stride across the parched wastes carrying their clothes high overhead, and throw their arms around the necks of their rescuers like drowning men. And men have been found dead, their fingers raw from digging for water, with full canteens of water too hot to drink beside them.

Nevertheless, gambling with death was preferable to sure death from being hanged or shot on sight. The fugitive colony grew until mail addressed "care of the Panamints" caused a wooden box with a hinged cover to be set up beside what came to be known as Post Office Springs. And the fugitives were doing a little prospecting in their spare time. Two of them went with Indian George further up Surprise Canyon than Dr. George had dared, and looked up to see towering above them the cliff of silver that Alvord once saw.

In 1873, with some famous backers, the mining camp of Panamint City sprang up at the head of Surprise Canyon. Organized by bad men and a lodestone for hundreds more, its record for murders and robberies excelled the worst the West knew. It was worse even than what Bodie or Tombstone later achieved, and Wells Fargo refused to transport its silver bullion. But Panamint knew itself and the ways of the country; it cast its silver into balls weighing 500 pounds each, and sent them out nonchalantly, unguarded, in an open wagon.

At the height of the boom, the most gorgeous bar in town imported from San Francisco a sumptuous and colossal mirror that had already come from France by way of Cape Horn. The night of its arrival, all Panamint gathered to help install it and to celebrate. By morning, shattered by gunfight bullets, the mirror had crashed to the floor.

But Panamint, with its veins of silver running out, was crashing too; so was the silver market. There was panic throughout the Pacific Coast. And then Death Valley let loose over its whole length a cloudburst flood that hurled most of the dying settle-nment down Surprise Canyon, washing out and choking with the debris of Panamint City the road that had led to it.

From this debacle, six men set out together to try for better luck in Arizona. They got as far as the floor of Death Valley. It was summer; three of them died on the Ground Afire. The other three were helped by the Indians back over the Panamints to the new silver boomtown of Darwin. One of the survivors, a Frenchman named Isadore Daunet, showed around some white crystals he had picked up on the Ground Afire. Nobody cared; miles of the valley floor were covered with cottonballs of stuff like that. Daunet wandered away.

But up north in Nevada, and further west in California, a white crystalline mineral called borax was being found in playas — dried lake beds — and making fortunes for men like William Coleman and Francis Smith, who were mining and refining it for the new chemical industries.

A prospector named Harry Spiller, tramping down from Nevada, stopped for the night at Ash Meadows in the stone hut, halfhewed from the hillside, where Aaron Winters, a middle-aged prospector who raised a little beef on the side, lived with his Spanish wife, Rosie. Frail, lovely and disconsolate, Rosie had attempted to soften the rough and poverty-stricken interior — tidies on the rocking chairs, notched newspaper on the shelves and mantel, a small looking glass, hung with worn ribbon, and A bottle of Florida water, cherished but empty, in a window ledge. Perhaps Spiller was touched, or perhaps as thanks for a supper and a shakedown, he told Winters about borax and how to recognize it: pour a solution of alcohol and sulphuric acid over the sample, ignite, and if the flame burns green, you have borax. Perhaps Spiller also gave Winters some of the solution. At any rate, Winters hastened down to the white corruscations in Death Valley, poured the solution on his sample, lit it, and - "She burns green, Rosie. We're rich!" And succeeded in selling William Coleman several hundred, unsurveyed, unclaimed acres at the very bottom of Death Valley, one hundred and sixty miles by burro track from the nearest settlement, for $20,000. Then, ostensibly to start a hay and feed ranch down there, filed claim on the best water supply, and sold that for another $2500. Later, he helped two prospectors sell Coleman a borax deposit up by the Amargosa River, which could be worked in summer. But to Rosie, all this meant only a brief shopping tour on the coast and then a desert ranch at Pahrump, where, not long after, she died.

Hearing of Winters' sale, Daunet remembered his white crystals, hastened to the southern end of the valley, staked his claim, dug a well, and organized the Eagle Borax Works. A huge boiler and a dozen thousand-gallon settling vats had to be freighted in over the steep trails; borax had to be freighted out to the nearest railroad station in the Mojave Desert. By the first summer, when work had to stop, the product was so impure it barely paid expenses. By the second, it was enough better so that there was a little profit. Daunet got married. But his wife found Death Valley impossible to live in winter or summer, and a husband for summers only she considered unsatisfactory. Faced by a divorce as well as growing competition and approaching failure, Daunet committed suicide by leaping out of a window. The Eagle Borax was never worked again.

Twenty-two miles down the Valley, at the Harmony Borax Works, Chinese were levelling a road across the salt flats and picking cottonballs from the playa. Huge wagons weighing three tons and carrying seven, with rear wheels seven feet high, were being built. Hitched together in pairs, these wagons were being hauled by twenty mules over what began to be the first roads in or out of Death Valley. They followed what easy slopes and canyon floors there were, but they were still studded with rocks and desperately difficult passages. On the long haul to Mojave there were only three wells; water, as well as hay and barley, had to be hauled to the dry camps. The skinner, who hitched up and drove the mules, flicking a whip a hundred and twenty feet long over his hundred-foot team, and the swamper, who did everything else, Including the cooking, had time to get exasperated with each other during those gruelling journeys. One skinner was beaten to death with a wagon spoke and his swamper hanged the next day. After that, the boss always asked the skinner at the end of each trip if he wanted to change swampers.

Then a white hill whose crystals burned green was discovered back of the Black Mountains; borax took other forms than cottonballs in playas. A wagon road still twists among the mudhills to that hill, and it is still known as Twenty Mule Team Canyon. Then a whole white mountain was found further up, named for Coleman's wife the Lila C., and kept for the future.

But in 1886 Coleman's international empire crashed in bankruptcy; Coleman devoted the rest of his life to paying his creditors. Frank "Borax" Smith took over the borax holdings in Death Valley. But back in California and near the railroad, more of the new borax was found. The camp of Borax boomed. The Harmony and Amargosa works ceased forever.

The mines were kept, in case of eventual need, and so was the ranch, then known as Greenland, which had been developed at Furnace Creek to feed the mules. Jimmie Dayton, an old twentymule-team swamper, kept the ranch running, though there were now no mules to need the alfalfa, and few prospectors drifted in from the hills to keep him company. He got married, but his bride liked Death Valley in summer no better than Daunet's bride.

Jimmie took her back to Los Angeles, and then, more lonesome than ever, decided to resign and join her. He sent an Indian ahead with his resignation and the date he planned to arrive. But, perhaps because a lot of whiskey could be bought for five dollars in Ballarat, supply town for the Death Valley country in those days, the letter did not arrive until a week or more after Jimmie should have arrived in person. Two old desert rats were enlisted to search for him. Near Bennett's Well, deep in the August blaze, they found his wagon with the horses tangled and dead in their traces. Their reins had been slashed with a knife, the wagon was full of feed and water, but Jimmie, the old swamper, had unthinkingly set the brake when he stopped. Nearby, in the shade of a mesquite tree, they found Jimmie's body, still guarded from the coyotes by his starving little dog. Sunstroke, heart attack whatever it was, it had been sudden. They buried him there, one of them remarking, "Well, Jimmie, you lived in the heat, and you died in the heat, and after what you been through, I guess you ought to be comfortable in hell."

At the turn of the century, the discovery of gold at Tonopah started prospectors breezing through Death Valley again, and stimulated them into seeing what they had missed all these years. A rash of mining camps broke out, each just real enough to produce a Main Street, a section euphemistically known as Maiden Lane, and a cemetery, generally referred to as Sourdough Gulch. Finders were seldom keepers. It was Shorty Harris and Ed Cross who touched off the whole boom by finding the rich lode in the Bullfrog Hills that led to Rhyolite. But Shorty, even more drunk on whisky than excitement, sold the claim for $700 to a man who resold it for $60,000. And a local Indian named Shoshone Johnnie found another lode nearby from which $5,000,000 was eventually taken and got two dollars and a pair of overalls for it. Five years later, when Rhyolite collapsed, Shoshone Johnnie, it was said, still had the overalls.

Then Shorty Harris and Pete Auguerreberry, a Basque newcomer to the trade, were punching their burros over the Panamints to Ballarat, where they planned to lay in some grub and celebrate the Fourth of July. On that familiar sky-high trail passed by prospectors maybe three or four times a week, Pete chipped off the gold-bearing ore that started Harrisburg. But before Harrisburg grew beyond three hundred, One Eye Thompson and Harry Ramsey, from Nevada, bound to Harrisburg, got lost in a fog six miles north and found the gold ledges that led to Skidoo. Then there was Jack Keane who, while looking for another Death Valley illusion the improbable gold buried by the Jayhawkers - found real chloride of silver and started the Keane-Wonder Mine under Chloride Cliff. The Keane-Wonder produced just about enough gold $1,000,000 to pay for itself. There was Greenwater, a mile almost straight up above Badwater. Shorty Harris had found copper there years before, but his partner got so drunk he forgot to file the claim. Greenwater produced national excitement, but, somehow, no copper.

In the fever of excitement, however, all things looked possible. Borax Smith began building a railroad that should send spurs both to Rhyolite and to the borax camp he planned to open at the Lila C. And, assisted by the same myopic fever, one Walter Scott, old time mule skinner and trick rider and roper with Buffalo Bill, began mining a comparatively new ore in Death Valley - publicity. On a mythical gold mine, Scotty got his start; staged gunfights and prearranged abandonments in a Death Valley summer effectively kept backers from ever seeing his mine. A special train hired to break the record between Los Angeles and Chicago, which did break it, achieving 239 miles in 239 minutes, landed Scotty in real headlines. A melodrama was written about him and he played his own role in it; he had dinner for himself and his Chinese servant served in the middle of Rhyolite's Main Street, because Rhyolite disliked and refused to serve Chinese; he told of shooting a sweet old couple or, sometimes, a pair of prospectors who were dying of thirst in Death Valley, because he knew he couldn't get back in time to save them; he asked a bum to lend him lunch money and the bum gave him two thousand-dollar bills. The "bum" was Albert Johnson, millionaire president of an insurance company, and Scotty's one real mine; Johnson apparently found the show well worth the cost.

In 1907 the railroad came to Rhyolite and the Lila C., where the town of Ryan sprang up. But the panic of 1907 came too. The mining boom collapsed; so did the boom towns. Borax Smith was caught in an overextended state and so crippled that a few years later, the banks foreclosed and left him with a debt of $7,500, 000 to pay. And Death Valley Scotty, also overextended, was forced to confess to a grand jury that he was broke.

There were last gaps: when the Lila C. was worked out, the entire town of Ryan was moved bodily over to the Biddy McCarthy, and perched dizzily on a mountain-side overlooking Death Valley. A model community, with a cooling system through every building, it lasted until 1928. Now, except for a caretaker, three dogs and a pet raven, it is closed most of the year. For a few weeks around Easter it opens as the Death Valley View Hotel. Then tourists may sleep in its bunkhouses and ride its narrow gauge railroad through miles of borax tunnels and out onto trestles where the view is magnificent. Briefly, there was Leadfield, at the head of Titus Canyon, a promoters' holiday which opened its post office with mail for two hundred on August 25, 1926, and closed it with mail for one on January 15, 1927. In the 1930s and 40s, Death Valley Scotty again made headlines by building a Hollywood extravaganza of a castle up Grapevine Canyon. But the final hoax was on Scotty: Albert Johnson died without leaving him a penny. Scotty still has the big castle, a show place in Death Valley.

Few men who have tried to wring riches out of Death Valley have died rich. Beans, bacon, and a wonderful view yes. Riches - no. Even the humbler tradesmen and assorted purveyors were unable to keep much of what rolled across palm or counter in the boom days. The following is reported to be a genuine poster widely displayed around Rhyolite in 1906:

THE UNIQUE and ADOBE CONCERT HALLS

These are Unfair Houses We request all Union men not to patronize said halls The unfair girl workers are:

Signed by THE CONCERT GIRLS Even saloon keepers got out of funds. The Skidoo News for April 25, 1906, reported:

MURDER IN CAMP MURDERER LYNCHED WITH GENERAL APPROVAL

Joe Simpson Shoots Jim Arnold Dead And Is Hanged by Citizens THE TRAGEDY The comparative quiet of Sunday morning was broken by a wild disturbance Joe Simpson, locally known as 'Hootch' - owing to his fondness for the liquor known by that name, had been indulging in his favorite stimulant for some days Joe was out of funds, a condition not calculated to improve his usual bad temper, and to his disordered imagination the only practical way of getting it was to kill a banker. For this purpose he crossed the road from the Gold Seal Saloon, which he owned in partnership with Fred Oakes, and entered the Skidoo Trading Co.'s store, in which the Southern California Bank is located. He immediately covered the cashier, Ralph E. Dobbs, with his gun and demanded twenty dollars under penalty of instant death. In a moment the place was in a blaze of excitement. A wild rush ensued and before he could carry out his threat, he was overpowered by a crew of citizens and disarmed.

In the meantime Henry Sellers, the deputy sheriff, was on the scene with handcuffs, with the intention of securing him to a telephone pole, there being no jail in camp. However, his partner and friends promised to keep guard over him until a warrant could be sworn out for his arrest . . . His gun was hidden . . . Holding up a bank is no light offense . . . and further, he was still under a bond of good behavior from the court of Independence, having shot up a hotel there on his last visit. Dwelling on these things . . . he armed himself with his gun, which he had discovered in the oven and crossed the street.

He passed the bank counter and approaching Jim Arnold, asked, 'Have you anything against me, Jim?' and Arnold answered, 'No, Joe, I've got nothing against you.' 'Yes you have your end has come prepare to die,' and with that he raised his gun and shot Arnold below the heart.

In a moment the camp was in an uproar... armed men sprang from every direction in every state of clothing, and carrying arms of every size and vintage... Gordon McBain, stupid with liquor and unarmed in any way, attempted to arrest Joe as he stepped from the store... Less than fifty yards away, Doc MacDonald, kneeling in the dirt, with levelled rifle, again and again called on McBain to stand aside... From the other corner came the constable with his sixshooter raised, running like a deer...With a sudden rush they were in the restaurant... McBain still blundered between the constable and his prisoner... the constable... slipped his gun barrel into McBain's ear and threatened to blow his brains out. Nor was he a second too soon for Simpson discharged his last three shots at the moment, one bullet passing within an inch of Sellers' stomach. Before the zing of the last bullet had silenced, the constable had Simpson overpowered and his gun taken from him...

The lynching took place on Wednesday night... The body was discovered the next day, hanging, and Judge Thisse advised of the fact. An inquest was held later in the day. While there was a general feeling of levity outside the court, the investigation was conducted with due dignity... One bystander remarked that he had been awakened twenty-three times during the night to be told that some persons had hanged Joe Simpson, and in his own words, 'I was surprised every time.'... A third remarked that Joe was a 'true Bohemian,' until the last, having at his positively last appearance, hung around all night!...

It is somewhat surprising that such an occurrence as a public hanging could be conducted so quietly... It is a matter of deep regret, but it was the will of the people.

It was not, however, Joe's positively last appearance. The next day reporters and photographers came from Rhyolite and elsewhere, and obliging townsmen hanged Joe to the telephone pole again, so he could have his picture taken. Still later, a visiting doctor expressed a wish for a nice skull, and Joe was dug up to supply it.

All Death Valley's mining camps today are ghost towns. Cloudbursts have swept through them, vandals have stripped them. Greenwater is a few scars, Harrisburg not even that, thanks to the desert habit of moving shacks, stores, in one case a church, and in another Ryan a whole town away from a dying camp to a booming one. The telephone poles that once proudly marched down to Panamints, across Death Valley and up the Grapevines to Rhyolite, can now be found, if you search forthem, among the mesquite and the sand dunes. The huge borax wagons and the overland stages stand in the sun at Furnace Creek Ranch. The burros that were lost or turned loose have gone wild in the mountains and multiplied until they constitute a pest of outrageous impudence, intelligence and charm. Worse, they foul the springs so that the wild bighorn sheep will not drink, and nibble the alpine herbage so that they starve as well.

The old prospectors of the boom days are mostly gone now. Pete Auguerreberry built himself the grandest memorial; he found a magnificent view of the Valley from the Panamints, and with his own pick and shovel built the first road out to the craggy point that now bears his name. Shorty Harris, when at the age of seventy-eight knew he was dying, requested an epitaph that spoke for all his kind:

BURY ME BESIDE JIM DAYTON IN THE VALLEY WE LOVED. ABOVE ME WRITE: HERE LIES SHORTY HARRIS, A SINGLE BLANKET JACKASS PROSPECTOR.

There are still prospectors and miners dug into the back country, and they are not easy for any government to dig out. They will, in fact, die first. They are fogging with jeeps or trucks instead of burros hasn't changed them any. There is, for instance, W. C. Thompson, up at the old Lost Burro, below Tin Mountain. He is there because he loves it the bright mountainside, the Joshua trees, the old mill, the litter left when the mine was abandoned, the tunnel he is developing into his new vein. "Mining's in my blood. And none of these new ores has the look of the yellow gold."

More and more people came to love Death Valley. Gold, silver, copper, borax, the boom towns and the legend of the folklore hell drew them; it was Death Valley that drew them back. Women as well as men came to love the glittering days, the gorgeous nights, and the desert peace. Slowly the myths dissolved; the realities were seen to be stranger and bigger.

Borax had built wagon roads passable by mules and iron men; borax built a railroad (now defunct) to the eastern ramparts, which hauled borax out and could and did haul supplies and visitors in. But Americans were taking to the automobile, and boulders and breakdowns deterred them no more in the twentieth century than walking half a continent beside an ox team had in the nineteenth. They came in increasing numbers. The county began improving the roads. And in 1933 presidential proclamation made Death Valley a National Monument.

As a National Monument, Death Valley comprises some three thousand square miles, five hundred and fifty of which are below sea level and much of which is a mile to two miles high. It is twice as large as Delaware, and second only to Yellowstone among park areas in the United States. For twenty years Superintendent T. R. Goodwin has been reconciling such divergent elements as Indians, the borax company, tourists, scientists, burros, bighorns, hotels and prospectors. He has explored Death Valley by foot, by mule, by car and in his own plane until he loves it as well and probably knows it better than any man alive. He says, "When people want Death Valley to be a National Park, they will make it so."

Smooth highways now approach and penetrate Death Valley. In one day you can drive down from the exquisite alpine meadows of the High Sierra, past the black isles and cloud-reflecting distances of Mono Lake, through the magnificent vistas of the Owens Valley, and then due east, between the Inyo and the Coso ranges, up the steep incline of the Argus, down into the huge and desolate brilliance of Panamint Valley, and so, perhaps at sunset, to Death Valley. From Los Angeles, you can come in a few hours up through the metal-colored hills and alkali playas of the Mojave Desert, through Red Rock Canyon into the Owens Valley to the same road. A morning or an afternoon will bring you from Boulder City or Las Vegas.

If you stay to explore, you will begin to understand why the Indians are still here. Why Manly, Bennett and Alvord came back. Why grey prospectors who came here young refuse to depart for what they regard as the insipid outer world until they are carried away dead or at least unconscious. And why, in any rank between superintendent and ranger in the Park Service, or between owner and bellhop in the hotels, you will find enthusiasts thanking God for a way to go on living in Death Valley. You will begin to see why the tall tales were told; only colossal lies could possibly ring against the facts. And you will begin to sympathize with those who try to establish the facts, the geologists, ecologists, botanists, and naturalists, to say nothing of historians, who, after years exploring this place, can still stumble across evidence that upsets theories documented by every previous observation.

In Death Valley, extremes lie side by side, and contradictions jostle each other. The salt flats and the peaks set the heights and depths of its huge theme; they remain in your mind when you cannot see them. But between them what happens happens suddenly, violently, and unpredictably. Every canyon is different Golden Canyon, Marble Canyon, Mosaic Canyon, Natural Bridge. Every few miles the mountain walls change, and the valley floor discloses the unexpected.

The bitter clear pool of Badwater, the lowest level in this hemisphere, reflects Telescope Peak, two miles above. From the grey uplands of the Panamints, you can look across the nearer ranges to the glittering, fourteen-thousand-foot granite wave of the Sierra Nevada, culminating in Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the United States. And you can stand in the Panamints among snow, pinon, juniper and mistletoe, and look down thousands of feet and fifty degrees of temperature to the burning gleam below.

Death Valley in summer holds the record for being consistently the world's hottest place, except perhaps the newly discovered Quattara Depression, the deepest sink of the Sahara. At sea level, in the shade, official thermometers at Death Valley regularly record summer temperatures in the middle 120s, and once recorded 134 degrees. Nobody has yet recorded the temperature of the noon sun at Badwater in July and August. Old desert rats say that when you hold your hand out, back up, to the sun and the fingernails "bust loose at the back end," it's 150. The Indians still go to gather pinon nuts up in the Panamints; the Park Service goes up to its summer headquarters in Wildrose Canyon, yet there are rangers, hotel keepers, and others who stay on the valley floor all summer and insist they like it. They do their work at dawn or by night, and let the day blaze past them. And nearly as many people now come to Death Valley in summer as in winter. Thanks to swift cars and smooth roads, they cross the Ground Afire in an hour to the cooler mountains. But in that hour they see only the huge supernatural theme and the unearthly brilliance.

Winter is the time to explore Death Valley. The climate is pure delight; the air caressing, the sun benign vitality. Its one curse, like all deserts, is wind. After months as clear as crystal, suddenly the wind sets in, raising not only dust devils but sky-wide storms. The mountains look dim, or disappear; the distances look like angry seas. Old inhabitants hole in and wait. Then one morning the sky comes clear again, and every crag and crevice, at every distance, is diamond sharp.

Death Valley is a place of transforming distances. From Dante's View or Auguerreberry Point, the salt flats look smooth as frost, mere dried deposits on the desert floor. Actually they are beds of jagged rock crystals three or four feet high, interspersed with pools and creeks of crystalling brine. Under them, drilling straight down for eighteen hundred feet reveals only rock salt and brine. From the Panamints, the Black and the Funeral ranges, deluged with lava, look sombre as their names. Go close to their steep foothills and you will see a chaos of turquoise, amber, coral, rose, magenta, garnet, mahogany, and every grey and dun chromatically possible. Zabriske Point does not look like the ramparts of a precipice, nor does Golden Canyon like the foot of one, especially when you go up between the high clay banks and rounding mudhills of yellow clay, reflecting sunlight among themselves until they seem made of gold, and look up at the towering shaft now called Manly Beacon.

Phenomena that anywhere else would be objects of pilgrimage are here almost lost in the immensities. Often you have to go close to the earth, with a guide and horses or a jeep to find them. Northward, still below sea level, the salt flats give way to a pallid turbulence of mudhills powdered with alkali or capped with lava. From the highway, you see only a monotony. Yet, winding through that moon-strange desert, under cliffs of grey conglomerate, suddenly there opens a place like an arm of the sea.

Ducks ride the bright waters of Salt Creek, herons wade the sedges fishing for the shimmering minnows; coyotes, padding silently, in hope, have left an inch-wide trail along the bank, Britons think of the chalk cliffs of home and New Englanders of tidal marshes reaching to the sea. There are places made for a child's delight-little Mustard Canyon, with its ochre steps en crusted with sticky crystals like rock candy, and the small wash glittering with cottonballs that is known as the Gnome's Work shop, other places where you may follow the tracks of Ice Age elk and long vanished elephants, antelopes, camels, boars. Up at the Racetrack, after a rain, huge boulders weighing up to a quarter ton move in the wind, leaving tracks like snails on the slip pery and resilient clay.

In the upper valley, there appear, dwarfed by the mountains and the distances, a few pale shapes like pyramids. These are the Death Valley sand dunes, kept forever in an area some seven miles wide and twelve long by the whirl of winds down the moun tain passes. In a harsh and rocky country, the dunes are soft and exquisite, responsive not only to the sculpturing wind but to the Imprint of Infinitesimal living feet. Morning lights up their winged crests and rippled slopes and shows the delicate trails that record the history of the night the passage of mice, beetles, vinega roons, packrats, the little kitfoxes and perhaps a 'rabbit, with dozens of others whom the Ground Afire has taught to emerge only under the stars. Here a mouse went forth too late, when the sky was growing light, and here a brush of tailfeathers and a stab of talons and his palpitant trace. At dawn the dunes glow with the sky.

Northward the valley slants up into hills and the mountain ranges approach each other. Mesquite, creosote bush and pole desert holly give place to cacti prickly pear, niggerhead and fishhook, higher still, to luminous chollos and there desert lilies, the Joshua trees. Where the Panamints end in the high peak of Tin Mountain, the black place begins black volcanic cones and cinder dunes rising to the sharp edge of Ubehebe Crater. Within, the huge explosion pit sinks down through rust-red strata. On its black slopes the desert holly shines like silver. The changes to be found within this strange cataclysm in the earth seem almost in exhaustible, even for old inhabitants there are canyons still unexplored, places beyond certain peaks still never visited, mazes of mudhills seen only hurriedly.

Death Valley looks arid as the moon and bears as frightening testimony to the power of water as of earthquakes and volca noes. The vivid earths come from the millions of years when the west of this continent was submerged, and huge tides, thundering across the primal crust of the cooling planet, eroded it into sands and sediments thousands of feet thick. Through other millions of years, the land rose and the sea receded. Rain beat the folds of the contracting earth back into sediments, Then again the seas come in, this time shallow and alive, leaving filament by filament, shell by microscopic shell, the evidence of primeval life. Vast gaps occur in our knowledge, what happened here during the hundred million years of the rise, reign and fall of the dino saurs that they left so little trace? Was Death Valley a sea among volcanoes? We know only that lava which later cooled to granite was forced up through the older strata and that, to the West, the Sierra Nevada began rising.

As the continental masses man would eventually see were shaping, and first the Rockies and the Andes, then the Alps and Himalayas were forced higher and higher, earthquakes of terrifying power shook this valley. Its floor dropped, its ranges shot up in immense faultings, tiltings, and upendings, long slabs of the earth's crust were thrust over and through each other, shortening the surfaces of the planet here by fifty to seventy-five miles. The mountain walls still exhibit this almost unbelievable churning. At Dante's View, the sombre Archean gneiss, two billion years old the primal earth crust changed by heat and pressurelies next to Tertiary rhyolite, a new volcanic rock laid down perhaps fifty million years ago. Where are the billion and a half years of rocks and sediments that should lie between them?

Today you look into the bed of an ancient lake. The rising ranges formed a land-locked basin, beginning of the base of the Sierra and reaching eastward. The rains, the springs and the rivers, leaching the heights, formed a vast lake from which the mountain chains stood farth'as islands. Intermittently the lake roceeded, evaporated and then again rippled from precipice ta precipica. Valcanoes, rose, spewed basalt into the lake, and sank again. Foldings and faultings elevated parts of the lake bed into hills and mountains. And the rains carried their salts and minerals downward.

One transformation of water only the glacier has never lain over Death Valley. Glaciers crowned the Sierra Nevada, sculpturing its danmies, spires, and colossal valleys. Then the earth oscillating in its orbit, entered a cycle thousands of years long and still incomplete, when the north pole spins closer to the sun, ice retreats, and tropics invade the North.

Twenty thousand years ago, men dwelt on the shares of the lake we now call Lake Manly. Already it was shallow, some two hundred feet deep, its outlines much like the sea level line today, and doubtless it was already bitter, in a climate humid and rather... tropical, men built their villages and quarried absidian to edge their axes, spears and scrapers, But year by year the glaciers melted, and the Sierra rose, Intercepting more and more the clouds bearing rain from the Pacific. What moisture passed their roking peaks fell on the peaks of the intervening ranges. The lake dried up. The Amargosa River, which Loops the southern end of the Black Mountains, faltered more and more, until it now vanishes in the sands and salt beds long before it reaches its sump at Badwater. The rainfall shrank to some two Inches a year, the humidity, which elsewhere in this country averages sixty per cent, here shrank to five.

Now, in summer, air from the Ground Afire boils up thousands of feet above the mountain peaks, engulfing birds in its searing currents until they fall exhausted, often to die on the burning flats. Rain, when it comes in summer, comes in the appalling Southwestern shape of the thunderstorm cloudburst. The black sky seems slit by the peaks, columns of apparently solid water, miles wide, fall on the bare ridges. Precipitous slopes hurl the water down, loosening boulders, gnawing at the baked crust. of the mudhills, sharpening their clawlike hold on the gullies. A wall of water that is less a flood than an avalanche tears through the narrow canyons, pours through their mouths onto the vast alluvial fans formed by their predecessors, and sinks at last into the desert. In July and August, when the thunderheads are rising there are canyons you must not enter. The perpendicular rock walls of Titus Canyon, for example, offer no chance of escape In winter, going up bone-dry canyon floor's, you will see twenty, feet and more above your head, hollows and chasms gauged In a few minutes by the last flood, and understand how, in the Ground Afire, men have died by drowning.

Annually and diurnally, the dryness of Death Valley adds to its aerial splendors. Noon sets the theme, the pallid mudhills, the dark mountains, the incandescent salt flats. But midnight is mag nificent. The mountains seem to sink, the desert to rise towards the arching brilliance. Depth on depth, through sparkle, blaze and luminosity of stars, space seems visible. At dawn and sunset, the pale floor reflects the sky, mud catches fire, dunes glow. One ranee turns ember, then ruby, amethyst, opal. Only the salt Hats, in all lights, burn blue.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering. He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hang eth the earth upon nothing.

Death Valley is one of the great climaxes of the earth.

PHOTOGRAPHY IN DEATH VALLEY

To prolong them, sirs, Death Valley is full of illusions. It is exceedingly difficult to photograph. Colors startling to the eye may look gray or else too heterogeneous and unimaginably unlike that block-mudowlite, the immensities of light and distance tend to become denn skimmers silhouetted on blank skies, the senior mad whole strange strictions Hotton jaja meaninglsas glare, and shadowk go Ιππικ κατά καιρός. Most photographers profusalamal, skilled conateur, word snap sfssonar likes go eleven to dabest on their fired negatives of Death Valley wdedly because thay antlerestimate is difficulties and overgalmata whul a can do. Death Valley is ant overage, even onto derech You will madeway bill you possess, every control through exposure and verdamental your must losihls equipment, psychologiend as well as photographid Mialutares în sus casustry the best kept on the wall things peepře, animals, details. Even herg, if you wish to convey the brillanes, or the voi landscape as hockground, you should honie a asd of interchangnoble Bewalsot of filter's both for black-and-white and anlar. For Emathe Kelley self a view camera with full syrlags zoud tilts is the hast Instrument He sete to check the bellows for leaks Pouth Valley will find theus if you des' Toka nlang a shart fuami hangti kass as will ex sormal and a long Pouat bengthe theres are places where you will be chase is something and woest all the surrounding image you cou get. All legses af cpurse, should he casted.. Test your mapasare miter and fake ise if yoς και τιciduals da happen. Takaraply of intras, a Ραίωνήσας, οι κά, α. Νο. 12 (mίναι lim, Crood en A are perhapse the next useful. Siters in Death Valley cane indispensables they enable you either is kreate the Masion of reality or to Die bryani it.

For the rest fake this used doeti prestavlions. Puisi yeur film and cuinever oxes white to kтор тады кабакр en tighthy and that w malieng tape and leaned. Duur le cantant rendre. Chacin all sculponent fro qweetty, kispecially hohless, where windbleira particles of send can lodge and pepper shks wetis edidigurien apecks. Sew a vehille slotk no tap of your fears ing shesh, it is machs masker to sus lato ground glass wives you are not smothering ender folde so that they seem voody to burn, Noror leave, your Cotony other suipment in the sum it com weirpa ko thad dry shir sand the matal parts, at neon, even in spring we fodl, buxama remarkably hot ic headlo. Por your ser la any shade you won Find, How the sake of your im well on veerself. Ansi meter go. blfhely off phalegraphing over the hit withøst first getting your anserings by the same corel the bangpa sollent handmarkss aar con bateane a surprisingly small alijeet to find in Deate Valley. O Courte you will follow the simple but essentiel roles mens bave died basert boys prary water for yourself soul the sodotor. Here ata barrels of radioter water plong the lögbewys, hoor you aan still find yoursell for frem ann when you need & Always ink sme zasponsible persely where you com going and fre fong you wopusti to be gows. Skay naar the highways, which as petrallard, and where may kilight rippling serinή κυτή και τα blaga, simply mọ walt. Remember that epart bom the ingirways, Roots Valley is still the vast desett the fortynines crossed, and a summer it is still the Graand Afire. The first prehlen in plictegraphing Death Volley is the distances. Whether nieur or hozy, they are so great that they will olude you anless you canno them. Con days of astroms civity, thay are very blues a blue-absorbing filter. εμεί ως τα Μα. 12 Ksbusid keep them frore vanishing. On slays of kast. bowever enesesting to the ove, they ram dull and opaque ar tits, and require steenger Fators এটি বই A. in wild conditions of either eatresme, a Felatiear is aanllent. When the baze is fastenss, you will save your self doupiaintment by availing the distances and working with the anos, ond dese. I there is a dussipram, you may find subjects insides for thon miniatures het cover your view comeru and pintact everything as honetically as you can speinst the blasting, searching dvat.

On glittering days the notis and road con after se bright thay murgs on value with A yellow fihar used on yellow rock without esposare fucracige will give as bright or nok hout en alarkey sky and shadows than when the Pactor i雞 brmessel. A graan fihar will wander sed rock and blue sky clarker humorosale hat will leave the grey desert plusta alnost pashargesh. In the wanyan, ather pluces where forme anean and slises bebind sach other, you may laid e C token über, which iterally materializes the interventap ok of restauble help in tuossatunting the atmospheric repessive from Deze fertas to distemi Petrogasare development, there can be no absolute rules; the variations where as and what you wish to express are far great. Careful monumental ment of the lights reflected by your subject and are normalization of your used print are expelled here. Are the shadows small for you capture all the lights and let the shadows go black; or have you large shadow areas where xxx shell in mindful As a covered outling of exposure and development, to keep in mind rather the sea. Small lenses invariably move the reading of light yolks simulant to white skin to sunlight, usually to the point marked "C" above the arrow on the Weston dial down to here thus true spot. F below marked "A. Sapiesa washing to that reading, and then develop langer. You will find the Igbo boss clunau and thus shadows elaborate. For a thorough and succinct discussion of the photographic principles involved, as well as sequential descriptions of the techniques employed by Ansel Adams, I refer you to ùa Brada Praia Marine Mergun and bester, New York) and especially to biarwal light Photography The bare ocule your variations of what you want, the more accurate your knowledge of how tones are influenced by filters, exposure and development, the more likely you are to bring back from Death Valley images warmer for what you see and those of the most extraordinary and beautiful pieces of América. Even, the her light of noon can be magic if you see, use your variations. Photographs against lie-flight sun have great power d Hans. Dawn is the most magnificent light of all, whether for color or black white, and there is less likelihood of haze than at sunset. The journey down to Badwater, or up to Puntos Vine, or the trama across the canyons are themselves worth getting up in the black of night to know