CHAPTER V: A RAINBOW OVER PANAMINT
INDIAN GEORGE shifted his position a little to get his back against a newly sun-warmed part of the rusty sheet-iron wall. He seemed very anxious that there should be no mis- take in the record of his experiences with the white men through his century of life in the Death Valley region.
"First time," he repeated, "I'm little boy. See three men. Next time, I'm big boy. Man. Big as now." He grinned. "Bigger." George has a sense of humor. "I see five men. I watch. I not so much scared. I see they good men. No fight. No shoot. Plenty eat. By'm'by they see me. Give me eat. Good. • I go 'long. One man name George. Very nice man. No talk Indian talk. Make sign. No good. Try hard. By'm'by I guess he want see silver in mountain. I take him up steep canyon." The old man pointed away to the southeast. "No go all the way. Too hard."
He paused to demand another verification of his recollections. "How long time ago, that?"
"Eighty years."
Again he nodded. "Long time," he said. "Next time I see two men. I no scared no more. I 'member white man's bacon, beans, good. I askum for eat. They no got much. Not like that George. They got gun. They know little bit Indian talk. They want place for hide. Shoot rabbit, quail, anything for eat. I takum up same canyon I take that George. Only, we go all the way. They see silver in rock. They say, 'By God, George, this good mine.' They laugh like hell. They say, 'Wells Fargo have big time get up here.' They say, 'You stick with us, George. All get rich. Plenty beans and bacon.' They say, 'This better than Pioche, better than White Pine.' They laugh like hell."
Again he put his own familiar question. "How long time ago, that?"
"Seventy years."
"Plenty long time."
George shifted his shoulders to another warmed spot, and dragged on his cigarette. He had outlined the first twenty years of the white men's invasion of the Death Valley region, and had recited the three outstanding incidents of his own first thirty years. I prodded him with another question.
"What those two men named, George? Curran? Wilson? Dempsey? Scobie? Gibbons? Parker? Copely?"
George shook his head. He wanted very much to be accommodating, but this roster of the first fugitive residents of the Panamints was a little beyond him. "Long time ago," he said.
"Did they treat you good? Plenty beans?"
He brightened. "No so good as that George. Pretty good. They say, 'George, this Injun country. We like Injun. No want trouble. You sell us these mine, we pay you good. Pretty quick plenty white man come. Plenty beans, bacon, whisky, everything. You get good pay, savvy?' "
"And did you?"
"Ugh, pretty good. Plenty white men come quick. Make Panamint City. You savvy Panamint City?"
Yes, I savvied Panamint City. It was the first great min- ing excitement that really put the Death Valley region on the map Of the desert. When I had assured George of that, he was satisfied to let the subject drop. Conversation lagged as interest in Death Valley had lagged from 'forty-nine to the early 'seventies.
Death Valley was hardly more than a horrid legend to most Americans twenty-three years after it had tortured its first white invaders. Even in my own childhood some twenty years later and only 220 miles from that deadly region there was a horror-stricken belief that no one, no thing, could live within it. How much less the scattered forty millions of United States population, nursing the national headache of the panic of 'seventy-three knew or cared about Death Valley in that day is easy to understand. Most of them had never heard of it. A few searchers for lost mines, a few emigrants and federal agents, and a few fugitives from the justice of Nevada mining camps, had been there. That was all.
Probably 99.44 per cent of the population of the United States was too engrossed in the personal problem of earning its ham and eggs without government assistance in 1873 to be concerned with Death Valley in any of its phases. The nation had been running wild since the Civil War. The Tweed Ring had looted the New York city treasury of $200,000,000. Jim Fisk, Jay Gould and 'friends had shaken ten millions out of the Erie Railroad and engineered their disastrous corner in gold. In the ensuing crash, eighty-nine railroads had gone bankrupt. Railroad building and supply was the leading business of the country, and those failures had put half a million railroad builders out of work. Half the iron and steel mills in the country had shut down. Forty-six thousand commercial houses failed. The national situation was sad enough without reference to Death Valley.
Only San Francisco and its heavily contributing Com- stock Lode and scattered mining camps in the Nevada desert were in a position to hear and give the slightest heed to a word Of allurement from that desolate waste. San Francisco boasted 130,000 population. Virginia City, on the Comstock, in Nevada, claimed 10,000. Los Angeles was not boasting of its 8,000 residents. Austin, Eureka, White Pine and Pioche had some thousands of lively citizens who always had an ear cocked for the sagebrush telegraph, and a burro ready to take the trail.
San Francisco, only two decades above the ooze from which it had sprung, was extracting the most exciting part of its vitamins from the Comstock Lode. To be sure, Grass Valley, Angel's Camp, and others of the Mother I Ode's best producers were still contributing A, B, and C. But D, the vitality vitamin, had come in with the $200,000,000 taken from the Comstock in its first thirteen years, and was making San Francisco leap and rear and squeal around the mining stock boards like a Man o' War intent upon improving the breed Of the American racehorse.
San Francisco was completely aware of all the possibilities of the mining business, both in the mines and in the mining stock exchange. San Francisco's awareness of its advantages and possibilities had extended its forces not only across the Sierra into the great Comstock but a few hundred miles farther into the Nevada desert.
Those desert mining camp dwellers were chock-full of vitamin D. It was an amazingly vital vitamin. It would make a man travel several hundred miles just for the fun of prodding the 130-mile long Gila monster that lay waiting in Death Valley, and putting a notice under his tail, to the effect that he was about to be dispossessed. Such a notice appeared early in 1873. It was signed by R. C. Jacobs, W. L. Kennedy and R. Stewart, and notified all men who could read writin' to gather at the camp of R. C. Jacobs & Co., in Mormon Canyon on February 10, 1873, to organize a new mining district and write laws to govern same.
If one did not know, one would not have suspected in 1873 that there was any human life in or around Death Valley or its neighboring Panamint Valley just over the crest to the west, except a few furtive Indians and fewer and more furtive white men. But R. C. Jacobs knew. He had been a miner on the Mother Lode, a pony express rider on a desert run, and was quite familiar with the life and letters of such camps as Eureka, White Pine and Pioche, and the hasty departure of some of their more vital residents. He suspected that some of those nervous-fingered gentlemen might be rusticating in the Panamint country, and would see his notices wedged in a rock monument or impaled on a mesquite tree, and would come to his party.
He was right. A dozen or so appeared at the appointed place on the appointed day, slipping in cautiously from behind rocks after they had inspected the group and assured themselves that there were no officers of the law or Wells Fargo detectives present. They organized the Panamint Mining District to cover an area approximately twenty miles square from Death Valley over the Panamints to the Panamint Valley. They adopted for their own the mining laws which ten million dollars' worth of litigation on the Comstock had taught U. S. Senator Bill Stewart of Nevada how to write. They punctuated their decision with gunshots and pledged their mutual allegiance in Jacobs' demijohn of whisky. And that was the beginning of Panamint, the camp, the city, the new lure of the Death Valley region.
Of course, Jim Scobie and Hank Gibbons, a couple of tough hombres who had seen life and probably taken it in various Nevada camps, and had gone to the Panamints for their health, had already hiked up Surprise Canyon, and noted the towering cliffs with their wide tracings of rich quartz veins, and had laid claim to some. So had John Copely and others. The group at Jacob's camp included John Wilson, Jack Dempsey, Parker, and Curran. But the richest quartz, 200 miles from transportation and far more than that from a smelter was not much good to men who wanted beef to eat and whisky to drink. Besides, their reputations were not very good in the centers of capitalism which might be interested if the right man came along with samples and a convincing assertion that this would be better than the Comstock.
Jacobs promised to be such a man. Kennedy had some business connections in San Francisco. Stewart had a reputation both as a prospector and a gun-fighter. So those who had already seen and claimed some of the most alluring ledges willingly took the newcomers into partnership on one basis or another, and the camp of Panamint was ready to declare itself to the world.
At the moment, however, San Francisco was too keenly interested in a revived Comstock to pay much attention to reports of another silver discovery twice as far away in distance, five times as far in time, and ten times as far in the discomfort of travel. San Francisco had recovered from the depression of the disastrous Yellow Jacket and Crown Point fires in the depths of the Comstock Lode. It was on the crest of a new wave of prosperity higher than anything it had ever experienced; higher in contrast to the depths of depression in which all the rest of the nation was sunk in the panic of '73.
One John P. Jones was generally given credit for lifting the city to that exalted point. Jones, at the age of forty, had gained wide fame and personal popularity as the hero of the Yellow Jacket and Crown Point fires in which more than forty men were killed. Shortly after that he had started the renewed Comstock boom by discovering a new bonanza in the burned-out Crown Point Mine, of which he was superintendent.
With Alvinza Hayward, a minor member of the Bank of California group then largely controlling the Comstock, Jones began quietly to buy the two-dollar stock. They had acquired control before the news of the bonanza leaked out. Then the price leaped to ninety dollars. Three weeks later Jones cut the same ore body 200 feet below the level on which it was discovered, proving its tremendous size. The stock took another jump to $180, and continued to climb. Jones was a multi-millionaire, and continuing to multiply.
The Comstock boomed again, and San Francisco boomed with it. That was the situation when the Panamint Mining District decided that it needed a big-shot mining man.
John P. Jones seemed the logical choice. But Jones was busy in the battle between the Bank of California ring and other interests in the Comstock and San Francisco; busy in his own mining and milling activities on the Comstock; busy in the United States Senate to which he had just been elected by the Nevada legislature.
Almost a year passed before a volunteer go-between, one E. P. Raines, a San Francisco mining stock-market hanger-on who had heard the call of the sagebrush telegraph and visited Panamint to verify its message, was able to interest Jones to the extent of $1,000. Before he had encountered Jones he had made a visit to I os Angeles with a sackful of the richest ore from the surface Of Panamint's outcroppings and had succeeded in interesting Temple and Workman, the pueblo's pioneer bankers and real estate holders, in the possibility of making their sleepy village a rival of San Francisco by way of this Panamint mint. Perfectly logical. Hadn't San Francisco grown from 80,000 to 140,000 population largely on the calories and vitamins of the Comstock in thirteen years? Here was the opportunity for Los Angeles to grow from its 8,000 to 80,000. All it needed to do was to build a railroad from Shoo Fly Landing, below the bluffs of Rancho Santa Monica y San Vicente through Los Angeles and the neighboring Mojave desert to a point west of Panamint where a good wagon road would automatically start Panamint's millions funneling down into Los Angeles.
Temple and Workman were bankers. They owned a great deal of land. So did Harris Newmark, who also had a store which supplied numerous ranchers with necessities, and bought their grain and wool. A few lesser men also thought it would be a good idea. They all gave Raines encouragement. They even started a subscription list for a wagon road to Panamint.
But Los Angeles had never had a boom. San Francisco had had half a dozen. Los Angeles was cautious. San Francisco was reckless, and glad of it.
And so, after all, it was one of San Francisco's millionaires who had made his fortune in mining supplies and real estate, who gave the next fillip to the Los Angeles-Panamint transportation scheme. Colonel Robert S. Baker, associated with E. F. Beale, a former surveyor-general who had acquired vast land holdings south of Bakersfield, purchased the Spanish grant of the Rancho Santa Monica y San Vicente, including 38,000 acres of the area between Los Angeles and the sea. Colonel Baker and Mr. Beale interested Mr. Temple in a plan for a railroad from the ocean front of their ranch, through Los Angeles, across the Mojave to Independence, the county seat of Inyo County, and on to tap the Union Pacific at Ogden. It would pick up the millions of Panamint, Cerro Gordo, and less pretentious camps en-route. Inyo's Assemblyman James E. Parker introduced a franchise bill in the legislature and saw it passed. It granted the proposed railroad right to collect eight cents a mile from passengers, and ten cents a ton mile for freight.
The Union Pacific junction at Ogden would provide vast quantities of freight and countless passengers at the northern end of the line. The bank of Temple and Workman would be the logical depository for all the millions flowing through Los Angeles.
Men promoted railroads as readily as they now promote new religious cults, or cure-alls for economic headaches. And they found the federal government ready to assist, with gifts of alternate sections of land along the right-of-way, and other subsidies. Baker and Beale and Temple knew how the Stanford-Huntington-Crocker-Hopkins syndicate had recently cleaned up many millions in cash and acquired many hundred sections of valuable land through the promotion of the Central Pacific Railroad to connect Northern California with the East. Why shouldn't Southern California have a similar connection?
Baker and Beale had the prospective ocean terminal. Senator John P. Jones had a fortune estimated at $20,000,000. He also had a great antipathy to the Stanford-Huntington-Crocker-Hopkins group and was arousing equal antipathy on their part by urging the taxation of their federal land grants. He had colossal ambition, extending to the creation of a desert empire for which he already had engineers in the field studying reclamation projects. He could be made to see that Panamint would be a great feeder to the suggested railroad.
Baker financed a trip to Washington for Raines to convince Senator Jones. And a few weeks later $113,000 of Jones money paid for five claims in Panamint.
That was spendable money, the first of any importance ever brought into the Death Valley region. More, it was an accolade conferred by a practical, successful, famous potentate of mines and mining upon the aspiring Panamint. As one man its population of prospectors, miners, gamblers, fugitives, saloon-keepers, freighters and what-not, already numbering nearly one hundred, arose from its knees, and with face alight shouted the challenge of knighthood to the world. And the world took heed—at least the western world of gold and silver extending from Weaverville in the Trinity Mountains of California where Jones had started his successful career in a grocery store, to the Comstock in Nevada, and down and beyond the Mother Lode to Inyo's Cerro Gordo, and on to Los Angeles and San Bernardino, and east and north again into Pioche and Eureka and similar camps of Nevada.
A thousand men turned their mules, their burros, their own plodding feet toward the rim of Death Valley. The nearest stage line, over 250 miles of rocky road from Carson City, ended at Owens Lake. From there a badly distorted trail led through the crooked pass between the Inyo and Coso Mountains, over the torturous Argus Range, down into the sink of Panamint Valley, and up the precipitous crevice which opened upon Surprise Canyon, and Panamint.
The bold and the bad men from the San Francisco region could travel over the Southern Pacific Railroad, building southward, as far as Delano. From there a fairly comfortable stage would carry them over a passable road to Bakersfield, and from Bakersfield another stage would take them to the Owens Valley, whence they could do their own seventy-five miles of foot or muleback to their goal. It was even worse and farther from Los Angeles across the Mojave Desert and over the Slate Range.
Or from the opposite direction, east and north, from Pioche, Nevada, for example, where men were men and whisky was designed to make them tougher, it was three hundred miles to Panamint, by the course that men and burros took. There wasn't even a trail there, but there was a route by which a man conscious of the advisability of finding new fields for his peculiar talents might make his way by installments Of twenty to fifty miles between water holes.
Among the men who thus defied Death Valley and the surrounding deserts, or the ropes and guns of irate citizens and local officers. a few should be named as representative.
They brought a blaze of color to the rim of the Panamints Which even yet reappears at sunset almost every night of the year, and frequently is reflected above the Black and Funeral Mountains on the other side of Death Valley. That may not be the meteorological explanation of the blazing color scheme that frequently paints the sky above the valley, but it comes logically to mind when one tries to describe the high life of the camp of Panamint.
Among those who contributed was Dave Neagle, who had recently shot a fellow hombre in Pioche, and was rarin' to go. Although only twenty-seven, Dave had accumulated a reputation throughout the desert, and tried not to let it rust in Panamint. He did pretty well at that too, but achieved even wider notoriety some years later in Bodie, Tombstone and Butte, the three toughest camps after Panamint. "Reformed" by those experiences but with trigger finger and reputation, such as it was, more or less intact, he obtained a job as bodyguard for Mr. Justice Stephen J. Field of the United States Supreme Court during one of Mr. Field's visits to the scenes of his California successes. The Justice's friends suggested a bodyguard because David S. Terry, also a former judge, a firebrand and a killer of the California gold rush and Comstock days, had lost a suit before Judge Field. Terry had married his client in that suit, the beautiful Sarah Althea Hill, once the toast of San Francisco, when he had failed to convince the jurist that Sarah was entitled to conjugal rights in the vast estate of William Sharon of Comstock and Bank of California fame. But the lovely bride could not quite soothe the bruised dignity of the fiery Southerner, and Terry had threatened to shoot the jurist. He had already killed David Broderick. So it seemed quite logical when Neagle encountered Terry in a restaurant where Field was dining, and read a threatening gesture into one of Terry's movements, that he should end all future movement with a .44 slug. With a United States Supreme Court Justice involved, that incident carried Neagle's fame into the press of the nation. But he really got his start in Pioche and Panamint.
There was Pat Reddy, also, the Earl Rogers and William Fallon of the mining camps when Rogers and Fallon were only recently released from diapers. Pat had had one arm shot off in a little affair, but he could still wave the remaining arm in most convincing gestures under the noses of jurors. His brother Ned had started a gambling joint at Cerro Gordo, where he was one of the first to hear of Panamint. Ned, straightway moved his faro layout to Panamint. It took no time at all for such an observant man to recognize an excellent opportunity for a competent criminal lawyer. So Pat made a journey of investigation from the county seat at Independence where the trials must be held if either of the litigants survived and had any money. Pat wasn't precisely a pioneer of Panamint, but he was in and out, looking for and always finding evidence of "self-defense," and a little something on the jurors.
Good prospective clients who had arrived before Pat included John Small and John McDonald who had come all the way from New York to the camp of Battle Mountain, Nevada, and thence worked their way on stolen horses, with supplies purchased out of the profits of stage robberies, over several hundred miles of desert sink and mountain to Panamint. With no bank yet there to rob, and no stage to stick up, they amused themselves momentarily by prospecting. They even went so far as to locate a rich ledge of silver. Then they waited, certain that victims would arrive as soon as Bart McGee and his associates completed their toll road. And soon they welcomed Pat Reddy, riding on the first wheels ever to climb Surprise Canyon.
In the dusty wake of Pat Reddy's buckboard and two mules in the early summer of 1874 came the usual variety of citizens and citizenesses who make a new mining camp. There was Jacob Cohn with a stock of blankets, overalls, shirts, and shooting irons. There were Harris and Rhine from Independence with a similar stock in addition to some groceries. There was the ancient Uncle Billy Wolsesberger who had peddled gimcracks for nearly a quarter of a century in every lively camp from Red Dog to Mariposy and from Hangtown to Battle Mountain. Known through hundreds of miles of desert and mountains as "Uncle Billy Bedamned," he felt that he would meet numerous tolerant old customers in the new silver camp. He had no intention of missing it even though he had to prod his pack-burro 417 miles from Eureka to get there. In Panamint he was to meet the competition of Mrs. Zoblein with a stock of needles and thread and buttons, and an optimistic supply of piece goods, but he was accustomed to meeting competition and surviving it.
The eminently respectable Miss Delia Donoghue arrived with the necessary equipment to establish a restaurant for the Panaminters. Charles King put in a meat market. John Schober brought the most essential part of a sawmill—the saw. Of course there was already almost enough whisky available in assorted kegs, jugs and bottles on temporary bars buttressed with poker and faro tables and flanked by six-guns.
By this time Panamint had almost all the essential features of a rip-snortin' camp. And very soon the well-upholstered and thoroughly experienced Martha Camp arrived with a bevy of handmaidens to supply another of those delights. The final necessity arrived soon after the triumphal entry Of Martha and her girls. It was in the form of a printing outfit and hand and head power in the person of T. S. Harris sufficient to produce a four-page newspaper. The Panamint News completed Panamint's self-assurance. Well—almost completed it.
The actual peak of satisfaction was attained with the arrival of Senator John P. Jones, the true angel of the camp. Jones' delay had been due to the fact that he was laying a golden highway of publicity on which Panamint expected to speed to greater riches than the Comstock. No promoter had ever displayed a greater variety of interests—and backed them with his own money. He had purchased a great hotel in New York. He had invested in an ice-making patent and established plants from Georgia west. He had bought mines in Arizona and Oregon. He had acquired 120,000 acres of tidal lands north of San Francisco Bay and planned the building of a $200,000 system of dykes to assure drainage and reclamation. He had envisioned what, seventy years later, was to become Hoover Dam and had put engineers to work upon the plans. He had put $113,000 cash into circulation in Panamint when the camp had only a hundred population. He had purchased an interest in Baker's and Beale's Rancho Santa Monica y San Vicente, with its potential ocean-front railroad terminus. He had subscribed $200,000 for the proposed railroad from Los Angeles to Independence which might extend a spur to the entrance of Surprise Canyon. He had interested his friend and fellow solon William Morris Stewart of Nevada and Washington.
Bill Stewart had recently been displaced by Bill Sharon as U. S. Senator from Nevada. He still had a lame-duck session to serve, but at the moment he had more time and less money than he had had for twelve years. Jones had had little difficulty in convincing him that Panamint was the place where he could occupy the one and regain the other. Both Stewart and Jones were aware that Panamint had been discovered by fugitive desperadoes, highwaymen and killers. But Stewart in his capacity of attorney in Virginia City had met such men before. He had also met the Wells Fargo officials whose stages they had robbed, and whose drivers and messengers they had murdered. He knew by experience and practice that there could be greater profit in compromise than in force, though he was not entirely averse to the latter. He was the perfect partner for John P. Jones, who was as competent a miner as Stewart was a lawyer.
The more conservative residents of the camp told Bill Stewart just how tough it was. There had already been half a dozen shootings, some local robberies, and stick-ups along the trails. Yes, said Stewart, he knew about that. He had a plan.
It was well that he had. For by the time he got to the Wells Fargo company to ask for an express line into Panamint, the reputation of the camp had convinced even that daring treasure-transportation agency that Panamint business was too hot to handle. When Wells Fargo declined to extend its express service into a new mining camp in those days, it was news. Panamint's reputation soared. Stewart and Jones were disappointed but not thwarted. Eventually they solved the problem of getting their silver out to the mint by casting it into balls of a quarter-ton each. That proved a greater disappointment to the highway gentry than Wells Fargo's refusal had proved to Stewart and Jones. The bullion moved out safely in a freight wagon, without guard.
But prior to that, Stewart had displayed his versatility in another little deal which gave to the partners one of the richest claims in the district. It will be recalled that Small and McDonald had done a bit of stage robbing on their way into Panamint.
That particular hold-up had a denouement which is unique. The sole duty of the Wells Fargo express messenger was to protect the treasure consigned to his care. He knew that before he took the job. So, if he was killed in the performance of that duty, as a number of them were, it was just too bad. But the duty of the company was to deliver the treasure to the consignee. Wells Fargo had grown rich and highly respected by doing just that. A secondary, and more painful duty, was to deliver the value of the package when and if a murdered messenger was unable to carry through. It then became the duty of the Wells Fargo detective force, first to recover the stolen treasure or its equivalent, and second, to discourage the bandits from further depredations.
It was precisely such a chain of events and duties that led James Hume, Wells Fargo's chief of detectives, Sheriff Gilmore of Eureka County, Nevada, and Sheriff Moore of Inyo County, California, up to the brink of Death Valley. Jim Miller, shotgun messenger, had been murdered while resisting a hold-up in Eureka County. The bandits got away with $4,462.64 from the express box, but not until the driver had recognized them as John Small and John McDonald. More slowly than Small and McDonald had departed from that scene, word filtered back to Eureka that they were happily located in Panamint; that they were in fact owners of one of the camp's best ledges.
Wells Fargo offered $2,000 apiece for their capture. No one seemed to want to ride all the way to Panamint for that small change. So Jim Hume set forth himself, putting a little pressure on Sheriff Gilmore and Sheriff Moore en route to provide himself with company. Word of their approach came to the attention of Small and McDonald, when they saw a posted notice of the reward of $4,000 for their capture. It came to the attention of Bill Stewart, who, having been attorney for Wells Fargo in similar situations, knew that Jim Hume's first duty was to recover the stolen treasure, or cash of equal value. And Bill Stewart's first duty, to himself, to John P. Jones, and to Panamint, was to acquire the best of its potential mines, and promote the general prosperity.
So, by the time the minions of the law and Wells Fargo arrived, Stewart had made some arrangements. Small and McDonald didn't want to go to jail. Like all property ownersthey were becoming conservative. Dave Neagle felt the same way about it. He had financed the two for a little while after their arrival, and claimed a grubstake right in their silver ledge.
In such circumstances negotiations were simple. Small and McDonald agreed to accept $12,000 from Stewarf for their mine. Hume agreed to accept $4,462.64 for Wells Fargo's share, and let by-gones be bygones. Dave Neagle agreed to accept half of the remaining $7,437.36 for his grubstake. Gilmore and Moore agreed that they had never wanted to take Small and McDonald on a long and lonely personally conducted tour of the desert. Besides, the late Jim Miller had taken the messenger job with his eyes wide open; so, in a way, his death was his own fault, and should not call for a dangerous journey for others and an expensive trial for Eureka County.
Everybody was happy. The first important mining camp in the West to be founded upon discoveries made by professional criminals in flight from justice seemed to have justified itself. Gunplay in the camp, and stick-ups in Surprise Canyon as the stages and freight wagons rolled in, increased with increasing population and prosperity.
Senators Jones and Stewart consolidated their holdings, built a mill, and proceeded to turn out their 500-pound balls of silver.
Death Valley, though east of the main trails into the roaring camp upon its western ramparts, had seen more traffic in two years than in all the years preceding. It had taken its toll of the wayfarers, though not such a heavy toll as had its small rival, Panamint Valley, on the west. William Wilson, a veteran prospector, had died beside a hot and sulphurous spring in Panamint Valley. Jacobs, Stewart and Kennedy had found the skeleton of Alvord. V. A. Gregg, himself near death from heat and thirst, had found the dry bones of a human leg in an alluvial wash on the Panamint side. Oscar Muller, a Panamint saloon keeper, hurrying back to take care of the Fourth of July trade after a trip out, was found face down in the sand, with fingers torn by mad digging for water. Albert Quigley, a miner, died in the same way on the same day. But Death Valley could wait. What was Panamint, or the Panamint Valley but a flash in the pan beside the vast cauldron of Death Valley? Those hundreds of men, and few score women, perhaps three thousand in three years, who had gone into Panamint so eagerly or so furtively, would be coming out again if they didn't die in their beds, or their barrooms, or their shack-lined streets, or bandit-lined canyon roadways. Death Valley could wait.
Panamint City lasted only three years. In the summer of 'seventy-five, Comstock shares crashed again on the San Francisco exchange. Then came the crash of the Bank of California, the sudden death of its guiding spirit, William Ralston. Panic gripped the Pacific Slope. The Temple and Workman bank, chief financial institution of Southern California failed. Workman committed suicide. The projected Los Angeles & Independence Railroad folded up its blue prints and vanished in the thin air from which it had come. Distant Virginia City burned to the ground, and its smoke cast a shadow over Panamint, three hundred miles away. Mining and milling companies with an authorized capitalization of $86,000,000 based on Panamint found no buyers for their stock certificates.
Jones and Stewart were crippled, though they allowed no one to suspect it from their faces or their exuberant manner of living. They had their silver ledges and their mill turning out solid silver cannon balls. But Panamint ore was as tough as its residents, and its reduction to coin silver was as costly as its transportation. Also, its ledges were not proving to be quite so deep as the world had been promised. Outside money was not coming in any more. The hangers-on were leaving. Many colorful and some important citizens were leaving. The voluminous Martha Camp and her dizzy damsels departed.
T. S. Harris, publisher of the Panamint News, printed an editorial which was a masterpiece of euphemism, explaining that he was moving his newspaper westward to Darwin merely because the newly rising camp of Darwin was more centrally located than Panamint. He added that as soon as all the available ground in Darwin was taken, the return migration to Panamint would begin. That was in October, 1875. All the available ground in Darwin has not yet been taken. So Editor Harris cannot yet be accused of misrepresentation. He was an excellent type of mining-camp editor. At last, after doing his part in and for Darwin and Bodie, and subsequently shooting his own managing editor of the Evening Republican in the conventional city of Los Angeles, he wrote his own obituary—"l have had a great time!" He put the exclamation mark in the form of a .44 slug in his own brain.
In the meantime, as if the glut of silver on the world market, the Pacific Coast panic of 'seventy-five, and the demoralization of John P. Jones' wide-flung promotional and financial empire, were not enough, Death Valley itself struck a staggering blow. Sending up its great column of superheated air it brought the rain clouds rushing to fill that low pressure area. It snagged the vast bags of water open on its mountain rims, and turned loose such floods as the desert had not known in many a year. It played no favorites. It ravaged Eureka, two hundred miles from its northern end. It drowned thirteen Chinese in one camp. It well-nigh destroyed the dying city of Panamint, carrying abandoned and occupied buildings, and even occupied graves, in a mad rush of water and rolling rock and broken lumber and household furnishings and merchandise into the narrow gorge below, where it tumbled, some fifty feet deep, through that tortured canyon. There was no road left to Panamint. There was little left to justify the building of a road. Even John Small and John McDonald, who had financed their final departure from Panamint by trussing up four of the remaining leading citizens in Harris Rhine's emporium and looting the safe of $2,300, were broke. It was an irritating situation. To ease the irritation, McDonald shot Small.
Death Valley had had its little joke. But men are stubborn animals—especially desert men.
Among those who had been toughened by the heat of the valley's summer sink, and tempered by the chill of its winter's rim of snow, were Isadore Daunet and five associates, who had not done too well in Panamint. Three of the six were to do better in the pit of Death Valley. The other three were to die there.
Their experiences paved the way to another story—to truths about Death Valley which had never been suspected.
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