Kitabı oku: «Loafing Along Death Valley Trails», sayfa 10
Chapter XVI
Long Man, Short Man
Before Tonopah, the first, and Greenwater, the last of the boom camps, Indians roaming the desert from Utah westward were showing trails to two hikos, who were to become symbols for the reckless courage needed to exist in the wasteland. They were known as Long Man and Short Man.
Previous pages have given part of the story of Long Man.
Coming into Death Valley country in the late Nineties, Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks wanted to know its water holes, trails, and landmarks. He hired Panamint Tom, brother of Hungry Bill, as a guide. Because Tom’s name was linked with Bill’s in stories of missing men, Fairbanks carried his six-gun.
Panamint Tom was also armed. When they reached the rim of Death Valley and started down, Fairbanks said, “Tom, this is Indian country. You know it. I don’t. You go first…”
Taking no chance on a surprise night attack, he directed the layout of the camp so that their beds were safely apart. Each slept with his gun. Around the camp fire, Tom nonchalantly confessed that he’d had to kill five white men.
The mission accomplished, they started back. When they came out of the valley Tom said, “Long Man, this is white man’s country. You know it. I don’t. You go first.” In after years, referring to their trip, Tom said, “Long Man, you heap ’fraid that time.” “I was,” Fairbanks confessed. “Me too,” Tom said.
When the Goldfield strike was made, Fairbanks saw that a supply station on the main line of travel was a surer way to wealth than the gamble of digging. He knew of a ranch with good water and luxuriant wild hay at Ash Meadows. Hay was worth $200 a ton. The owner had abandoned the ranch, however, and moved into the hills. Fairbanks could get little information concerning his whereabouts. “Up there somewhere,” he was told, with a gesture indicating 50 miles of sky line. But he wanted the hay and started out and by patient inquiry located his man just before daylight on the second day. “What will you give for it?” the man asked.
“Well,” Fairbanks parried, “you know it’ll cost me as much as the ranch is worth to get rid of that wild grass.” Having only a vague idea of its real worth he had decided to offer $4000, but sensed the man’s eagerness to sell and started to offer $1000. Suddenly it occurred to him that someone else might have made an offer. “I’ll go $2000 and not a nickel more.”
“You’ve bought a ranch,” the owner said.
Elated, Fairbanks wrote a contract by candlelight on the spot. Both signed and they started back to find a notary. “I determined the fellow should not get out of my sight until the deed was recorded. If he wanted a drink of water, so did I. If he wished to speak to someone, I wanted a word with the same man.”
Finally the deal was closed and Fairbanks started home. Outside, he met Ed Metcalf, chuckling.
“What’s so funny, Ed?”
Metcalf pointed to the departing seller. “He was just telling me about being worried to death all morning for fear a sucker he’d found would get out of his sight. He’s been trying to unload his ranch for $500 and some idiot gave him $2000.”
Fairbanks also operated a freighting service to the boom towns in the gold belt as far north as Goldfield and Tonopah. Rates were fantastic and he made a fortune. He opened Beatty’s first cafe in a tent.
Money was plentiful and after a trip with a 16 mule team over rough roads to Goldfield, he was ready for a relaxing change to poker. When the white chips are $25, the reds $50, and the blues $500 the game is not for pikers and he would bet $10,000 as calmly as he would 10 cents.
In such a game one night he found himself sitting beside a player who had removed his big overcoat with wide patch pockets and hung it on his chair. Fairbanks noticed the fellow had a habit of gathering in the discards when he wasn’t betting and his deal would follow. He also noticed intermittent movements of the fellow’s deft fingers to the big patch pocket and soon saw that every ace in the deck reposed in the pocket.
Later in the game, Fairbanks opened a jackpot. Every man stayed. The crook raised discreetly and most of the players stayed. Fairbanks bet $1000.
“Have to raise you $5000,” the crook said.
Fairbanks met the raise. “… and it’ll cost you $5000 more,” he said evenly.
With the confidence that came from the cached aces, the sharper shoved out the five, smiled exultantly as he spread four kings and a deuce and reached for the pot.
“Not so fast,” Fairbanks said as he laid four aces and a ten on the table.
The crook gave him a quick look. Fairbanks’ eyes were steady. Neither said a word. The crook couldn’t. He knew that Fairbanks’ long fingers had found the big patch pocket.
When three men and a jackass no longer made a crowd in Shoshone, Ralph Fairbanks became restless. With a population of 20 – half of it his own progeny, he felt that civilization was closing in on him. “Charlie, I’ve been in one place too long…” He had now become “Dad Fairbanks” to all who knew him.
The automobile was being increasingly used in desert travel and transcontinental trips were no longer a daring adventure or the result of a bet. Sixty miles south of Shoshone there was a wretched road that pitched down the washboard slope of one range into a basin, then up the gully-crossed slopes of another. Part of the transcontinental highway, it was a headache to the traveler. Radiators usually boiled down hill and up.
To this desolate spot went Dad Fairbanks. The hot blasts from the dunes of the Devil’s Playground and the dry bed of Soda Lake made summer a hell and the freezing winds from Providence Mountains turned it into a Siberian winter.
Here in 1928 Dad Fairbanks built cabins and a store and installed a gas pump. Water was hauled in. “Coming or going,” he said, “when they reach this place they’ve just got to stop, cool the engine, and fill up for the hill ahead.” The place is Baker on Highway 91.
Here, as at Shoshone, sales technique was tossed into the ash can. Stopping for dinner one day I met Dad coming out of the dining room. “How’s the fare?” I asked.
“Are you hungry?”
“Hungry as a bear…”
“All right. Go in. A hungry man can stand anything.” Then in an undertone he added: “Employment agent sent me the world’s worst cook. Take eggs.”
Later as we talked in the sheltered driveway a Rolls-Royce limousine drove up and a well-fed and smartly tailored tourist stepped out and spoke to Dad: “Do you know me?” he asked.
Dad looked at him hesitantly. “Face is familiar.”
“You loaned me $300, 25 years ago.”
“I loaned a lotta fellows money.”
“But I never paid it back.”
“A helluva lot of ’em didn’t,” Dad said.
The stranger reached into his pocket, pulled $1000 from a roll and handed it to Dad. “I’m Harry Oakes,” he said. “Where’s Ma?”
So they went over to Dad’s house and with Ma Fairbanks who had shared all of Dad’s fortunes, good and bad, they sat down and Oakes talked of the long trail that led from 300 borrowed dollars to an annual income of five million.
Harry Oakes had gone to Canada and learning that the legal title to a mining claim would expire at midnight on a certain date, he and his partner W. G. Wright sat up in a temperature of forty below, to relocate the Lakeshore Mine – Canada’s richest gold property.
Born in Maine, Harry Oakes became a subject of England and was at this time Canada’s richest citizen, with an estimated fortune of $200,000,000.
It was a long way from the Niagara palace back to Greenwater and Shoshone and as Ma Fairbanks and Dad and Harry sat in the plain little desert cottage, I couldn’t keep from wondering why a man with $200,000,000 would wait 25 years to repay that $300.
In his native town of Sangerville in Maine, Harry Oakes was criticized when, as a youngster with every opportunity to pursue a successful career according to the staid Maine formula, he became excited by gold. “Quick easy money.” “Just a dreamer.” He talked big, acted big, and was big.
But Harry Oakes started out in life to make a fortune by finding a gold mine and you can’t laugh aside the determination and courage with which he stuck to his purpose until he succeeded.
Dad Fairbanks spent nearly 50 years in Death Valley country and it is a bit ironical that at last, the Baker climate drove him from the desert to Santa Paula and later, of all places, to Hollywood.
“I should never have believed it of you,” I kidded.
“Hell – ” Dad retorted, “I wanted solitude. Haven’t you got enough sense to know that the lonesomest place on Godamighty’s earth is a city?”
He died in 1943 and at the funeral were the state’s greatest men and its humblest – bankers, lawyers, doctors, beggarmen, muckers and miners, and with them, those he loved best – sun-baked fellows from the towns and the gulches along the burro trails. No man who has lived in Death Valley country did more to put the region on the must list of the American tourist and none won more of the regard and affections of the people.
Chapter XVII
Shorty Frank Harris
No history of Death Valley has been written in this century without mention of the Short Man – Frank (Shorty) Harris – and none can be. Previous pages have given most of his story. After his death at least two hurried writers who never saw him have stated that Shorty discovered no mines, knew little of the country.
From a page of notes made before I had ever met him, I find this record: “Stopped at Independence to see George Naylor, early Inyo county sheriff and now its treasurer. We talked of early prospectors. Naylor said: ‘I have known all of the old time burro men and have the records. Shorty Harris has put more towns on the map and more taxable property on the assessors’ books than any of them.’”
I first met Shorty at Shoshone. Entering the store one day, Charles Brown told me there was a fellow outside I ought to know, and in a moment I was looking into keen steady eyes – blue as water in a canyon pool – and in another Shorty Harris was telling me how to sneak up on $10,000,000. Thus began an acquaintance which was to lead me through many years from one end of Death Valley to the other, with Shorty, mentor, friend, and guide.
Of course I had heard of him. Who hadn’t? In the gold country of western deserts one could find a few who had never heard of Cecil Rhodes or John Hays Hammond, but none who had not heard of Shorty Harris. Wherever mining men gathered, the mention of his name evoked the familiar, “That reminds me,” and the air thickened with history, laughter, and lies.
He was five feet tall, quick of motion. Hands and feet small. Skin soft and surprisingly fair. Muscles hard as bull quartz. With a mask of ignorance he concealed a fine intelligence reserved for intimate friends in moments of repose.
It is regrettable that since Shorty’s death, writers who never saw him have given pictures of him which by no stretch of the imagination can be recognized by those who had even a slight acquaintance with him. Authors of books properly examine the material of those who have written other books. In the case of Shorty this was eagerly done – so eagerly in fact, that each portrayal is the original picture altered according to the ability of the one who tailors the tale. All are interesting but few have any relation to truth.
Shorty Harris was so widely publicized by writers in the early part of the century that when the radio was invented, he was a “natural” for playlets and columnists. It was natural also that the iconoclast appear to set the world right. He employed Shorty to guide him through Death Valley. “I want to write a book,” he explained, “and I have only three weeks to gather material.”
The trip ended sooner. “What happened?” I asked Shorty when I read the book and was startled to see in it a statement that Shorty became lost; had never found a mine; and never even looked for one.
“Did he say that?” Shorty laughed.
“And more of the same,” I said.
“Well, let’s let it go for what it’s worth… He bellyached from the minute we set out.”
Those who knew Shorty best – Dad Fairbanks, Charles Brown, Bob Montgomery, George Naylor, H. W. Eichbaum, and the old timers on the trails had entirely different impressions. There was, however, around the barrooms of Beatty and other border villages a breed of later comers – “professional” old timers always waiting and often succeeding in exchanging “history” for free drinks. Though they may have never known Shorty in person, they were not lacking in yarns about him and rarely failed to get an audience.
There were also among Shorty’s friends a few who had another attitude. “What has he ever done that I haven’t?” the answer being that nothing had been written about them.
With variations the original pattern became the pattern for the succeeding writer. In the interest of accuracy it is not amiss to say that Shorty Harris was not buried standing up. The writer saw him buried. It is not true that he ever protested the removal of the road from the site of the place where he wished to be buried, because he never knew that he would be buried there. Nor did he have the remotest idea that a monument would be erected to him, because the idea of the monument was born after his death, as related elsewhere.
He did not leave Harrisburg on July 4, 1905 to get drunk at Ballarat. Instead, he went to Rhyolite to find Wild Bill Corcoran, his grubstaker.
He did enjoy the yarns attributed to him and their publication in important periodicals. But he was also painfully shy and ill at ease away from his home. Even at the annual Death Valley picnics held at Wilmington, near Los Angeles, he could never be persuaded to face the crowds.
One cannot laugh aside the part he played nor the monument that honors one of God’s humblest. His strike at Rhyolite brought two railroads across the desert, gave profitable employment to thousands of men, added extra shifts in steel mills and factories making heavy machinery and those of tool makers. The building trades felt it, banks, security exchanges, and scores of other industries over the nation – all because Shorty Harris went up a canyon. And it is not amiss to ask if these historians did their jobs as well.
At my home it was difficult to get Shorty to accept invitations to dinners to which he was often invited by service clubs, but in the Ballarat cabin he was as sure of himself as the MacGregor with a foot upon his native heath and an eye on Ben Lomond.
His passion for prospecting was fanatical. I asked him once if he would choose prospecting as a career if he had his life to live over.
“I wouldn’t change places with the President of the United States. My only regret is that I didn’t start sooner. When I go out, every time my foot touches the ground, I think ‘before the sun goes down I’ll be worth $10,000,000.’”
“But you don’t get it,” I reminded him.
He stared at me with a sort of “you’re-too-dumb” look. “Who in the hell wants $10,000,000? It’s the game, man – the game.”
Nor is the picture of his profligacy altogether true. Despite Shorty’s disregard for money he had a canniness that made him cache something against the rainy day. At Lone Pine Charlie Brown was packing Shorty’s suit case before taking him to a doctor. “Shorty, what’s this lump in the lining of your vest?”
“Oh, there was a hole in it. Poor job of mending I guess,” Shorty answered guilelessly.
“I’ll see,” Charlie said and ripping a few stitches removed $600 in currency.
Shorty’s last years furnish a story of a man too tough to die. He had had three major operations, when in 1933 I received the following telegram: “Wall fell on me. Hurry. Bring doctor. Shorty Harris.” It had been sent by Fred Gray from Trona, 27 miles from Ballarat, nearest telegraph station.
My wife and I hurried through rain, snow, sleet; over washed out desert and mountain roads. Outside the cabin in the dusk, shivering in a cold wind, we found two or three of Shorty’s friends and Charles and Mrs. Brown, who had also made a mad dash of 150 miles over roads – some of which hadn’t been traveled in 30 years.
Puttering around his cabin, Shorty had jerked at a wire anchored in the walls and brought tons of adobe down upon himself. He was literally dug out, his ribs crushed, face black with abrasions. With rapidly developing pneumonia he had lain for 60 hours without medical attention and with nothing to relieve pain. We learned later from Dr. Walter Johnson, who had preceded us, that if a hospital had been within a block it would have been fatal to move him. All agreed that Death sat on Shorty’s bedside.
“A cat has only nine lives,” Fred Gray said gravely, and outside in the gathering gloom we planned his funeral. Because of the isolation of Ballarat and lack of communication we arranged that when the end came, Fred Gray would notify Brown and bring the body down into Death Valley for burial. There we would meet the hearse.
Because bodies decompose quickly in that climate, time was important. While we planned these details, my wife, who had been at Shorty’s bedside, joined us. “Shorty’s not going to die,” she said. “He’s planning that trip up Signal Mountain you and he have been talking about.”
I tiptoed into the room. He was staring at the ceiling, seeing faraway canyons; the yellow fleck in a broken rock. Suddenly he spoke: “I’m losing a thousand dollars a day lying here. Why, that ledge – ”
A week after returning to our home we received another telegram from Trona asking that we come for him. He had insisted upon being laid in the bed of a pickup truck and taken across the Slate Range to Trona, where we met him.
At our home he lay on his back for weeks, fed with a spoon. Always talking of putting another town on the map. Always losing a million dollars a day. He was miraculously but slowly recovering when an Associated Press dispatch bearing a Lone Pine date made front page headlines with an announcement of his death.
Though the report was quickly corrected, his presence at our house brought reporters, photographers, old friends, and the merely curious. At the time the Pacific Coast Borax Company’s N.B.C. program was featuring stories based on his experiences over a nation-wide hook-up. Among the callers also were moguls of mining and tycoons of industry who had stopped at the Ballarat cabin to fall under the spell of his ever ready yarns.
Among these guests, one stands out.
It was a hot summer day when I saw on the lawn what appeared to be a big bear, because the squat, bulky figure was enclosed in fur. Answering the door bell I looked into twinkling eyes and an ingratiating smile. “They told me in Ballarat that Shorty Harris was here.” I invited him in.
“I’ll just shed this coat,” he said, stripping off the bearskin garment. “… sorta heavy for a man going on 80.” He laid it aside. “It’s double lined. Fur inside and out. You see, I sleep in it. Crossed three mountain ranges in that coat before I got here. May as well take this other one off too.” He removed another heavy overcoat, revealing a cord around his waist. “Keep this one tied close. Less bulky…”
Under a shorter coat was a heavy woolen shirt and his overalls concealed two pairs of pants. He went on: “I was with Shorty at Leadville. My name’s Pete Harmon. We ought to be rich – both of us. Why, I sold a hole for $2500 in 1878. Thought I was smart. They’ve got over $100,000,000 outa that hole. I was at Bridgeport when I heard Shorty was sick, so I says, ‘I’ll just step down to Ballarat and see him.’ (The ‘step’ was 298 miles.) When I got there Bob Warnack tells me he’s in Los Angeles. When I get there they tell me he’s with you. So I just stepped out here.”
He had “stepped” 481 miles to see his friend.
I ushered him in and left them alone. After an hour I noticed Pete outside, smoking. I went out and urged him to return and smoke inside, but he refused. “It’s not manners,” he insisted.
Later I happened to look out the window and saw him empty the contents of a small canvas sack into his hand. There were a few dimes and nickels and two bills. He unfolded the currency. One was a twenty. The other, a one. He put the coins in the sack and came inside. A few moments later, from an adjacent room I heard his soft, lowered voice: “Shorty, I’m eatin’ reg’lar now and got a little besides. I reckon you’re kinda shy. You take this.”
“No – no, Pete. I’m getting along fine…”
I fancy there was a scurry among the angels to make that credit for Pete Harmon.
Late in the afternoon Pete donned his coats. “I’d better be going. I’ve got a lotta things on hand. A claim in the Argus. When the money comes in, well – I always said I was going to build a scenic railroad right on the crest of Panamint Range. Best view of Death Valley. It’ll pay. How far is it to San Diego?”
“A hundred and forty miles…”
“Well, since I’m this far along I’ll just step down and see my old partner. Take care of Shorty…” And down the road he went.
With humility I watched his passage, hoping that the good God would go with him and somehow I felt that of all those with fame and wealth or of high degree who had gone from that house, none had left so much in my heart as Pete.
During this period of convalescence Shorty was often guest in homes of luxury and when at last I took him to Ballarat I was curious to see what his reaction would be to the squalor of the crumbling cabin.
When we stepped from the car, he noticed Camel, the blind burro drowsing in the shade of a roofless dobe. “Old fellow,” he said, “it’s dam’ good to see you again…” I unloaded the car, brought water from the well and sat down to rest. Shorty sat in a rickety rocker braced with baling wire. I regarded with amusement the old underwear which he’d stuffed into broken panes; the bare splintered floor; the cracked iron stove that served both for cooking and heating. The wood box beside it. The tin wash pan on a bench at the door.
Then I noticed Shorty was also appraising the things about – the hole in the roof; the box nailed to the wall that served as a cupboard. A half-burned candle by his sagging bed. For a long time he glanced affectionately from one familiar object to another and finally spoke: “Will, haven’t I got a dam’ fine home?”
For ages poets have sung, orators have lauded, but so far as I’m concerned, Shorty said it better.
The last orders from the surgeon had been, “Complete rest for three months.”
In the late afternoon we moved our chairs outside. The sun still shone in the canyons and after he had seen that all his peaks were in place, he turned to me: “I’m losing $5,000,000 a day sitting here. Soon as you’re rested, we’ll start. You’ll be in shape by day after tomorrow, won’t you?”
I restrained a gasp as he pointed to the side of a gorge 8000 feet up on Signal Mountain. “No trip at all…”
No argument could convince him that the trip was foolhardy and on the third day we started through Hall’s Canyon opposite the Indian Ranch. The ascent from the canyon is so steep that in many places we had to crawl on hands and knees. The three and a half miles were made in seven hours, but on the return the inevitable happened. Shorty, exhausted, staggered from the trail and collapsed. When he rose, he wobbled, but managed to reach a bush and rolled under it. I ran to his side. It seemed the end. “You go ahead,” he said weakly. “I’m through.”
I had given him all my water and exacting a promise that he would remain under the bush, I started for help at the Indian Ranch, to bring him out.
Coming up, I had paid no attention to the trail and was uncertain of my way – which was further confused by criss-crossed trails of wild burros and mountain sheep. Coming to a canyon that forked, I was not sure which to take and panicked with fear took a sudden uncalculated choice and started up a trail. The desert gods must have guided my feet, for it proved to be the right one and an hour later I came upon the green seepage of water.
I dug a hole; let the scum run off then drank slowly and lay down to rest. In my last conscious moment a huge rattler passed within a few inches of my face. But rattlers were unimportant then and I went to sleep.
The swish of brush awoke me and I saw Shorty staggering down the trail. He fell beside the water and was instantly asleep. Time I knew, was the measure of life and I allowed him twenty minutes to rest, then awoke him and made him go in front. On a ledge, he slumped again, his body hanging over the cliff with a 1000 foot fall to rocks below.
I managed to catch him by the seat of his trousers as he began to slip, and dragged him back on the trail. Somehow I got him to the bottom. There the canyon widens upon a level area covered with dense growth. Walking ahead I suddenly missed him. He had crawled from the trail and it required an hour to find him and this I did by the noise of his rattly breathing.
I half carried, half dragged him to the car and lifted him in. He was asleep before I could close the door and remained unconscious for the entire 11 miles of corduroy road to Ballarat. There Fred Gray and Bob Warnack lifted him from the car and laid him on his bed. None of us believed that Shorty Harris would ever leave that bed alive.
The next morning I tiptoed softly out of the room, went over to the old saloon and had breakfast with Tom, the caretaker. Afterward we sat outside smoking and talking of Hungry Hattie’s feuding and her sister’s mining deals, when we heard steady thumping sounds coming from Shorty’s place. We looked. Bareheaded, Shorty Harris was chopping wood.
Shorty was born near Providence, Rhode Island, July 2, 1856. He had only a hazy memory of his parents. His father, a shoemaker, died impoverished when Shorty was six years old. “… I went to live with my aunt. If she couldn’t catch me doing something, she figured I’d outsmarted her and beat me up on general principles.”
At nine he ran away and obtained work in the textile mills of Governor William Sprague, dipping calico. The village priest taught him to read and write and apart from this, his only school was the alley. The curriculum of the alley is hunger, tears, and pain but somehow in that alley he found time to play and learned that with play came laughter. Thenceforth life to Shorty Harris was just one long playday.
In 1876 he started West and crawled out of a boxcar in Dodge City, Kansas. About were stacks of buffalo hides, bellowing cattle, “chippies,” gamblers, cow hands, and a chance for youngsters who had come out of alleys.
“… Among those I remember at Dodge City were my friends Wyatt Earp and a thin fellow with a cough. If he liked you he’d go to hell for you. He was Doc Holliday – the coldest killer in the West. I had a job in a livery stable. Job was all right, but too much gunplay. Cowboys shooting up the town. Gamblers shooting cowboys.”
Flushed with his pay check, Shorty wandered into a saloon and met one of the percentage girls – a lovely creature, not altogether bad. They danced and Shorty suggested a stroll in the moonlight. And soon Shorty was in love.
“Shorty,” she asked, “why be a sucker? Why don’t you go to Leadville? You might find a good claim.”
“I’m broke,” he told her.
“I’ve got some money,” she said, and reached into her purse.
“I’m no mac,” he snapped.
Finally she thrust the bills into his pocket.
At Leadville he went up a gulch. Luck was kind. He found a good claim and going into Leadville sold it for $15,000. Later it produced millions. Within a week he was penniless. “Why, all I’ve got to do is to go up another gulch,” he told sympathetic friends.
On this trip his feet were frozen and he was carried out on the back of his partner. Taken to the hospital, the surgeon told him that only the amputation of both feet could save his life.
Telling a group of friends about it in the Ballarat cabin later, Shorty of course had to add a few details of his own: “Dan Driscoll came to see me and I told him what the sawbones said. ‘Why hell,’ Dan says. ‘Won’t be nothing left of you. You’ve got to get outa here. When that nurse goes, I’ll take you to a doc who’ll save them feet.’ And the first thing I knew I was in the other hospital.
“The doc whetted his meat cleaver, picked up a saw and was about to go to work, when he found there was nothing to dope me with. ‘I’ll fix it,’ Doc says, and wham – he slapped me stiff. I don’t know what he did, but when I came to I was good as new.”
After selling a second claim to Haw Tabor, Shorty was again in the money and remembered the girl in Dodge City. Returning, he looked her up, took her to dinner. They danced and dined and Shorty toasted her in “bubble water.” “I reckon everybody in Dodge City thought a caliph had come to town. No little girl suffered for new toggery. No bum lacked a tip. In a week I was broke again.
“Going down to the freight yard to steal a ride on the rods I met the girl and the next I knew, I was begging her to marry me. ‘Shorty, you don’t know anything about my past, and still you want to marry me?’
“‘You don’t know anything about my past either,’ I said. But it was no go.”
Years afterward when Shorty and I were camped in Hall Canyon, I asked him if he would actually have married a girl like her.
“Who am I to count slips?” he bristled. “I did ask her,” and he swabbed a tear that had dried fifty years ago.
In 1898, after working for a grubstake he started on the trip that led at last to Death Valley, by way of the San Juan country – one of the world’s roughest regions. “I walked through Arizona, to Northern Mexico – every mile of it desert. A labor strike in Colonel Green’s mines threw me out of a job and I started back. Ran out of water and lived five days on the juice of a bulbous plant – la Flora Morada. Each bulb has a few drops.
“On the Mojave I ran out of water again. Finally saw a mangy old camel drinking at a pool. I had enough sense left to know there were no camels around and went on till I flopped. A fellow picked me up. I told him I’d been so goofy I’d seen a camel and water, but I knew it was just a mirage. ‘You damned fool,’ he said. ‘It was a camel and you saw water. Hi Jolly turned that camel loose.’”
Shorty reached Tintic, Utah, and from there walked over a waterless desert to the Johnnie mine, where he was given shelter, food, and clothing.
