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THE PROSPECTORS
The pioneers who had accidentally stumbled into Death Valley carried more than their story of their sufferings to the settlements of California: one of them brought tangible evidence that precious metals could be found there.
While searching for a way out of the Valley, Jim Martin, a member of the Bugsmashers group, pocketed a piece of shining metal from a sparkling ledge. The Georgians recognized that the rock was rich silver ore. Martin had knocked the sight off his rifle earlier on the journey and when he reached Mariposa in the gold fields, he took the piece of metal to a gunsmith to replace his gunsight. The story quickly spread of the mountain of silver crossed by Martin and his party on their way to California, and it touched off one of the west's great prospecting booms. The sparkling ledge with the pure silver outcroppings was never found again, or perhaps was worked out and never recognized as such. But the Lost Gunsight Mine beckoned to prospectors decade after decade. Martin himself came back to Death Valley to look for it in 1862.
The earliest desert prospectors found few minerals but left place names and some legends behind them. Darwin was named for a disappointed miner named Darwin French. A Dr. Samuel George, of the Rough and Ready Mining Co. discovered antimony at Wildrose Canyon on Christmas Day 1860 and called it the Christmas Gift Mine. A prospector named Charles C. Breyfogle after being lost from his prospecting party for several days, returned from the Valley with rich gold ore in his hands and no memory of where he had discovered it. Thus, the Lost Breyfogle Mine was added to the lore and the lure of the region.
From the 1860's until well into the twentieth century, prospectors wandered over the desert with pick, shovel, canteen and the long-suffering burro. Although no deposit compared with the fabulous Comstock Lode in Virginia City, they found silver in the Panamints, silver and lead at Darwin, gold and silver at Keeler and in the Calicos.
At the turn of the century, gold discoveries skyrocketed Tonopah, Goldfield, Bullfrog, and Skidoo into the boom towns. Rhyolite's gold brought three railroads, electricity, telephones, newspapers, banks, a business district with three-story skyscrapers named Golden Street, and a population of 4000 by 1907. During the flush days, everything was ordered by the carload. But by 1910, the census takers found just 611 souls in Rhyolite. The post office closed in 1913 and the power company turned off the lights in 1916.
Gold was found in Harrisburg, first called Harrisberry after Shorty Harris and Pete Aguerreberry who made the strike. Gold was also found near Emigrant Canyon at what became the Skidoo Mine, developed by bob Montgomery who had discovered the biggest mine in Rhyolite. In the valley itself there were smaller scale gold strikes at the Keane Wonder Mine and in Chloride Cliffs. Greenwater was one of the great stock mining scams of all time. Out of a few green stains of copper sprang saloons, dance halls, two newspapers, a bank, a post office, and telephone service – all the trappings of a mining boom town except the ore in the ground to pay for it! Similarly, Leadfield's wealth was only in the stock which a few small veins of lead and silver inspired promoters to issue. Like most of its neighbors, it is a ghost town today.
The prospectors who worked the Death Valley region have been as colorful as the towns that shot up around their discoveries. They were independent, adventurous, and sometimes lucky. Some of the ones who have enriched our history, if not themselves, include Shorty Narris, John Lemoigne, Johnny Mills, Shorty Borden, Jack Madison, Paddy Miles, Bob Thompson, Bill Maddick, Johnny-behind-the-gun-Cyte and, of course, Death Valley Scotty. |