The Story of Charles Brown
The story of Charles Brown and the Shoshone store begins at Greenwater.
In the transient horde that poured into that town, he was the only one
who hadn’t come for quick, easy money. On his own since he was 11 years
old, when he’d gone to work in a Georgia mine, he wanted only a job and
got it. In the excited, loose-talking mob he was conspicuous because he
was silent, calm, unhurried.
There were no law enforcement officers in Greenwater. The jail was 130
miles away and every day was field day for the toughs. Better citizens
decided finally to do something about it. They petitioned George Naylor,
Inyo county’s sheriff at Independence to appoint or send a deputy to
keep some semblance of order.
Naylor sent a badge over and with it a note: “Pin it on some husky
youngster, unmarried and unafraid and tell him to shoot first.”
Again the Citizens’ Committee met. “I know a fellow who answers that
description,” one of them said. “Steady sort. Built like a panther. Came
from Georgia. Kinda slow-motioned until he’s ready for the spring.
Name’s Brown.”
The badge was pinned on Brown.
Greenwater was a port of call for Death Valley Slim, a character of
western deserts, who normally was a happy-go-lucky likable fellow. But
periodically Slim would fill himself with desert likker, his belt with
six-guns, and terrorize the town.
Shortly after Brown assumed the duties of his office, Slim sent word to
the deputy sheriff at Death Valley Junction that he was on his way to
that place for a little frolic. “Tell him,” he coached his messenger,
“sheriffs rile me and he’d better take a vacation.”
After notifying the merchants and the residents, who promptly barricaded
themselves indoors, the officer found shelter for himself in Beatty,
Nevada.
So Slim saw only empty streets and barred shutters upon arrival and
since there was nothing to shoot at he headed through Dead Man’s Canyon
for Greenwater. There he found the main street crowded to his liking and
the saloons jammed. He made for the nearest, ordered a drink and
whipping out his gun began to pop the bottles on the shelves. At the
first blast, patrons made a break for the exits. At the second, the
doors and windows were smashed and when Slim holstered his gun, the
place was a wreck.
Messengers were sent for Brown, who was at his cabin a mile away. Brown
stuck a pistol into his pocket and went down. He found Slim in Wandell’s
saloon, the town’s smartest. There Slim had refused to let the patrons
leave and with the bartenders cowed, the patrons cornered, Slim was
amusing himself by shooting alternately at chandeliers, the feet of
customers and the plump breasts of the nude lady featured in the
painting behind the bar. Following Brown at a safe distance, was half
the population, keyed for the massacre.
Brown walked in. “Hello, Slim,” he said quietly. “Fellows tell me you’re
hogging all the fun. Better let me have that gun, hadn’t you?”
“Like hell,” Slim sneered. “I’ll let you have it right through the
guts—”
As he raised his gun for the kill, the panther sprang and the battle was
on. They fought all over the barroom—standing up; lying down; rolling
over—first one then the other on top. Tables toppled, chairs crashed.
For half an hour they battled savagely, finally rolling against the
bar—both mauled and bloody. There with his strong vice-like legs wrapped
around Slim’s and an arm of steel gripping neck and shoulder, Brown
slipped irons over the bad man’s wrists. “Get up,” Brown ordered as he
stood aside, breathing hard.
Slim rose, leaned against the bar. There was fight in him still and
seeing a bottle in front of him, he seized it with manacled hands,
started to lift it.
“Slim,” Brown said calmly, “if you lift that bottle you’ll never lift
another.”
The bad boy instinctively knew the look that pages death and Slim’s
fingers fell from the bottle.
Greenwater had no jail and Brown took him to his own cabin. Leaving the
manacles on the prisoner he took his shoes, locked them in a closet. No
man drunk or sober he reflected, would tackle barefoot the gravelled
street littered with thousands of broken liquor bottles. Then he went to
bed.
Waking later, he discovered that Slim had vanished and with him, Brown’s
number 12 shoes. He tried Slim’s shoe but couldn’t get his foot into it.
There was nothing to do but follow barefoot. He left a blood-stained
trail, but at 2 a.m. he found Slim in a blacksmith shop having the
handcuffs removed. Brown retrieved his shoes and on the return trip Slim
went barefoot. After hog-tying his prisoner Brown chained him to the bed
and went to sleep.
Thereafter, the bad boys scratched Greenwater off their calling list.
Slim afterwards attained fame with Villa in Mexico, became a good
citizen and later went East, established a sanatorium catering to the
wealthy and acquired a fortune.
Among the first arrivals in Greenwater was a lanky adventurer known to
the Indians as Long Man and to whites for his ability to make money in
any venture and an even more marvelous inability to keep it. He was
Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks. Broke at the time, he was seeking the quickest
way to a “comeback.”
Foreseeing that the biggest names in copper meant a rush, he had taken a
look at the little stagnant spring with a green scum that was to give
the town its name.
“Not enough water in it to do the family washing,” he decided and with
uncanny talent for seeing opportunity where others would starve to
death, he was soon peddling water at a dollar a bucket. He had hauled it
40 miles uphill from Furnace Creek wash.
A hopeful, but late arrival who expected to find the town crowded with
killers was an undertaker who came with a huge stock of coffins. The
prospect of a quick turnover seemed to guarantee success, but in two
years Greenwater had exactly one funeral and he sold but one coffin.
Disgusted he stacked the caskets in the center of his shop; left and was
never again heard of.
Fairbanks came into town one day with his sweat-stained 16 mule team,
noticed the abandoned coffins, picked out the largest and best and gave
Greenwater its first watering trough, which was used as long as the town
lasted.
Fairbanks soon made enough money to acquire a hotel, store, and a bar,
which became a popular rendezvous. Fairbanks was born of well-to-do
parents, in a covered wagon en route to Utah in 1857. Of the thousands
who flocked into Greenwater, only he and Charles Brown were to remain in
Death Valley country and wrest fortunes from America’s most desolate
region. To Greenwater he brought his wife, Celestia Abigail, who shared
his spirit of adventure, but fortunately for him she possessed a caution
which he lacked. Among their children was a beautiful and vivacious
daughter, Stella.
Fairbanks, who was of the quick, go-getting type, didn’t care for Brown.
Born in the North, he was critical of the slow-moving, silent, young
Georgian and unacquainted with the Deep South’s drawl, he referred to
him as “that damned foreigner.”
The reputation of the Fairbanks camaraderie spread, and Mrs. Fairbanks,
who understood the longing of a youngster for a home-cooked meal,
invited Brown to dinner.
There were other young fortune seekers in Greenwater who were also
occasional guests at the Fairbanks dinners—among them a Yankee from
Maine—Harry Oakes, of whom the world was to hear later. Allen Gillman,
known as the Rattlesnake Kid, because of his stalking rattlesnakes to
indulge his hobby of making hat bands and trinkets, later to become
associated with Bernarr McFadden. Wealthy young mining engineers. Bank
clerks with futures. Brown apparently had none.
“He’ll get out of the country like he came in—afoot and broke,” rivals
told Stella. So when romance came, there was still a long trail ahead.
Then came Greenwater’s first warning of trouble. A few miners were laid
off; a few padlocks appeared on a few cabins; a few merchants
complained. Soon it was noticed that the tinny pianos from which
slim-fingered “professors” swept the two-step and the waltz were
gathering dust while the girls lolled in empty honkies. But when Diamond
Tooth Lil padlocked her door and joined the rush to a new copper strike
at Crackerjack in the Avawatz Mountains the wiser knew that Greenwater
was through.
With no guests Fairbanks told off on his fingers, departed patrons, mine
owners, doctors, lawyers. “Just Charlie left. Wonder what’s keeping
him?” Celestia Abigail knew. She knew that the big Georgian was
desperately in love with Stella and didn’t care how many of her suitors
left.
With mines closing and few official duties, Brown loaded a burro with
supplies and with Joe Yerrin went on a prospecting trip. Their course
led across Death Valley. They were caught in a heat that was a record,
even for the Big Sink, and ran out of water. Fortunately they were
within a few miles of Surveyor’s Well—a stagnant hole north of
Stovepipe. The burros were also suffering and Brown and Yerrin staggered
to water barely in time to escape death.
The well there is dug on a slant and looking down they saw a prospector
kneeling at the water, filling a canteen and blocking passage.
“Reckon you fellows are thirsty,” he greeted. “I’ll hand you up a drink.
Have to strain it though. Full of wiggletails.” He pulled his shirt tail
out of his pants, stretched it over a stew pan, strained the water
through it and handed the pan up to Brown. “Now it’s fit to drink,” he
said proudly.
“It was no time to be finicky,” Charlie said. “We drank.”
Brown and Yerrin combed hill and canyon but failed to find anything of
value. Yerrin knew of another place. “You can have it,” Brown said. “I
left a good claim.”
Yerrin eyed him a long moment, then grinned: “Stella, huh?”
The sage in Greenwater streets was rank now and again Ralph Fairbanks
looked out over the dying town. “Ma, we’re getting out,” he said. He
emptied his pockets on the table; counted the cash. “Ten dollars and
thirty cents. Can’t get far on that—”
He was interrupted by a knock at the door. There stood a stranger who
wanted dinner and lodging for the night. During the evening the guest
disclosed that he was en route to his mining claim near a place called
Shoshone, 38 miles south. It was near a spring with plenty of water,
warm, but usable. He wanted to put 50 miners to work but first he had to
find someone willing to go there and board them.
“Maybe we’d go,” Fairbanks said. “What’ll you pay for board?”
“A dollar and a half a day. Figures around $2250 a month.”
Ralph looked at Ma. She nodded. “It’s a deal,” he said.
The next morning the guest left.
Fairbanks turned to his wife. “I can haul these abandoned shacks down
there in no time. Charlie’s not working, I can get him to help.”
Ralph Fairbanks had stayed with Greenwater to the bitter end. Now he
hauled it away.
The road to the new site was over rough desert, gutted with dry washes.
Brown slept in the brush, put the shacks up while Fairbanks went for
others. Both worked night and day to get the place ready. Finally they
had lodging for 50 men, a dining room, and quarters for the family. With
$2250 a month they could afford a chef and Ma could take it easy. Stella
could go Outside to a girl’s school.
Then like a bolt of lightning came the bad news. The Greenwater guest,
they learned, was just an engaging liar, with no mine, no men. He was
never heard of again.
Without a dollar they were marooned in one of the world’s most desolate
areas. Stumped, Fairbanks looked at Brown. “I’ve been rich. I’ve been
poor. But this is below the belt. What’ll we do?”
“I can get a job with the Borax Company,” Brown said. “But you?”
“We have that canned goods we brought to feed that liar’s hired men.
I’ll figure some way to live in this God-forsaken hole.”
From the dining room, prepared for the $2250 monthly income, he lugged a
table, set it outside the door facing the road. Then he went to the
pantry, filled a laundry basket with the cans of pork and beans,
tomatoes, corned beef, and milk brought from Greenwater. He arranged
them on the table, wrenched a piece of shook from a packing crate and on
it painted in crude letters the word, “Store.” He propped it on the
table and went inside. “Ma,” he announced, “we’re in business.”
You could have hauled the entire stock and the table away in a
wheelbarrow and every person in the country for 100 miles in either
direction laid end to end would not have reached as far as a bush league
batter could knock a baseball.
The wheelbarrow load of canned goods went to the Indians living in the
brush and the prospectors camped at the spring. Another replaced it and
the “store” moved then into the dining room prepared for the
non-existent boarders. Powder, a must on the list of a desert store, was
added. The desert man, they knew, needed only a few items but they must
be good. Overalls honestly stitched. Bacon well cured. Shoes sturdily
built for hard usage.
“If we sell a shoddy shirt, an inferior pick or shovel to one of our
customers,” they told the wholesaler, “we will never again sell anything
to him nor to any of his friends.”
Soon the prospectors were telling other prospectors they met on the
trails: “Square shooters—those fellows. Speak our language....” The
squaws and the bucks told other squaws and bucks. Soon new trails cut
across the desert to Shoshone and soon the store outgrew the dining room
in the Fairbanks residence.
From Zabriskie, now an abandoned borax town a few miles south of
Shoshone, an old saloon and boarding house was cut into sections and
hauled to Shoshone. It had been previously hauled from Greenwater where
it had served as a labor union hall and club house. It was deposited
directly across the road from the original store.
So began in 1910 an empire of trade that is almost unbelievable.
Charlie had at last coaxed the right answer from Stella but there wasn’t
enough in the business at the start to support two families, plus the
score of children and grandchildren of Fairbanks. At Greenwater he had
known all the moguls of mining and he had only to ask for a job to get
one. Retaining his interest in the Shoshone store he became
superintendent of the Pacific Borax Company’s important Lila C. mine and
thus formed a connection which grew into valuable friendships with the
executives. The Shoshone business grew and soon required his entire time
and that of Stella.
Born in Richfield, Utah, Stella Brown grew up in Death Valley country
and a reel of her life would show an exciting story of triumph over life
in the raw; in desolate deserts and in boom towns where bandits and
bawdy women rubbed elbows with the virtuous, millionaire with crook, and
caste was unknown. If a girl went wrong; if an Indian was starving; a
widow in need—there you would find her. Some day somebody will write the
inspiring story of Stella Brown.
Not all those who were told to see Charlie were seeking directions or
suffering from toothache. When General Electric desperately needed talc,
its agents were so advised. When Harold Ickes came out to promote
President Roosevelt’s conservation ideas and officials of the War
Department sought critical material, they too were given the old
familiar advice and took it, and one day I saw the President of the
Southern Pacific Railroad stand around for an hour while Charlie waited
for a Pahrump Indian to make up his mind about a pair of overalls.
Today the store that started on a kitchen table requires a large
refrigerating plant and lighting system, three large warehouses, two
tunnels in a hill. About a dozen employees work in shifts from seven in
the morning till ten at night, to take care of the store, cabins, and
cafe. Three big trucks haul oil, gas, powder, and provisions to mines in
the region. Out of canyon, dry wash, and over dunes they come for every
imaginable commodity, and get it.
A millionaire city man who vacations there sat down on the slab bench
beside Brown, aimlessly whittling. “Listen, Charlie,” he said. “Why
don’t you get out of this desolation and move to the city where you can
enjoy yourself?”
“Hell—” Charlie muttered, and went on with his whittling.
The new store stands upon the site where Ma Fairbanks’ kitchen table
displayed the canned goods brought from Greenwater. Modern to the minute
and air-cooled it would be a credit to any city.
Again I heard the old familiar, “See Charlie,” and while he was telling
someone how to get to a place no one around had ever heard of, I glanced
over the Chalfant Register, a Bishop paper, and noticed a letter it had
published from a lady in Wisconsin seeking information about a brother
who had gone to Greenwater more than 40 years ago. She had never heard
of him since.
When Charlie joined me I called his attention to the letter. “I saw it,”
he said. “Nobody answered and the editor sent the letter to me. I have
just written her that the brother who came to find out what happened,
died suddenly at Tonopah, only a few hours by auto from Greenwater. The
other brother was killed in a saloon. I knew him and the man who killed
him.”