Death Valley Scotty
A strictly factual thumbnail sketch of Walter Scott would contain the
following incidents:
He ran away from his Kentucky home to join his brother, Warner, as a cow
hand on the ranch of John Sparks—afterward governor of Nevada. He worked
as a teamster for Borax Smith at Columbus Marsh. He had a similar job at
Old Harmony Borax Works.
In the Nineties he went to work with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He
married Josephine Millius, a candy clerk on Broadway, New York, and
brought her to Nevada.
He became guide, friend, companion, and major domo for Albert
Johnson—Chicago millionaire who had come to the desert for his health.
He did some prospecting in the early part of the century, but never
found a mine of value.
America was mining-mad following the Tonopah and Goldfield strikes and
Scotty went East in search of a grubstake. He obtained one from Julian
Gerard, Vice President of the Knickerbocker Trust Company and a brother
of James W. Gerard who had married the daughter of Marcus Daly, Montana
copper king and who was later U.S. Ambassador to Germany.
Scotty staked a claim near Hidden Spring and named it The Knickerbocker.
He gave Gerard glowing reports of a mine so rich its location must be
kept secret.
Scotty appeared in Los Angeles unheard of, in a ten gallon hat and a
flaming necktie and with the natural showman’s skill, tossed money
around in lavish tips or into the street for urchins to scramble over.
This was the well-staged prelude to the charter of the famed Scotty
Special for a record-breaking run from Los Angeles to Chicago. Though
Scotty stoutly denies it, he was lifted to fame by a big and talented
sorrel-headed sports editor and reporter on the Los Angeles Examiner,
named Charles Van Loan, and John J. Byrnes, passenger agent of the Santa
Fe railroad. Scotty meant nothing to either of these men, but the
publicity Byrnes saw for the Santa Fe did, and the red necktie, the big
hat, the scattering of coins, and the secret mine made the sort of story
Van Loan liked.
Here Scotty’s trail is lost in the fantastic stories of writers, press
agents, and promoters. Several years afterward when his yarns began to
backfire, Scotty swore in a Los Angeles court that E. Burt Gaylord, a
New York man, furnished $10,000 for the Scotty Special’s spectacular
dash across the continent—the object being to promote the sale of stock
in the “secret mine.”
More remarkable than any yarn Scotty ever told is the fact that although
headlines made Scotty, headlines have failed to kill the Scotty legend.
You may toss our heroes into the ash can, but we dust them off and put
them back. Likable, ingratiating, Scotty will brush aside any attack
with a funny story and let it go at that.
In a law suit for an accounting against Scotty, Julian Gerard asserted
he was to have 22½% of any treasure Scotty found. Judge Ben Harrison
decided in Gerard’s favor, but the only claim found in Scotty’s name was
the utterly worthless Knickerbocker and Gerard got nothing. The claim
showed little sign of ever having been worked. A few broken rocks. A few
holes which could be filled with a shovel within a few moments.
Passing the claim once, I stopped to talk with a native: “This is the
scene of the Battle of Wingate Pass,” he told me. “In case you never
heard of it, it was fought for liberty, Scotty’s liberty—that is. Gerard
got suspicious about Scotty’s mine and decided to send his own engineers
out to investigate. He ordered Scotty to meet them at Barstow and show
them something or else. It worried Scotty a little, not long. He’d
learned about Indian fighting with Buffalo Bill and met the fellows as
ordered. When he led them to his wagon waiting behind the depot, the
Easterners took a look at the wagon, another look at Scotty and one at
each other. The wagon had boiler plate on the sides, rifles stacked army
fashion alongside. Outriders with six-guns holstered on their belts and
Winchesters cradled in their arms.
“‘Don’t let it worry you,’ Scotty said. ‘Piutes on the warpath. Old
Dripping Knife, their Chief claims my gold belongs to them. Dry-gulched
a couple of my best men last week.’
“The Easterners turned white and Scotty gave ’em another jolt.
‘Butchered my boys and fed ’em to their pigs. But we are fixed for ’em
this trip. They sent word they aim to exterminate us. Maybe try it, but
I’ve got lookouts planted all along. Let’s go....’ He shunted them
aboard, shaking in their knees and headed out of Barstow.
“The party had reached that hill you see when suddenly out of the brush
and the gulches and from behind the rocks came a horde of ‘redskins,’
yelling and shooting. Scotty’s men leaped from their saddles and the
battle was on. The Easterners jumped out of the wagon and hit the ground
running for the nearest dry wash and that was the closest they ever got
to Scotty’s mine. You’ve got to hand it to Scotty.”
The story made front page from coast to coast and it was several days
before the hoax was revealed. Unexplained though undenied, was the
statement that Albert Johnson was in Scotty’s party listed as “Doctor
Jones.” It is assumed that he had no guilty knowledge of the hoax.
The most astounding achievement of Scotty’s career was attained when he
interested in an imaginary Death Valley mine, Al Myers, a hard-bitten
prospector and mining man who had made the discovery strike at
Goldfield; Rol King, of Los Angeles, bon vivant and manager of the
popular Hollenbeck Hotel, and Sidney Norman who as mining editor of the
Los Angeles Times knew mines and mining men.
These were certainly not the gullible type. But with a yarn of gold,
Scotty induced them to hazard a trip into Death Valley in mid-summer
when the temperature was 124 degrees.
Scotty may have missed the acquisition of a good mine when he failed to
find one lost by Bob Black. While hunting sheep in the Avawatz Range,
Bob found some rich float. “Honest,” Bob said, “I knocked off the quartz
and had pure gold.” He tried to locate the ledge but he couldn’t match
his specimen. Later he returned with Scotty, but a cloudburst had mauled
the country. They found the corners of Bob’s tepee, but not the ledge.
They made several later attempts to find it, but failed.
Bob always declared that some day he would uncover the ledge and might
have succeeded if he hadn’t met Ash Meadows Jack Longstreet one day when
both were full of desert likker. Bob passed the lie. Jack drew first.
Taps for Bob.
All kinds of stories have been told to explain Albert Johnson’s
connection with Scotty. The first and the true one is that Johnson,
coming to the desert for his health, hired Scotty as a guide, liked his
yarns and his camping craft and kept him around to yank a laugh out of
the grim solitude.
But that version didn’t appeal to the old burro men. They could believe
in the hydrophobic skunks or the Black Bottle kept in the county
hospital to get rid of the old and useless, but not in a Santa Claus
like Albert Johnson. “It just don’t make sense—handing that sort of
money to a potbellied loafer like Scotty....”
Albert Johnson was able to afford any expenditure to make his life in a
difficult country less lonely. He could have searched the world over and
found no better investment for that purpose than Scotty.
Genial, resourceful, and never at a loss for a yarn that would fit his
audience, Scotty was cast in a perfect role. As a matter of fact,
whatever it cost Johnson for Scotty’s flings in Hollywood, or alimony
for Scotty’s wife, it probably came back in the dollar admissions that
tourists paid to pass the portals of the Castle for a look at Scotty. Of
course they seldom saw Scotty—never in later years. Mrs. Johnson was an
intensely religious woman and didn’t like liquor and that disqualified
Scotty.
“This is Scotty’s room,” the attendant would say. “And that’s his bed.”
“Oh, isn’t he here?”
“Not today. Scotty’s a little under the weather. Went over to his shack
so he wouldn’t be disturbed....”
Mrs. Johnson was killed in an auto driven by her husband in Towne’s Pass
when, to avoid going over a precipice, he headed the machine into the
wall of a cut.
In 1939 Albert Johnson testified that he first met Scotty in Johnson’s
Chicago office when a wealthy friend appeared with Scotty, who was
looking for a grubstake. Johnson said he gave Scotty “something between
$1000 and $5000.” When the attorney asked him to be more definite,
Johnson replied that at the time, his income was between one-half
million and two million dollars a year and the exact amount consequently
was of no importance then. “Since then,” Johnson testified, “I have
given him $117,000 in cash and about the same in grubstakes, mules,
food, and equipment.”
They went together into the mountains as Johnson explained, “because I
was all hepped up with his ... claims.” Further explaining his
connection with Scotty, he said: “I was crippled in a railroad accident.
My back was broken. I was paralyzed from the hips down. Through the
years I got to have a great fondness for him.”
Albert Johnson, whose fortune came from the National Insurance Company,
died in 1948, leaving a will that contained no mention of Scotty.
But one laurel none can deny Walter Scott. He did more to put Death
Valley on the must list of the American tourists than all the histories
and all the millions spent for books, pamphlets, and radio broadcasts.
The almost incredible case of Jack and Myra Benson proves that P. T.
Barnum was not wholly wrong in his dictum regarding the birthrate of
suckers.
Newly married in Montana they loaded their car and set out to seek
fortune in the West. “We didn’t know anything about gold,” Jack
confided. “If anyone had told us to throw a forked stick up a hillside
and dig where it fell, we would have done it.”
Near Parker, Arizona, they were having supper in camp when another
traveler stopped and asked permission to erect his tent nearby. Myra
invited him to share their supper and during the meal the stranger told
them he was a chemist and that he had prospected over most of the West.
He had found a clay that cured meningitis, he said, and this had led to
fortune. In one town he had found the entire population, including
doctors and nurses down and out. The clay had cured them within a week.
Among the cured, was the son of a rich woman who had given him $5000.
Grateful for the fate that had brought this man into their lives, the
Bensons confided that they had hoped to reach the California gold
fields, but car trouble had depleted their cash and asked if he knew of
any place where they could pan gold.
“Go to Silver Lake, in San Bernardino County, California,” he advised
them, “and your troubles will be over. On the edges of the lake is a
thick mud. Get some tanks and boil it. You’ll have a residue of gold.”
Jack and Myra set out over the Colorado Desert; then climbed the
Providence Mountains to worry through the deep blow sand of the Devil’s
Playground. After three gruelling weeks they reached the lake. There
they boiled the mud. Then an old prospector became curious about their
unusual performance. The world slipped out from under the Bensons when
he told them they were the victims of a liar.
With $5.00 they headed for Death Valley; found themselves broke and
gasless at Cave Spring. Jack knocked upon the door of a shack he saw
there. The woman who opened the door was Jack’s former school teacher,
Mrs. Ira Sweatman, who was keeping house for her cousin, Adrian
Egbert—there for his health.
Those who traveled the Death Valley road by way of Yermo and Cave Spring
will remember that every five miles tacked to stake or bush were signs
that read: “Water and oil.” This was Adrian Egbert’s fine and practical
way of aiding the fellow in trouble.
Myra and Jack later acquired a claim near Rhodes Spring, a short
distance from Salsbury Pass road into Death Valley and moved there to
develop it. I had been away from Shoshone with no contacts and returning
was surprised to find Myra there. I inquired about Jack.
“Why, haven’t you heard?” she asked, and from the expression in her eyes
I knew that Jack was dead.
As best I could, I expressed my condolence, knowing how deeply she had
loved.
She said: “He went up to the tunnel to set off three blasts. I heard
only two. He was to come after the third blast. I knew something was
wrong and went up. Bigod, Mr. Caruthers, Jack’s head was blown off to
hellangone....”
Myra’s language failed to mask the grief her welling eyes disclosed.
Only once in her long, helpful life did Myra ever stoop to deception.
The old age pension law was passed and Myra was entitled to and needed
its benefits, but Myra wouldn’t sign the application. She made one
excuse after another, but finally Stella Brown got at the bottom of her
refusal. Myra had been married to Jack for 40 years and just didn’t want
him to find out that she was a year older than he. Mrs. Brown at last
persuaded her to put aside her vanity.
“Hell—” Jack grinned when told about it. “I knew her age when I married
her.”
On cold winter nights Myra could always be found in the Snake House
where a chair beside the stove was reserved for her. One night I said
jestingly: “You never play poker. What are you doing here?”
She whispered: “Wood’s hard to get. I’m saving mine.”
Then came one of those mornings when one’s soul tingles with the feel of
a perfect desert day and Myra was up early. She came to the store.
“What got you up at this hour?” Bernice asked.
“I felt too dam’ good to stay indoors....”
There were a few old timers in the store and these surrounded
her—because she was the kind who could tell you that it was hotter than
hell, in a thrilling way. She bought a few groceries and started back to
her cabin. Friendly eyes followed her passage along a path across the
playground of the little school. Children sliding down the chute or
riding teeter boards, waved affectionately. Myra was seen to falter in
her step, then sag to the sand. The children ran to her aid and in a
moment Shoshone was gathering about her. Myra Benson was dead.
Sam Flake, nearing 80, on the fringe of the crowd paid his simple
tribute in a voice a bit shaky, but in language hard as the rock in the
hills: “Dam’ her old hide—us boys are going to miss Myra....” He turned
aside, his hand pulling at the bandana in his hip pocket and Shoshone
understood.
Though she was buried 500 miles away, every man, woman, and child in
Shoshone wanted a token of love to attend her and about the grave that
received her casket was a wilderness of flowers.