The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-07-07

and Not One Survived.
 The treacherous, merciless sands of Death Valley have yielded up the story of another grewsOme, ghastly tragedy fifty years after it was enacted. Stories of similar tragedies in that Valle de los MuertOs have been told again and again. yet they are always new in the telling, for their fascination lies in their horror. Yearly, as the white men tra- verse that trapdoor of hell, they play their lives against the tales of yellow lure that lie under it, and some lose. The next year their mummified corpses are found by others, who pity them as good men; they played the limit and lost" There is no occasion for mourn ing; they were strong men. and knew the game they were against. They ac- cepted the chance in the gamble with death, and, having lost, they paid the winner in full. But when women and children go down that journey of death only because husbands and fathers go there is an excuse among those who know" for the moisture that collects on sun-dried eyelids.
 Fifty-one years ago a party of men, women and children-twenty, all told left Independence, Mo, in two wagons drawn by oxen. bound for the gold fields of California. From that day until now they have never been heard of, and their rate has always been a mystery, although it was thought probable that they strayed from the overland trail and had been massacred by Indians. All these years has the bare. brown breasted" desert held the secret secure ly locked, and only recently have its restless, crawling sands disclosed the key; that key was the huge, rusted hook of an ancient OK chain.
 Don Pickett is a prospector. with a frame of tempered steel and thews and muscles as tough as whang leather He is not we'll known in San Francisco. but is familiar figure from Carson to the Mexican line. Tonopah, the sink of the Amargosa, Death Valley and the Des- ert of the Colorado know him. He is in the city now, and it is difficult for him to back-track himself from a mining office on Montgomery street to his ho tel but in the country named he knows the trails as they are known to the In- dians and the eagles. He has just re- turned from a prospecting trip from To- nopah through the Panamint country and Death Valley. by way of Mojave and Keeler. It was in the northern ex- tremity of the Panamnt range that he picked up the key that unlocked the half century secret.
 At the foot of spur of the Panamint Mountains on it's northeastern slope he and his partner Len Gorson, had stopped to rest themselves and their burros from the exhaustion attendent upon their trip across Death Valley. Where they stopped d spring of perfect ly clear, cold water bubbled from the rocks and lost itself in the sands few yards further on. They did not drink of the water: they knew it; so did their burros, and the animals hardly sniffed at it as they turned to nihble at the scant herbage. It was poison, deadly poison, and the arsenic contained in a good draught would kill thinker. Years ago some prospector had scrawled the word Poison" on a board from a packing box and had fastened it to stake by the edge of the spring. It was while resting in the shade of the rocks and brush that Pickett saw, few feet from him, the top of a rust eaten iron hook projecting above the sand. He took hold of it, but it did not come away easily. and, eXerting his strength, he uncovered an ancient OK chain forty feet in length, the kind that is practi cally out of use now. From it's rusty condition it must have lain buried in the sand for at least fifty years, and, know ing the manner in which the desert con- cealed it's secrets, they took their pro- specting picks from the packs and be- gan drawing them through the sand. The points of the picks turned up bone after bone and pieces of wagon irons. Some of the bones were of oxen, and some were of humans, a few evidently being those of women and children. As many of the bones of humans as they uncovered they reinterred in trench in the sand and then packed on across the dreary waste that stretched away be- fore them. They told the story of their find to Indians and old white settlers in the Amargpsa country, and from one and another of the old men they gath cred the following:
 It was in the fall of '5t that a party came down Amargosa way with two worn-out OK teams. The party had left Independence, Mo-, that spring, but had been delayed by sickness, and had once lost it's way and had left the trail. Con- sequently they did not approach the Si- ezra Nevada mountains until the near ness of winter prohibited their passage. They had, thereforfore, turned south from Humboldt sink and had taken the Salt Lake and Los Angeles trail One or two of the women and several of the children had died on the way, and the oxen were so thin and worn that all were attached to the best Wogon and the other abandoned, as were some of their goods. The remaining women, children and outfit were packed in one wagon, and with the men on foot the sorrowful little cavalcade toiled on to- ward Fl Dorado. Nothing more was seen or heard of them by the Amargosa settlers, and it was presumed they had gone through in safety. The greWsome find at the poison spring tells a differ ent tale. It is a tale easy in the read ing for men who travel the desert and know it better than you know the pork. iF, ha