Los Angeles herald., 1906-06-03

| When Francis Marion Smith, the
borax king, shall have completed his
line Of steel across Death valley, that
region of horror and mystery will have
lost the most of its terrors.
There Is now hardly an acre Of its
sere and desolate length and breadth
that has not been pressed by the foot
Of the tireless and undismayed pros
| pector. True, many of these have never
returned to tell the tale Of their dis
coveries, and their bones are now
bleaching in the sands along with those
of untold hundreds who went before.
So many have entered it's confines but
to give new Justification for its name,
and so frightful were the sufferings of
those who managed to escape its hor-
rors that both California and Nevada
have made large appropriations to dot
the whole desert with signposts, point
ing the thirst-tortured traveller to the
nearest water. The deadly arsenic
springs will be marked or walled in,
and where possible wells will he drilled
in places where the water holes are too
far apart.
on the Nevada side the edge of the
valley is already dotted thickly with
populous mining towns, such as Bull
frog, Searchlight Tonopah, Goldfield,
Rhyolite and Silver Peak. Along the
west slope of the Funeral mountains
hundreds of mining claims have been
staked and are under development, and
tales of fabulous wealth are daily
tempting men to brave poisonous
waters, so that it seems no rash pre-
diction that in q very few more years
Death valley will be better known as
the valley of gold.
It is probable that no other corner of
the world of equal area, or of ten times
At..- ,A,g,, -ct
fed wealth in minerals as Death valley.
1t is very likely that including its east
ern and western walls, the Funeral and
Telescope mountains, it contains more
gold than the Rand or the Klondike,
more silver than Nevada, more nitrateS
than Chile, more copper than Montana,
Arizona or the Lake Superior copper
region, more iron than the Mesaba and
Gogebic ranges, more tin than Corn
wall, more arsenic than Styria and the
Harz mountains, more asbestos than
Canada, more lead and zinc than Mis-
souri, and Characteristics manganese,
platinum, baryta, gypsum, sulphur,
marble, granite, soda, salt, boraX, tur-
quoise, garnets, opals, tourmaline and
whole catalogue of valuable minerals,
metals, drugs and chemical compounds.
1t is one vast laboratory in which ma
ture seems to have compounded drugs
for the healing-or for the extermina-
tion-of the nations. 1t has been de-
scribed as an inexhaustible storehouse
of wealth, the drug store of the uni
verse the treasure vault of the nation.
1t is all of these-but it is locked and
barred by heat and thirst, and the key
is held by death. If the grim monster
can be driven from this his strong
hold by railroads, water wells, signposts
and the prospectors' burros, the treas
ures of the Incas and Montezumas, the
wealth of King Solomon's mines, of
Ophir and Golconda will hardly be a
circumstance.
Death valley received its name of i'll
omen away back in 1850, when the Ben
nett party of gold seekers bound for
California, looking for short cut to the
new Eldorado, passed through it's por-
tails in the Funeral mountains. But two
out of the party of thirty survived to
tell the tale of thirst and madness, of
wild chasing after cooling fountains and
placid pools depicted by the deceitful
of slow death by torture and
final open sepulture among the sage and
sand, with the distorted Joshua tree and
Spanish bayonet for monuments. Re-
Gently when the San Pedro, Los Ange-
les & Salt Lake railroad was being
pushed forward mile by mile the con-
struction crews found thirty human
skeletons along Ine narrow SLTlp Ol
land that formed the right of way with
in the boundaries of Lincoln county,
Nevada.
Yet the desert of Lincoln county is not
to be compared in horror and utter
desolation to Death valley. 1t is only
miles long, varying in width
from five to fifteen miles long. 1t con-
tains 500 square miles, and its lowest
depression is 410 feet below sea level. |
Few tenderfeet standing on the Fun
eral mountains and looking across the
glittering stretch of white and gray, |
imagine that they would have any diff
culties of travelling in the yielding sand, |
of the intense heat that frequently
reaches 14O degrees, of the fine dust and
poisonous eXhalations from the super
heated sands, of the deep salt marshes
concealed beneath the treacherous
floors of boraX and soda.
When one surveys the valley with its
wonderful play of colors such as no
artist has ever placed on canvas, it is |
hard to believe that within it's confines
more men have perlshed violently than