Gold & Death

DEATH VALLEY PROSPECTORS--Dane Coolidge--Dutton ($2.50).

The first white men to see Death Valley searched for gold while fleeing for their lives, thereby setting a pattern that prospectors into that dismal region have followed ever since. On Christmas Day, 1849, a party of emigrants in 27 wagons known as the Sand-Walking Company, lost while trying to find a short cut from Salt Lake City to San Bernardino, Calif., entered the Valley by way of Furnace Creek and never got out. Ahead of the Sand-Walkers there was a band of young men, traveling in 20 wagons, unencumbered by women or children, known as the Jayhawkers, who split off to save themselves when the train bogged down, turned aside to locate what became known as the Lost Gunsight Mine, and never got out of Death Valley either. Only survivors were the families in four wagons trailing behind the Jayhawkers. When, the wagons could go no further, two young scouts pushed ahead, traveled 25 days across the desert, shooting a crow, a hawk and a quail for food, returning with horses from California to rescue the two families surviving.

Last week Dane Coolidge made the Jayhawkers' tragedy the starting point of a rambling, formless but interesting account of the perils of gold-hunting in the hottest region on earth, the 500 square miles of volcanic rock, salt deposits, borax mines, poison springs and complete desolation that make up Death Valley. Divided into eleven brief chapters and illustrated with 17 excellent photographs by the author, Death Valley Prospectors is partly an account of Author Coolidge's travels through the Valley, partly history as he picked it up from his reading and his talks with Indians and oldtimers like Death Valley Scotty. The first famed lost mine in the Valley after the Gunsight was the Breyfogle. Huge, big-footed Louis Jacob Breyfogle found it in 1864, brought back ore that was rotten with gold, but he had been so tormented by his Indian captors that he went crazy whenever he approached the area of his wealth and suffering. The Indians had started following him from curiosity, unable to believe that the enormous tracks he left could have been made by a human being.

Still lost, the Breyfogle is generally thought to have been in a region where several rich mines were later located, is believed by Death Valley Scotty to have been buried by cloudbursts.

Best character sketch is that of Shorty Harris, grouchy, restless, simple-minded prospector who tramped Death Valley for 50 years, found five rich mines, got almost nothing for them. When he found The Bullfrog in 1904 a saloon keeper kept him drunk for three weeks, got him to sell his claim for $1,000 and three barrels of whiskey. When he found The Harrisburg soon after he became a partner in the company formed to work it, taking stock which he did not know was assessable. Author Coolidge hired Shorty Harris to guide him across the Valley to Death Valley Scotty's ranch. Shorty ran true to tradition by getting lost. They traveled hard all day, made a dry camp after dark, found the next morning that they had slept almost beside the spring they were trying to find. Shorty believed that Death Valley got so hot that gas rose out of the ground. He said the ducks carried canteens when they flew over it. Travel ing by burro, the slowest method of transportation known to man, he was al ways in a great hurry to get from one desolate point to another just as desolate.

When he died he left instructions to be buried near a famed Death Valley pioneer, with this epitaph: "Here Lies Shorty Harris, A Single Blanket Jackass Prospector." The Author-- Unlike most authors of Western stories, Dane Coolidge knows the region he has written of in such romances as Snake Bit Jones, Rawhide Johnny, Gun Smoke, some 30 other books. Born in Natick, Mass, in 1873, he was taken to California in 1877, entered Stanford at the age of 21, with a job as field collector working on mammals and reptiles. Since then he has collected live animals for the New York Zoological Park, U. S. Nationa Zoological Park, been field collector for the British Museum, U. S. Biological Sur vey, National Museum, traveled in Italy Mexico and France, becoming "the second American to trap in Europe." An early photographer of wild animals, he has pursued them throughout the West especially in the deserts, gathering material for cowboy stories and visiting more than 20 Indian tribes on the way.

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