Death Valley National Park

A History

Hal Rothman, Char Miller

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780874179262
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The first comprehensive study of the park, past and present, Death Valley National Park probes the environmental and human history of this most astonishing desert. Established as a national monument in 1933, Death Valley was an anomaly within the national park system. Though many who knew this landscape were convinced that its stark beauty should be preserved, to do so required a reconceptualization of what a park consists of, grassroots and national support for its creation, and a long and difficult political struggle to secure congressional sanction.This history begins with a discussion of the physical setting, its geography and geology, and descriptions of the Timbisha, the first peoples to inhabit this tough and dangerous landscape. In the 19th-century and early 20th century, new arrivals came to exploit the mineral resources in the region and develop permanent agricultural and resort settlements. Although Death Valley was established as a National Monument in 1933, fear of the harsh desert precluded widespread acceptance by both the visiting public and its own administrative agency. As a result, Death Valley lacked both support and resources. This volume details the many debates over the park's size, conflicts between miners, farmers, the military, and wilderness advocates, the treatment of the Timbisha, and the impact of tourists on its cultural and natural resources.In time, Death Valley came to be seen as one of the great natural wonders of the United States, and was elevated to full national park status in 1994. The history of Death Valley National Park embodies the many tensions confronting American environmentalism.

CHAPTER 1

Before the Monument

The land that in 1933 became Death Valley National Monument had a long human history that preceded the arrival of the first Europeans in the New World. In that lengthy story, the environment's fundamental characteristics determined the fate not only of pre-Columbian peoples but also of each of the cultures that succeeded them. At its core, Death Valley stretched humanity, for no human culture easily adapted to its harsh climate, lack of water, and often sparse food sources. The populations that best adapted, those closest to the land, had nothing to rely on save the place. Adaptability was crucial to their survival. Later cultures saw in Death Valley sources of raw material that developers could barter in an industrial society. Their connections to the land and concern for it were not as deep, for they did not have to be.

This second, later, vision of a place that could provide natural resources in exchange for the goods of an industrial mainstream indirectly led to the creation of Death Valley National Monument. The creation of single-purpose mining towns that exploded and then receded created a new context for the desert's development. As more Anglo-Americans encountered the region, including such writers as George Wharton James, Mary Austin, Dix Van Dyke, and Edna Brush Perkins, and as its natural-resource advantages seemed to be exhausted in the rise and fall of the prices of raw materials, Death Valley acquired a new significance, entering the pantheon of the nation's special places.

More than 10,000 years of human history predated that transformation. People began to inhabit Death Valley and the Mojave Desert between 11,000 and 8000 BCE. Before this era, the evidence of human occupation in Death Valley is scant. Scientists cannot date with certainty nor clearly ascribe to human endeavors artifacts from the late-Pleistocene period, before 10,000 BCE. Possible archaeological objects from the succeeding Lake Mojave period, 10,000 to 5000 BCE, have been found near the shores of now-dry pluvial lakes around the Slate Range, southwest of the park, and provide the most compelling evidence of early human habitation. Scientists suggest that this choice of locations indicates an adaptive strategy focused on lakeside resources. Others question that reasoning, suggesting that archaeologists have tended to search for early sites primarily along the shores of pluvial lakes, finding there exactly what they expected. In this view, artifacts and the few faunal remains associated with the Lake Mojave period suggest a more generalized hunting-and-gathering adaptation, providing a direct challenge to explanations that focus on lake resources. Around 7000 BCE, hunters and gatherers who resembled the people archaeologists designate “Archaic” moved through the region, fashioning their existence from its intermittent offerings. Typically without domestic animals, intensive horticulture, or permanent dwellings, these people knew their environment well and took advantage of all it offered.¹

During the Lake Mojave period, the Death Valley region contained widespread xeric juniper parkland, more abundant large fauna (including some now-extinct creatures), and more plant life than are now present. This relative abundance of resources allowed well-documented human occupation throughout the Great Basin, that now-rain-starved region comprising portions of Nevada, western Utah, southeastern Oregon, and California east of the Sierra, as well as part of northern Mexico. Two distinct dry environments constitute the Great Basin: the Great Basin Desert to the north, a cold, high-elevation desert dominated by sagebrush, and the Mojave Desert to the south, a low-elevation area typically home to cactus and creosote bush. Across this more southerly area, a variety of cultural complexes, including Clovis, Lake Mojave, Cougar Mountain, Lind Coulee, and Silver Lake, established communities. In Death Valley, artifacts such as spear and dart points, crescents, gravers, distinct scrapers, drills, leaf-shaped knives, and a few heavy core tools suggest consistent occupation during an extended period.²

During the subsequent Pinto period, 5000 to 2000 BCE, Great Basin inhabitants first encountered environmental conditions that resembled the contemporary era. The changes began as the Pleistocene lakes in the Mojave dried up. Some scientists argue that the desert was too dry for extended human habitation from the beginning of this era for as long as 2,000 years. There is no firm confirmation of Pinto sites in Death Valley prior to 3000 BCE, but the later Pinto Basin Complex offers the clearest articulation of the era's characteristics. Researchers disagree about the traits of Pinto-period artifacts, especially the spear and dart points that might help articulate period boundaries, but a consensus of thought posits habitation of the Pinto Basin Complex until about 700 BCE. These items appear similar to the Lake Mojave period, but the occurrence of milling stones serves to differentiate them. The similarities suggest a generalized hunting-and-gathering strategy during the era, with people inhabiting the desert during wetter periods and retreating to its fringes or oases in drier times.³

Although the Gypsum period, 2000 BCE to 500 CE, remains largely devoid of material cultural remains, evidence of culture and lifeways suggests intensive desert occupation and a broadening trade with coastal California and Southwest communities. Such exchanges later became more frequent. Hunters introduced the bow and arrow late in the era, allowing them greater food success, and a rich ritual life developed. Large spear and dart points overlap with Pinto points in time and morphology, suggesting a continuation of earlier hunting practices. Knives, scrapers, drills, and other small stone tools characterize period artifacts. In addition, archaeologists have found stone and shell beads, slate tablets, incised and painted pebbles, and split-twig figurines at Gypsum-period sites. They have also discovered milling stones, including mortars and pestles, at these sites. In the eastern Mojave, the influence of Pueblo culture of the Colorado Plateau region as the Gypsum period ended became evident. Figurines, pit houses, and Basketmaker III ceramics typify this influence, and the introduction of agriculture may have resulted from contact and trade. The inhabitants of the western Mojave seem to have experienced few of these developments, continuing their patterns of hunting and gathering. Researchers have found sites from this era near Death Valley at lower elevations—near current water sources and ones that now are either dry or too salty for human use—and in the mountains.⁴

During the Shoshonean period, beginning about 1200 CE and continuing until European arrival, ancestors of the Numic-speaking Paiute and Shoshones first inhabited the southwestern Great Basin. When contact with the Spanish occurred, the Panamint Shoshones and Nevada Shoshones regarded the Death Valley area as their territory, even as it served as the border between the two groups. The appearance of small Cottonwood Triangular and Desert Side-notched arrow points and locally made plainware ceramics marks the Shoshonean period. Scientists categorize such plainwares as Paiute and Shoshone utility wares. They include several varieties of knives, drills, gravers, scrapers, manos, metates, pestles, mortars, Olivella shell beads, bone beads, pendants, occasional pointed tools, incised stones, and baked and unbaked clay figurines. Large villages in valleys or along valley boundaries and smaller hunting-and-gathering camps near specific resources, at lower elevations and in the mountains, characterize human habitation during this time.⁵ These groups remained in the region and greeted the first Europeans and Americans who arrived after 1800 CE.

By the nineteenth century, the Native peoples of the Mojave faced the ever-growing European presence in the New World. Spain and Mexico had seen little of value in the Mojave Desert; Spanish soldiers and settlers passed through it when necessary, as did the first Anglo-Americans, who arrived in the 1820s. When trappers and mountain men such as Jedediah Smith and Peter Skene Ogden explored the Great Basin, Death Valley and its environs offered little to these fur-trapping commercial entrepreneurs. Only with the 1838 formation of the US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers and its subsequent search for railroad routes to California did the expansionist nation look seriously at the region.⁶

The quest for a transcontinental nation gave meaning even to stark deserts, and government-sponsored expeditions and gold seekers dominated exploration throughout the 1840s. In early 1844, during his second exploration of the Far West, Captain John C. Frémont and thirty-nine explorers skirted Death Valley's perimeter. After nearly a year on the trail, Frémont was eager to reach the southern part of the Old Spanish Trail and begin his return to St. Louis. Traveling south, Frémont and his men turned east at Los Angeles. On April 27, he and his party camped at Frémont Springs, known as Salt Spring on contemporary maps. Frémont made mention of the region's paradox in his journal entries: “Throughout this nakedness of sand and gravel, were many beautiful plants and flowering shrubs, which occurred in many new species, and with greater variety than we had been accustomed to see in the most luxuriant prairie countries; this was a peculiarity of this desert.”⁷ This was a fitting assessment by one of the more inventive minds of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The clamor to reach California during the 1849 Gold Rush brought the next wave of Americans into Death Valley. Most of the parties entering the valley between 1849 and 1851 sought a shortcut to the goldfields. During the winter of 1849–50, at least five groups came to the area. None had declared this southern approach their first choice; all took the difficult Spanish Trail because they started late in the migration season or experienced delays along the way, making their departure from Salt Lake City too close to winter to be assured of clearing the Sierra Nevada passes before snowfall. While the lure of gold remained strong, the memory of the Donner Party disaster of 1846–47 that left more than forty dead lingered, and none wanted to wait for spring.

One of these gold-hungry groups gave Death Valley its name. During December 1849, a group of Kansans, Georgians, and others left their Utah camps for the final trek to California. Near the Las Vegas springs, two groups decided to travel directly west, following a shortcut they thought led them directly to the California fields. One group, led by Captain Edward Doty and consisting of about three dozen men from Knoxville and Galesburg, Illinois, called themselves the Jayhawkers. Another group, the Bugsmashers, included more than a dozen men who hailed mostly from Georgia and Mississippi. Three families, those of Asabel Bennett, J. B. Arcan, and Harry Wade, trailed behind with a few stragglers, most prominently William Lewis Manly. All the travelers entered Death Valley between December 22 and December 27, 1849, likely at the same place, Furnace Creek, and all faced the same obstacle, the Panamint Mountains. The Bennett group went south to Bennett's Well, while the Jayhawkers turned north and followed Emigrant Wash to the southwest. Eventually, the dry, vast, and seemingly empty area ensnared both parties.⁸

Hemmed in by snowpacks that covered the western Panamint Mountains, the separated parties rejoined and searched for a trail leading west. Unable to find an exit from the valley floor, they separated into smaller parties. A number stayed near Tule Spring, while others, including Manly and John Rodgers, searched for an escape route. After five weeks, the two men returned, reporting an exit to the south. Manly's account, penned some fifty years later, notes that three members of the party died of dehydration before he returned. Other accounts claim that only William B. Robinson expired during a separate search for a western route. Despite the differences, no account disputes the severity of their situation. Had Manly and Rodgers not returned with a way out, the party faced dire circumstances and even death. The groups reassembled and left the valley floor just north of Searles Lake at Providence Spring. Upon leaving their base camp, someone in the party reportedly commented, “Good-bye Death Valley,” giving the region its foreboding name.⁹

The party left considerable physical evidence behind. The remains of a large camp stood at Furnace Creek Spring. At Jayhawker Spring to the east, either Robinson or Rood scratched the initials “W. B. R.” and the year, “1849,” in the lava rock. Rood inscribed “WB Rood” on a boulder near the trail between Cottonwood Canyon and Emigrant Canyon. The ill-fated 1849 party left traces at Six Springs and Bennett's Well as well. Reaching the California settlements a few weeks later, members of the party reportedly announced that large silver-ore deposits lay in the mountains surrounding Death Valley, spurring more prospecting activity in the Mojave. These rumors inspired prospectors to chance the difficult eastern Mojave and added to the knowledge that Americans possessed of the desert, setting the stage for further exploration.¹⁰

During the 1850s, the federal government's reconnaissance of the nation's newest acquisitions lands acquired after the Mexican War reached Death Valley. The US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers took the lead in surveying the West, performing cadastral surveys to measure, mark, and delineate land and collecting information about plants, animals, Native peoples, geology, and anything else its teams encountered. The topographical engineers preceded railroad surveying parties intent on finding a route for the transcontinental railroad. Talented scientists supported the surveying expeditions that spread across the West.

Crossing California's mountains and desert proved the greatest obstacle, and agents of the government and private companies sought safe avenues of passage. In 1853 the Pacific and Atlantic Railroad Committee retained Lieutenant Tredwell Moore to find a railroad route through eastern California and the Sierra Nevada. Although Moore did not find such a route, his expedition did map the upper reaches of Death Valley. George H. Goddard, a British artist, cartographer, and amateur naturalist who served as Moore's assistant, collected more than six hundred geological and biological samples during their stay. Three years later, the General Land Office sent a cadastral survey team, led by William Denton, to subdivide the region into quarter sections for future homesteaders. At nearly the same time, Allexey W. von Schmidt led another survey team into Panamint Valley, west of the Denton team. In 1857 a self-styled colonel from Virginia, Henry Washington, extended the cadastral survey into the center of Death Valley. All the surveys extended the definition of “suitable for homesteading” to marginal lands, but none so egregiously as Washington's. Washington marked nearly one million acres from the sink of Death Valley to the crest of the Amargosa as potential ranch and farmland, submitting a bill for more than forty thousand dollars for his work. This sum, greater than the surveyor general's annual budget, was paid before anyone challenged the veracity of Washington's claims. Despite the ludicrous expense, these surveys, published as part of the US surveyor general's 1857 map of California, provided the first detailed topography of Death Valley. By the end of the 1850s, US society had learned a considerable amount about the eastern Mojave.¹¹

As more and more people determined that the region merited further attention, the mapping of its features continued. The creation of the Nevada Territory in 1861 necessitated a clear boundary line between this new state and California. As long as Nevada remained part of the distant Utah Territory, a defined boundary meant little; territorial status anticipated statehood, and the federal government had to address the question of boundaries. That year, Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives commanded the United States and California Boundary Commission that attempted to draw an accurate map of the California-Nevada border between Death Valley and Lake Tahoe. Washington's earlier map had already been found wanting. The Ives Party used camels as pack animals because of the arid conditions. Starting near the Colorado River, Ives and his team completed only about one-third of the project before cost overruns aborted their mission.

After the Civil War, the US military reestablished its mapping program in the West, beginning the era of the “great surveys.” Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, Clarence King, the one-armed Major John Wesley Powell, and others began systematic explorations of the West and Southwest. In his late twenties, Wheeler was ambitious and precocious. In 1869 he asked to begin a large survey project in the Southwest. Army officials assigned him the task of exploring and mapping lands south of the Central Pacific Railroad in California and in eastern Nevada. Assembling one of the era's most impressive expeditions, Wheeler started in northern Nevada, bringing along the pioneer photographer Timothy O'Sullivan, reporter Frederick W. Loring, and an array of scientists, topographers, meteorologists, and other specialists. The expedition twice crossed through the heart of Death Valley. Wheeler divided his men into two parties that explored separately but rendezvoused frequently. Characteristic of Wheeler, the plan was grandiose, and unfortunately its timing was atrocious. The expedition spent the summer in the Mojave Desert, an interminably hot and difficult venture. Many of the men suffered sunstroke, as Loring, who nearly succumbed himself, reported. Wheeler emphasized Death Valley's harsh and arid character, and his party described the region in terms of its “utter desolation” and lack of water and vegetation. Rather than open the desert up for settlement, Wheeler's party further reminded the nation of its limits.¹²

Wheeler's expedition simultaneously was a success and a failure. The expedition collected some of the more accurate barometric readings of the below-sea-level elevations in Death Valley. Losing two guides during its stay, its members also discovered just how treacherous the area could be. The expedition did not help the image of the federal government in the West. California newspapers vilified Wheeler for his perceived shortcomings as a leader. Nor did the data Wheeler's men collected please government officials or the scientific community. The army realized that more exploration and mapping around Death Valley were necessary.

After the Wheeler expedition, exploration of the West continued at an accelerating pace. The government dispatched a parade of surveyors to investigate the region. Allexey von Schmidt returned to Death Valley in 1872 and finished the boundary-line survey from Lake Tahoe to the Colorado River. Captain A. B. McGowan and Lieutenant Rogers Birnie undertook additional military surveys in 1875. By 1877 the detailed mapping of Death Valley reflected solid understanding of the area's topography. Within two decades, naturalists emerged as an important source of knowledge about Death Valley. The Department of Agriculture's 1891 regional biological survey m...