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Archeological Resources: Pleistocene Era / Lake Mojave Period / Pinto Period / Gypsum Period / Saratoga Springs Period / Shoshonean Period / Historic Archeology / Status of Archeological Research / Landforms and Archeological Resources / National Register of Historic Places
Historic Resources: Exploration / Transportation / Mining / Ranching and Homesteading / Federal Administration / Civilian Conservation Corps / Recreational Development/Tourism / Timbisha Shoshone Village / Cultural Landscapes / National Register of Historic Places / Museum Collection
Various cultural resource studies have examined archeological resources in the Death Valley National Park area. The most significant studies are: Hunt, Archeology of Death Valley Salt Pan (1960); Wallace, Death Valley National Monument’s Prehistoric Past: An Archaeological Overview (1977); Davis, Brown, and Nichols, Evaluation of Early Human Activities and Remains in the California Desert (1980); Warren, Knack, and Warren, A Cultural Resource Overview for the Amargosa-Mojave Basin Planning Units (1980); Norwood and Bull, A Cultural Resource Overview of the Eureka, Saline, Panamint and Darwin Region, East Central California (1980); Brooks, Wilson, and Brooks, An Archaeological Inventory Report of the Owlshead/Amargosa-Mojave Basin Planning Units of the Southern California Desert Area (1981); and Fowler, Dufort, Rusco, and the Historic Preservation Committee, Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, Residence Without Reservation: Ethnographic Overview and Traditional Land Use Study, Timbisha Shoshone, Death Valley National Park, California (1995).
During the Pleistocene Era, a period that witnessed a cool, moist climate south of the continental ice sheets, these rivers formed an integrated drainage system, along with several extensive lakes, including Lake Mojave, that ultimately drained into Death Valley, forming pluvial Lake Manly. Evidence of human occupation during the Pleistocene Era remains a controversial subject.
Lake Mojave Period, 10,000-5000 B.C.
Claims have been made for archeological assemblages dating to times earlier than the Lake Mojave period, but all are debatable and have little or no known relationship to later cultural developments in the Mojave Desert. However, the Lake Mojave complex, which is considered to be a Paleo-Indian assemblage by most archeologists, is also thought to be ancestral to the early Archaic cultures of the Pinto period.
Sites of the Lake Mojave period are nearly always limited to the surface, and it is possible that two or more assemblages are represented at some of these sites. Many of the sites are associated with shoreline features of Pleistocene lakes, such as the shorelines of extinct Lakes Mojave and Manly, and near springs. While some scholars have postulated that the cultural assemblages of the Lake Mojave period were the remains of a widespread generalized hunting adaptation in pursuit of large mammals, others have argued that they are associated with a more specialized adaptation to lacustrine resources of the pluvial lakes or with a more generalized hunting and collecting economy for this early population in which the lakeside sites represented a "marsh orientation" during a portion of the seasonal round.
Dramatic environmental changes came to the Mojave Desert with the end of the Pleistocene Era, characterized by harsh climatic conditions with higher temperatures and lower precipitation. Lakes and rivers dried up, and resources available were much reduced. Human adaptation to these new environmental conditions appears to be represented by the Pinto period assemblages.
The Pinto sites are most often limited to surface manifestation or have poorly developed middens with relatively low artifact density. They appear to be seasonal camps by small groups of highly mobile people. The small number of Pinto period sites, together with their apparent temporary occupation of hunting large and small game and collecting vegetable resources, suggests that the population was sparse and poorly adapted to the increasingly arid conditions of the desert environment. During particularly arid periods, they probably withdrew to the margins of the desert and to perennial springs and microenvironments less affected by the overall climatic deterioration, and during more moist periods they likely expanded their territory in the lower desert areas to take advantage of the shallow lakes, marshes, and springs. During the later part of the Pinto period, when the Mojave Desert was at its most arid, the population of the Mojave Desert seems to have decreased, although a mosaic of microenvironments permitted localized habitation throughout the desert.
Gypsum Period, 2000 B.C.–A.D. 500
The beginning of the Gypsum period coincided with the commencement of a more moist climatic era, often referred to as the Little Pluvial, about 2000 B.C. The Gypsum period was a time of intensive occupation of the desert, coupled with a broadening of economic activities and increasing contact with the California coast and Southwest. The bow and arrow was introduced late in this period, making hunting more efficient. The split-twig figurines and Coso Range petroglyphs, located just outside the planning area, suggest the existence of a rich ritual life.
Although hunting continued to be an important economic pursuit during the Gypsum period, milling stones and handstones became common during this period, indicating increased use of plant foods and reliance on hard seeds. Mortars and pestles and manos and metates are reported at Mesquite Flat in Death Valley and on the Amargosa River, where they dated between 2080 and 3250 B.C. These sites are located near or in mesquite groves, suggesting that the processing of mesquite pods with the mortar and pestle may have become an important element in the subsistence system.
Generally, the Gypsum period was a time in which the Mojave Desert population incorporated new technological items and ritual activities and increased socioeconomic ties through trade. Because of these new means of adaptation, the return of arid conditions toward the end of the Gypsum period had relatively little effect on the Mojave Desert’s population density and distribution.
Saratoga Springs Period, A.D. 500–1200
During this period, large village sites, such as Saratoga Springs in Death Valley, were developed. The settlement pattern in these places appears to have shifted from a circulating pattern of temporary camps to one with more specialized camps radiating outward from the larger habitation sites.
In the northern Mojave, from Death Valley to the Sierra Nevada, the sites of the Saratoga Springs period appear to exhibit cultural continuity with the Gypsum period being most apparent the reduction in size of projectile points as a result of the introduction of the bow and arrow. Changes in subsistence systems cannot be adequately identified, but reduction in mammal hunting, such as deer, in the northern Mojave may be postulated. During the Saratoga Springs period, there appears to be a refinement of adaptation to the arid environment of the northwest Mojave, and presumably the beginnings of the eastward expansion across the Mojave of Numic-speaking groups, who were the ancestors of the historic Shoshone and Paiute who inhabited the eastern California desert region at the time of Euro-American contact.
Essentially, the same assemblage was present across the Mojave Desert north of the Mojave River. However, Basketmaker-Pueblo influences increased with Anasazi occupation of the lower Virgin and Muddy Rivers. Research suggests that the Anasazi controlled turquoise mines near Halloran Spring in the east-central Mojave between about A.D. 700 and 900, followed by Hakataya peoples who withdrew about A.D. 1200-1300. Finally, the Southern Paiute utilized the area in late prehistoric times. The mining of turquoise resulted in Anasazi influence in much of the eastern Mojave, because small parties of these Virgin and Muddy River villagers used the region for intermittent and seasonal foraging. The extent of these forays has not been determined, but it appears to have been considerable, particularly in well-watered areas such as Las Vegas Valley, Ash Meadows, and the Spring Mountains. The area of this influence can be mapped by the distribution of Anasazi sherds occurring in considerable frequency at sites in southern Nevada and in California as far west as the Cronise Basin, west of Soda Lake. Anasazi influence set the eastern Mojave apart from the remainder of the desert.
Shoshonean Period, 1200 A.D.–Euro-American Contact
The Shoshonean period clearly anticipates the historic Native Americans with evidence of bow and arrow hunting, exploitation of plant resources using milling stones, and use of circular houses. The Anasazi influence faded after A.D. 1200 as a result of changes in climatic conditions, population movements, settlement patterns, social organization, and trade alignments.
This northern Mojave assemblage extended from Owens Valley on the west to the Valley of Fire on the east, and is represented by the Indian Ranch site and Coville Rockshelter in Panamint Valley, a variety of sites in Death Valley, and the China Ranch site and the Shoshone Rockshelter in the Amargosa Valley.
Historic archeological sites in the park are largely associated with transportation corridors, water sources, and mining operations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Status of Archeological Research
Although it is estimated that only about 6 percent of the lands within the boundaries of pre-1994 Death Valley National Monument (and an even smaller proportion of the lands added to the monument in 1994) have been surveyed for archeological resources, the overall cultural sequence is well documented. In particular, the archeological research and survey efforts of Hunt and Wallace, conducted primarily during the 1950s and 1960s, have formed the bulk of extant data about prehistoric native cultures. Nearly 2,000 archeological sites, covering some 10,000 years of human activity, have been identified. Archeological sites include house circles; habitation areas; complex sites; rockshelters; campsites; workshops; quarries and lithic scatters; hunting blinds; plant food processing stations; storage pits; cemetery and burial areas; rock art (petroglyphs/pictographs); rock alignments; and rock traps or caches. Areas of particular archeological significance within the park boundaries include Butte Valley, Mesquite Flat, the floor of Death Valley, Grapevine Canyon, high elevation localities in the Panamint Mountains, alluvial fans on the west side of Death Valley, and springs.
More recent archeological survey has been driven by compliance actions and salvage operations related to park development plans. These efforts, although more up-to-date in terms of professional scientific standards, have sometimes lacked a cohesive research design which would tie them to larger issues of a parkwide or desert-wide nature. As a result, past researchers have often been forced to treat individual sites in different portions of Death Valley as culturally distinct entities, resulting in sometimes confused cultural sequential chronologies.
At present, the National Park Service is undertaking a three-year systematic, parkwide archeological survey of at-risk areas under a cooperative agreement with the University of California, Riverside.
Landforms and Archeological Resources
While archeological sites are found on virtually every type of landform in the park, the persistent association of certain features with archeological sites allows for fairly reliable estimates about the types of landforms that are likely to support sites. Proximity to fresh water and food resources are the primary variables influencing Native American site location. For example, a spring in or near a mesquite grove would be an optimal location for a site. An alluvial fan generally lacks resources and would not have been a primary occupation or food collecting and processing site, but may have been the location of food storage facilities or a temporary campsite, trail, burial site, or rock art site, all of which fall outside of the parameters of a model based solely on subsistence variables.
However, previous environmental conditions must also be considered. Ancient late Pleistocene Era/early Lake Mojave Period beach features associated with now-extinct lacustrine and riparian habitat were prime occupation or food collecting and processing sites over 6,000 years ago, in spite of what the present landscape may look like.
Euro-American sites, while generally more easily identified than prehistoric sites, are generally associated with transportation networks and resource procurement/exploitation features. In the park, transportation routes, water sources, and mining operations are prime locations where such archeological sites may be found. The network of interconnecting roads is usually preserved and is easily discernible from aerial photographs and early maps.
National Register of Historic Places
No prehistoric archeological sites or districts within the park boundaries are listed on or have been determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Draft National Register nomination forms for archeological districts in the national park that have been prepared include: Butte Valley, Mesquite Spring, Racetrack-Goldbelt, Ubehebe Crater, Upper Emigrant, Upper Panamint, Death Valley Salt Pan, Furnace Creek, Mesquite Flat, Grapevine Canyon, Ibex Spring, Keane Wonder Mine, Saratoga Springs, and Lower Vine Ranch.
The National Park Service is planning to prepare National Register nomination forms for archeological districts such as Furnace Creek Wash, Saline Valley, and Eureka Valley.
Various cultural resource studies and publications have examined historic resources in Death Valley National Park. The most significant studies and publications are: Levy, Death Valley National Monument Historical Background Study (1969); Evans, Taylor, and Rapp, Special Report 125, Mines and Mineral Deposits in Death Valley National Monument, California (1976); Westec Services, Inc., A History of Land Use In the California Desert Conservation Area (1978); Warren, Knack, and Warren, A Cultural Resource Overview for the Amargosa-Mojave Basin Planning Units (1980); Norwood and Bull, A Cultural Resource Overview of the Eureka, Saline, Panamint and Darwin Region, East Central California (1980); Greene and Latschar, Historic Resource Study, A History of Mining in Death Valley National Monument, 4 vols. (1981); Vredenburgh, Shumway, and Hartill, Desert Fever: An Overview of Mining in the California Desert (1981); Lingenfelter, Death Valley & The Amargosa: A Land of Illusion (1986); Fowler, Dufort, Rusco, and the Historic Preservation Committee, Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, Residence Without Reservation: Ethnographic Overview and Traditional Land Use Study, Timbisha Shoshone, Death Valley National Park, California (1995); and Unrau, A History of the Lands Added to Death Valley National Monument by the California Desert Protection Act of 1994 (1997).
The national park has an impressive inventory of historical resources. The mountains and valleys contain sites associated with early Spanish and American exploration and survey of the vast Mojave Desert region, and the area is laced with remnants of prehistoric and protohistoric Native American trails as well as Euro-American trails, wagon roads, railroads, highways, and other early transportation arteries. The region contains numerous remnants of abandoned mining operations, sites of settlements long gone and nearly forgotten, railroad grades and railway structures. Fence lines, water tanks, and corrals testify to a continuing ranching-grazing industry and scattered remains of homesteads tell of a time when small farming operations were attempted in this arid land. There are significant reminders of early recreational and resort development associated with the advent of tourism to the region, as well as reminders of early federal government administration of portions of the area, including administration, maintenance, and residential buildings constructed by the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps.
The first known Euro-American visitors to the Death Valley region were more than 100 emigrants who found themselves trying to escape the desolate region after having attempted a "shortcut" from the Old Spanish Trail, across Death Valley, to the northern California goldfields during the winter of 1849-50. The name Death Valley symbolized the suffering and anxiety endured during their wanderings through the isolated region with its stark mountain ranges and arid valleys. Because of the reputation it acquired, the region remained largely unvisited until rumors of its possible mineral riches spread throughout the West during the 1850s and early 1860s, attracting such explorers as E. Darwin French who made discoveries leading to a mining rush in the Coso Mountains west of Death Valley.
During the 1850s, railroad surveying parties reconnoitered the present park area, attempting to locate a transcontinental railroad route across eastern California. In the fall of 1853, Lieutenant Tredwell Moore led a party of 17 surveyors, financed by the San Francisco-based Pacific and Atlantic Railroad Committee, to the Death Valley region to locate a railroad route through eastern California and find a suitable connecting pass over the Sierra Nevada. Although the party failed to find a railroad route, Moore’s assistant, George H. Goddard, a British artist, cartographer, and amateur naturalist, collected more than 600 geological and botanical specimens, and much new country, including the upper reaches of Death Valley, was mapped for the first time.
The next surveyors to enter the Death Valley and Mojave Desert region arrived with contracts for cadastral surveys to run township, range, and section lines for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s General Land Office, and subdivide the land into 160-acre quarter sections for settlers who might come someday. William Denton and his crews surveyed the south end of Death Valley and the Amargosa Desert region in late 1856. At the same time, Allexey W. von Schmidt surveyed Panamint Valley to the west. Early the following year, "Colonel" Henry Washington was hired to extend the surveys into the heart of Death Valley and up the Amargosa until he and his surveyors reached what they judged to be the California-Nevada boundary. The surveys, published in the surveyor general’s map of California in 1857, provided the first detailed topography of Death Valley, although the valley itself was marked only as an unnamed "Dry Lake."
During 1861, the United States and California Boundary Commission passed through the Death Valley region. Starting from the Colorado River, the commission completed only about one-third of the boundary between California and Nevada toward its destination at Lake Tahoe. It was not until 1872 that von Schmidt returned to the Death Valley country to run the first complete survey of the boundary line from Lake Tahoe to the Colorado River.
Nevada mining interests turned covetous eyes to Death Valley as a possible shortcut route from the state capital at Carson City to the Pahranagat Mining District near the southeastern border of the state. In 1866, Nevada’s first governor, Henry G. Blasdel, accompanied by the State Mineralogist, R. H. Stretch, led a survey party through Death Valley looking for a shorter route.
The search for a route between Owens Valley and Silver Peak and Pahranagat east of Death Valley in Nevada brought another expedition through the Death Valley region during the spring of 1867. This party was led by Cavalry Lieutenant Charles E. Bendire from Camp Independence, a fort that had been established in Owens Valley on July 4, 1862, to protect the growing Euro-American mining and agricultural settlements in that area from Indian attack. The party scouted the region east of Coso, through the Panamints, and across Death Valley to the Amargosa and beyond. Maps compiled by some of the scouting parties from Camp Independence during the years from 1862 to 1877, although not easy to interpret, provide information on early routes that passed through some of the lands that were added to Death Valley National Monument in 1994.
George M. Wheeler’s extensive topographic and scientific surveys west of the 100th meridian for the U.S. Corps of Engineers during the 1870s earned him national recognition and made an invaluable contribution to the knowledge of the West. During his first major expedition in 1871, Wheeler’s men reconnoitered some 72,250 square miles, covering portions of lower Nevada, eastern California, southwestern Utah, and northwestern, central, and southern Arizona and including the Death Valley and Mojave Desert regions. The success of this expedition enabled Wheeler to obtain congressional support for the extensive program of exploration that he would undertake throughout the remainder of the decade. During 1875, his detachments again penetrated Death Valley via Darwin Canyon and Panamint Valley and the Mojave from the south edge of Death Valley to the Colorado River. The Wheeler surveys recorded data on archeology, geology, botany, zoology, and Native Americans and developed topographic maps of the region.
Beginning in the 1890s, scientific exploration expeditions penetrated the region. One of the most noteworthy undertakings was the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Death Valley Expedition in 1891. Crisscrossing the country from Panamint to Pahrump and Saratoga Springs to Sylvania, this expedition was one of the first in a series of biological surveys of the West conducted by naturalist Clinton Hart Merriam, chief of the department’s Division of Ornithology and Mammalogy in Washington, D.C., who initiated studies of the geographic distribution of plants and animals in order to define life zones that could be used to assess the suitability of land for farming and ranching.
During the late 1890s and early 1900s, state and federal government geologists arrived in the eastern California desert to conduct the initial scientific studies of the area’s geological formations and mineralogical potential. Surveyors from the U.S. Geological Survey mapped most of the region during the early 1900s, producing the first reliable topographic maps of the region. In 1909, Walter C. Mendenhall, who would later become director of the Geological Survey, issued a guide to the "watering places" throughout the eastern California-southern Nevada desert country, providing detailed information and maps on the main routes of travel and the location and description of irrigating and artesian waters and springs in the region.
During the early 1900s, Francis M. "Borax" Smith attempted to tap his Amargosa Valley borax properties near Death Valley with a traction road, consisting of a rock base wagon road from his newly developed Lila C. Mine to the California Eastern railhead at Ivanpah II (There were three settlements with the name of Ivanpah). In April 1904, a traction engine left Ivanpah on the inaugural trip, but it completed only 14 miles before bogging down. Smith then determined to build the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, extending northward from Ludlow through the region to Beatty, Nevada. Operating from 1907 to 1940, the railroad, along with its feeder lines, tapped the growing mining settlements in the region. Clark would also construct the Las Vegas and Tonopah, a feeder line extending from Las Vegas to Beatty and Goldfield that passed through a segment of present eastern Death Valley National Park.
Mining activities in the present Inyo and San Bernardino counties of the eastern Mojave began during the winter of 1849–50. In Inyo County, two of the Forty-Niners who blundered into Death Valley discovered a promising mineral deposit near one of their campsites in Panamint Valley and carried some of the ore out of the Death Valley region. Because this ore was reportedly used later to fashion a gunsight, this has since been known as the "Lost Gunsight Mine." The location of the ore deposit is unknown, but is believed to be somewhere in the Panamint or Argus ranges.
In San Bernardino County, gold was discovered at Salt Springs near the Amargosa River in December 1849. This discovery was made by a member of the Forty-Niners who chose not to take the shortcut through Death Valley. This party was led to San Bernardino by Jefferson Hunt, a veteran of the Mormon Battalion.
Fueled by rumors of the Lost Gunsight, a stampede of prospectors scoured the eastern California desert after the discovery of the Comstock silver deposits in 1858-59. During the early 1860s, two groups of prospectors, one led by E. Darwin French and the other by Samuel G. George, discovered and named mountain peaks, a waterfall, a "volcano" (Coso Hot Springs), an antimony mine in Wildrose Canyon, and gold and silver mines in the Coso and Slate ranges, those over-promoted mines being worked until the mid-1860s. Miners from Aurora, Nevada, traveled south to discover the White Mountain City mines, north of Death Valley, in 1861.
In 1865, silver-lead ores were discovered by Mexican miners at Cerro Gordo in the Inyo Mountains west of Death Valley, and southeast of the valley lead deposits were noted east of Tecopa that would be developed as the Gunsight Mine. Cerro Gordo was the most significant discovery of the 1860s, and its development would stimulate the economy of Los Angeles much as the Comstock had contributed to the growth of San Francisco. Mining engineer Mortimer Belshaw systematically developed the entire hill, now known as Cerro Gordo Peak, conquering problems in linking Cerro Gordo to the outside world, smelting ore, and bringing water to the desolate area. Criticized as a ruthless businessman, Belshaw nevertheless furnished the technology and obtained the capital needed to extract a large percentage of the $17,000,000 in ore values that would be extracted from the peak.
Although the mines at Salt Springs and in the Providence, Coso, and Slate ranges were vacated during the late 1860s because of trouble with Native Americans who sought to protect their traditional lands against the influx of Euro-American miners, the threat of Indian attack was removed by 1870, and prospectors began heading back to the abandoned portions of the desert.
The prosperous national economy after the Civil War stimulated mining ventures in the California desert region, but the bank panic in 1873 and subsequent depression curtailed speculative capital for mining at the moment when three significant discoveries were made west of Death Valley at Panamint (discovered six months before the crash), Darwin, on the west side of the Argus Range, and Lookout, on the east side of the Argus Range. Charcoal kilns in the Wildrose area were constructed to supply charcoal to the area’s mines. Of these three silver-lead districts, Panamint, located on the west side of the Panamint Range, was the most famous and least productive. Within two years after its discovery, over-promoted Panamint City was already on the decline. Darwin and Lookout, located just outside Death Valley National Park, shared the spotlight equally as the significant California desert mining districts of the 1870s, each producing approximately $2,000,000. Lesser mining ventures were established at Chloride Cliff and Lee in the Funeral Mountains on the east side of Death Valley.
The discovery of nonmetallics in the eastern Mojave, initially of borax and later of talc, ensured the region’s industrial future, because in time these commodities far outweighed the more sought-after metallic elements in lasting commercial value. The first productive mining operations in the Death Valley region focused on the extraction and processing of borax during the 1880s. The first borax mine in the valley was operated at the Eagle Borax Works near Bennett’s Well from 1882–84, while the later Harmony Borax Works (1883–88) popularized Death Valley with the famous 165-mile 20-mule team wagon run to the railhead at Mojave. The Conn and Trudo Borax Works operated in Saline Valley, west of Death Valley, from the late 1880s to the early 1900s. Borax was discovered at Old Ryan on the east side of Death Valley in 1903, the result of the Pacific Coast Borax Company’s search for a deposit to replace the diminishing ore reserves at its Borate mine. In 1915, New Ryan replaced Old Ryan as the center of the company’s operations, when the Biddy McCarthy Mine superseded the Lila C. During the early 1900s, borax and sodium carbonate were mined at Soda Lake. In 1911, the Saline Valley salt deposit was developed, and during subsequent years its production would be transported over the Inyos via an engineering marvel known as the salt tram.
Gold mining dominated mining ventures in the eastern California desert region during the 1890s, the Panic of 1893 resulting in political decisions favorable to gold interests over those of silver ventures. During this time, the widespread use of cyanide for treatment of gold ore sent many prospectors out to rework old dumps, and formerly unprofitable mines were reopened. These developments led to discovery and development of the Ratcliff (Radcliffe) and World Beater mines in Pleasant Canyon, the Gem Mine in Jail Canyon, the Oh Be Joyful Mine in Tuber Canyon on the western slopes of the Panamints, and mines in the Ibex Mountains southeast of Death Valley.
Not until the early 1900s did conditions become conducive to large-scale hard-rock mining operations in the eastern California desert region, prompted in part by the improvement of transportation facilities and by a renewal of interest in gold and silver. The significant discovery at Goldfield, Nevada, in 1903 led to a stampede early the following year. During the fall of 1904, the mining rush extended southward to Rhyolite, and soon spilled over into Inyo and San Bernardino counties in eastern California. A variety of metallic minerals were exploited during the 1900s, including gold (Bullfrog Hills, Skidoo, Ubehebe, Chloride Cliff, Funeral Mountains [especially the Keane Wonder Mine], Black Mountains; antimony (Wildrose Canyon); copper (Greenwater, Kunze, Black Mountains); lead, zinc and silver (Ubehebe, Titus Canyon, Lemoigne Canyon, Galena Canyon, and Wingate Wash); and tungsten (Harrisburg Flats, Trail Canyon). This activity resulted in the formation of boom towns whose progress paralleled for a time the maturation of Goldfield, Tonopah, and Rhyolite in Nevada. Ephemeral mining camps, such Greenwater sprang up throughout the desert region. These mining ventures flourished until the financial panic of 1907, which resulted in an immediate slowdown of work and often total cessation of mining activity.
During the years immediately preceding and during the nation’s involvement in World War I, mining in the eastern California desert region experienced a general revival as prospectors began searching the old dumps for overlooked fortunes in manganese, lead, zinc, talc, and tungsten. Darwin and Cerro Gordo, among others, were "rediscovered," and had record productions during the war years. Nitrate prospecting was conducted in the Ibex and Saratoga Springs areas of Death Valley, prompted by the nation’s need for the product to manufacture explosives and fertilizers.
Although the inflationary 1920s put a damper on new mineral discoveries and mining development in the California desert, the Shoshone silver mines provided a modest output. Sulphur deposits were opened in the Crater area in northern Death Valley during the mid-1920s and developed during the 1930s and early 1940s.
The 1930s witnessed a revival of gold mining in the desert. Although the major discoveries occurred in Kern County, older districts experienced revivals. Prospect holes appeared where gold was known to have occurred, and some new discoveries, such as the Marble Canyon placers north of Saline Valley, were made as a result of this heightened interest.
The United States recovered from the Depression largely as a result of the world-wide demand for industrial and military-related products with the onset of World War II. Factories were placed in full production to turn out war materials, and the government paid premium prices for minerals such as tungsten, antimony, manganese, iron, copper, lead, and zinc necessary for military industrial production. Darwin produced more than 100,000,000 pounds of lead and 5,000,000 ounces of silver during 1941-51. Manganese and iron deposits were developed in the Owlshead Mountains south of Death Valley. Concerned that more than 20,000 men were employed at 250 gold mines and 700 placer mines throughout the western United States, the War Production Board issued Limitation Order L-208 on October 8, 1942, classifying gold mines (lode mines producing less than 1,200 tons in 1941 were exempt) as non-essential for the war effort and giving mine owners 60 days to cease operations.
Uranium fever, much like the gold fever of earlier days, swept the eastern Mojave during the mid-1950s. Tungsten prospecting revived after World War II, and a major talc industry that had begun during World War I but had never thrived because of limited markets and remoteness of the deposits revived. Talc has been produced for some years in the Death Valley region, including the Warm Spring-Galena Canyon area, southern Ibex Hills, Owlshead Mountains, and Talc Hills.
Throughout the eastern California desert region, little oases with rich pockets of ground could become for a time more profitable bonanzas than most of the surrounding mineral lands. These isolated patches of fertile soil and perennial springs could produce crops of vegetables, fruit, and hay, or fatten a herd of beef cattle, thus providing quick fortunes for the homesteader or rancher as long as the neighboring mining camps boomed. Although most ranchers held 160-acre homestead claims, they were usually able to irrigate only a faction of that, while their stock ranged free for miles beyond. The proximity of ranches and mining camps determined the profitability of both, but ultimately it was the size of the ore pocket that limited the size of the salable crop, so as the mines went from boom to bust, so did the ranches.
The natural fecundity of watered land in the region had long been demonstrated by Native Americans, who raised abundant crops of corn, beans, melons, and squash around some of the springs and seeps. During the late 1860s, Mormon Charlie, a progressive Paiute, started a stock ranch east of Death Valley in Pahrump Valley, Nevada, with animals left to him by the miners at Potosi. Euro-American homesteaders soon followed.
Andrew Jackson Laswell, a Kentucky native, is generally credited with being Death Valley’s first homesteader, establishing, along with his partner Cal Mowrey, a hay ranch at Bennett’s Well during the summer of 1874 to supply the Panamint mines. The Panamint boom also attracted William Johnson, another Kentuckian who started a truck garden and planted fruit trees in the canyon that now bears his name on the west side of Death Valley some six miles east of Panamint City. During the early 1870s, William L. Hunter started a seasonal ranch, which would become known as the Hunter Mountain Ranch, where he left his pack animals, used for his pack train enterprise at Cerro Gordo, to graze while he pursued his mining interests. In 1872, Noah T. Piper, son of English immigrants and a native of Michigan who arrived in California in 1855, established the Oasis Ranch north of the Last Chance Range in Fish Lake Valley to provide foodstuffs for the emerging mining camps in the surrounding areas of eastern California and western Nevada. A few ranchers, such as Charles Murphy who squatted at Pigeon Spring about 1873, also settled in the hills of the Last Chance range north of Death Valley during the Lida, Nevada, boom.
During the late 1870s and 1880s, Euro-American, as well as Native American, settlers established ranches in Death Valley and in areas to the west. Hungry Bill, a Panamint Shoshone, moved back onto Johnson’s abandoned ranch, and with the help of George Hansen, generally known as Indian George, replanted the garden, terraced and irrigated several more acres, and set out more peach trees. Hungry Bill’s brother, Panamint Tom, established a ranch in Warm Spring Canyon, and Indian George established a ranch at the mouth of Hall Canyon north of Warm Spring on the east side of Panamint Valley. The Saline Valley Indian Ranch, which may have had 125 inhabitants at its peak, was developed using the waters of Hunter Creek, and on June 30, 1892, a 160-acre land grant, consisting of two 80-acre parcels, was issued to Tom Hunter and Caesar, heads of the ranch’s principal families. At the north end of Death Valley, Jacob Staininger, who would become known as the "Hermit of Death Valley," patented land in Upper Grapevine Canyon where he raised mustangs and quail and tended a vineyard. The largest and most profitable ranch in Death Valley, however, was the Greenland Ranch at the mouth of Furnace Creek, established in 1883 as part of the extensive borax operation of William Tell Coleman. Ultimately, this ranching operation would become known as the Furnace Creek Ranch, serving as the focus of tourist accommodations and as the headquarters of Death Valley National Park. Nevares Springs, above the Cow Creek residential area, was homesteaded by Adolphus Nevares in the early 1900s where he grew alfalfa, melons, and vegetables.
Many of the best ranch lands in the Death Valley region were located east of the valley on the Amargosa at Resting Spring, Ash Meadows, and Oasis Valley, and farther east at Pahrump where more than a dozen ranches were started during the mining booms of the 1870s. Charles King, a Yankee from Maine who had joined the gold rush to California in 1850, was the first rancher to settle on the Amargosa, purchasing 1,300 head of cattle in southern California and driving them to Ash Meadows in January 1873 to supply the mining settlements of Panamint, Ivanpah, and Chloride Cliff. Philander and Leander Lee arrived in the Amargosa region with a herd of cattle from the San Joaquin Valley during the Panamint rush in the winter of 1874–75, staking out a spring near King. Farther south in the Amargosa, William and Robert Brown started the first ranch at Resting Spring after discovering silver at Tecopa. Another ranch was established on Willow Creek near Resting Spring to serve the Tecopa mines, and after Ah Foo, a Tibetan, farmed it for several years during the 1880s it became known as China Ranch.
During the 1930s–50s, a few families established homesteaded "recreational ranches" in the Goler Wash and Butte Valley areas in the southwest portion of present Death Valley National Park. Examples of such homesteads are the Myers and Barker ranches.
Many homes stood empty in the east Mojave at the beginning of the Depression. Driven by the economic downturn, people moved into some of these abandoned sites and managed to eke out a living, some people attempting to mine gold on an almost primitive scale. These proud people, unwilling to face the urban soup lines, quietly wrote a chapter in the history of the eastern California desert.
Until the 1930s, the public lands in the region were administered by the General Land Office (GLO), established in 1812 as a bureau in the U.S. Treasury Department and later transferred to the Department of the Interior in 1849. In 1934, the Taylor Grazing Act provided for the segregation of up to 8,000,000 acres (later raised to 142,000,000 acres) for grazing purposes under the jurisdiction of the newly established Grazing Service (GS) in the Interior Department. The Bureau of Land Management was established in 1946, uniting the functions of the former General Land Office and Grazing Service. The Bureau of Land Management was given responsibility for administration and management of all public lands in the United States and Alaska, including its surface and subsurface resources.
On February 11, 1933, President Herbert C. Hoover issued Executive Proclamation 2028 (47 Stat. 2554), establishing Death Valley National Monument under the provisions of the Antiquities Act of 1906. The original monument’s acreage of approximately 1,600,000 acres was expanded by presidential proclamations in 1937 and 1952, increasing the monument’s size to nearly 2,100,000 acres. Under the provisions of Title III of the California Desert Protection Act of October 31, 1994 (Public Law No. 103-433; 108 Stat. 4471), Death Valley was designated a national park and acquired jurisdiction over more than 1,200,000 of additional lands formerly administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
The Civilian Conservation Corps, established in 1933 as a New Deal unemployment relief measure during the Depression, maintained three permanent camps in Death Valley National Monument during 1933-42 – the twin camps of Funeral Range and Cow Creek (constructed in 1933) and Camp Wildrose (constructed in 1935). The camps were used, and surviving standing structures are still being used, as park administrative and maintenance buildings. Several spike camps operated for varying periods at Mesquite Spring, Emigrant Canyon, Daylight Pass, and Butte Valley. The CCC developed wells and springs and constructed administration and maintenance buildings, including the Emigrant Ranger Station, residences, facilities at the Timbisha Shoshone Village, roads, trails, parking areas, campgrounds, picnic facilities, and the monument’s airplane landing field and water system.
Recreational Development/Tourism
Recognition of the recreational and park values of the California desert was first undertaken during the pre-World War I years by such organizations as the Automobile Club of Southern California and the International Desert Protective Association, both of which encouraged their members to tour the desert and assisted them to do so with maps, sign programs, and lobbying campaigns for better roads. Since that time, the eastern California desert region has attracted an ever increasing number of tourists interested in taking advantage of its recreational opportunities, including hunting, trapping, rockhounding, hiking, camping, and sightseeing.
Several resorts were developed in the Death Valley region during the 1920s and 1930s to provide visitor accommodations, thus stimulating travel to the national monument. In 1925, Herman W. Eichbaum began construction of a toll road extending from Darwin Wash to Stovepipe Wells via Panamint Valley and Towne Pass. The following year, Eichbaum opened the Stovepipe Wells Resort, consisting of 20 modified tent houses, restaurant facilities, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a landing strip for the first passenger air service to Death Valley.
About 1927, the Pacific Coast Borax Company converted its employee dormitories at New Ryan to the Death Valley View Hotel and its headquarters building at Death Valley Junction to the Amargosa Hotel. Both resorts, however, were short-lived.
The Furnace Creek Inn was opened in 1927 by the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Like Stovepipe Wells, Furnace Creek Inn employees conducted motor trips to area attractions and led tours to local borax mines. The facility included a swimming pool, golf course, and tennis courts.
Furnace Creek Ranch, initially operated as a ranch associated with the borax operations of William Tell Coleman, was developed into a resort by the Pacific Coast Borax Company in 1933, designed to provide less costly lodgings than the Inn. The ranch features the Borax Museum, telling the story of borax extraction in Death Valley.
During the 1930s, a short-lived small resort and water bottling enterprise was established at Saratoga Springs, and a store, cafe, gas station, and cabins were constructed in Wildrose Canyon, the latter being used until the 1970s when they were removed by the National Park Service.
Construction of Scotty’s Castle, a vacation retreat for millionaire Albert Johnson and his wife Bessie on Jacob Staininger’s old Upper Grapevine Ranch, began about 1922. Construction continued until 1931, but the never-completed castle became a well-known tourist attraction because of its association with the widely reported antics of Walter Scott (Death Valley Scotty). During the mid-1930s, tours were offered to castle visitors and the Johnsons began charging entrance fees, hired people to staff the tours, and opened a small gift shop. The Gospel Foundation, established by Johnson to administer the castle prior to his death, provided formal tours, overnight accommodations, a gift shop, and a cafe until 1970 when the property was purchased by the National Park Service. The complex looks much as it did during the 1930s, and interpretation and preservation efforts have been focused on the 1931–54 period, the latter year being the date of Scotty’s death.
The Timbisha Shoshone people have lived in and around Death Valley since before the arrival of European culture. During the late 1920s and early 1930s members of the tribe lived in four different locations in the Furnace Creek area. Finally in 1936 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the National Park Service agreed on a site south of the Furnace Creek Ranch for a permanent residence area. This site became known as the Timbisha Shoshone Village, an area of approximately 40 acres.
In 1936, under NPS supervision, construction started on nine adobe structures using materials provided by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These were to be residences for Timbisha families. Adobe was one of the common construction materials of the day in Death Valley. Many NPS structures dating to the 1930s are constructed of adobe.
The following year two communal facilities, a laundry and a trading post, were constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps under NPS supervision. By 1938 the adobe structures housed most of the Timbisha Shoshone families living in the Death Valley area. Most families lived in their homes into the 1940s. Some moved elsewhere during World War II because of lack of employment in the region of the park. In the 1950s five adobe structures that were perceived to be vacant or semi-occupied were removed by the National Park Service, leaving six structures.
During the early 1980s, the remaining structures were rehabilitated and additional housing was purchased and moved to the village. The village has maintained a population of approximately 40–50 persons through the 1980s and the 1990s.
Beginning in the 1930s, and for many years, there was a permit between the National Park Service and the tribe for use of the village site. In 1983 the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe was granted federal recognition by the secretary of the interior. Since about that time there has not been a formal permit in place.
Many cultural landscapes exist in the national park that are potentially eligible for listing on the National Register, but cultural landscape studies have not been undertaken to identify their character-defining elements. Landscapes reflecting mining, ranching, ethnographic, and administrative activities can be seen throughout the park. Especially significant landscapes are found at Scotty’s Castle, Lower Vine Ranch, and the salt tram in Saline Valley, and, in association with many of the CCC-era national monument administration structures. Other significant cultural landscapes include the: (a) contemporary Timbisha Shoshone Village; (b) Chloride Cliff and Keane Wonder mining sites; (c) Cow Creek CCC maintenance yard and administrative area; (d) various large and small mining sites; (e) cultivated areas and orchards connected with ranching and agricultural activities; and (f) extensive layouts of gardens, groves, and recreational facilities related to tourist resorts.
National Register of Historic Places
Six historic period properties in Death Valley National Park are listed in the National Register of Historic Places:
Five historic properties in the national park have been determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places:
Seventeen draft national register nomination forms have been prepared for the following properties in the national park in connection with the aforementioned Historic Resource Study: A History of Mining. The forms have been submitted to the Pacific-Great Basin Support Office in San Francisco, but no formal determinations of eligibility have been processed for them:
Three draft national register nomination forms have been prepared for the following historic properties in the lands that were added to the national monument in 1994:
Four draft national register nomination forms were prepared by the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe through a NPS Historic Preservation Grant:
Park staff are responsible for monitoring, documenting, and preserving a large, diverse museum collection that includes more than 177,000 cataloged objects and specimens, mostly stored in substandard conditions. An additional 23,000 archeological artifacts and records are at the NPS Western Archeological Center in Tucson, Arizona. Museum collections include historical objects and archival documents, archeological artifacts, ethnological materials, biological specimens, geological samples, and paleontological materials. Numbers of currently cataloged objects in the various disciplines range from an estimated 78,900 historical objects to approximately 280 ethnological items. There are potentially 1,600 objects associated with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.
The museum collection constitutes an important part of the overall resources offered by the park. In historic districts, the collection constitutes a primary resource that visitors view. A relatively large number of historic objects are on display in the National Register-listed Death Valley Scotty Historic District. Diverse material types are exhibited in the historic house museum as well as on the grounds.
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