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Death Valley Scotty the Man and the Myth by Hank Johnston Soft Cover
Death Valley Scotty: the Man and the Myth by Hank Johnston
Soft Cover REVISED SECOND EDITION
48 pages
Copyright 1972
CONTENTS
The Cowboy and the Lady
All that Glitters
The Coyote Special
The Man from Chicago
The Battle of Wingate Pass
Million-Dollar Mine Hoax
Castle in the Desert
The Last Hurrah
INTRODUCTION
Preternatural and forbidding, Death Valley lies snuggled between the mountains along the California-Nevada border. It is an awesome and nightmarish place: the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, and more consistently than anywhere else, the world's hottest spot.
The Indians called it Tomesha, the Ground Afire, and the searing midsummer heat bears out the aptness of the name. In July and August, when temperatures over 120are regularly recorded, the unwary traveler may wonder if Hell itself can be more accursed.
Yet for much of the year, Death Valley boasts a primeval beauty no other place can exactly match. Jagged, snow-capped peaks rise thousands of feet above barren stretches of salt. Undulating sand dunes, sculptured by swirling desert winds, provide a curious contrast to kaleidoscopic rock formations. From October to May the climate is remarkably salubrious, the air a pure delight.
Nature has worked on a grand scale in Death Valley. Covering an area 150-miles long by 5- to 15-miles wide, it is a land of dramatic starkness, of ear-shattering stillness, of strange illusion. Exhibits of the geological column spanning from earliest times to the present make it a naturalists' paradise.
But oddly enough, for all its physical wonderment, Death Valley's most intriguing mystery was embodied in a paunchy, singlehanded prospector who for fifty years captured the headlines of America with his bizarre and flamboyant escapades.
His name was Walter Scott, but he was known to the world as "Death Valley Scotty."
He toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, then achieved national prominence in 1905 when he chartered a special train to break the speed record from Los Angeles to Chicago. He told wild tales of gold, flaunted thick rolls of currency, fought a variety of sensational court battles, moved alternately from bum to hero and back again, and finally climaxed it all by giving his name to a strange, multimillion dollar castle in the wasteland of Death Valley's Grapevine Canyon.
Part fact, a great part folklore, Scotty's singular life was perhaps the Last Hurrah of the Old West. Even his death in 1954 rated headlines in some of the nation's greatest newspapers - this despite the fact that he confessed under oath on two widely publicized occasions that his claims of golden riches were only an elaborate hoax.
What was the magical attraction, the Scotty Charisma, that enabled him to keep his name in the news for half-a-century (probably longer than any other "common man" in modern history)? What universal appeal lay in the antics of this self-styled bonanza hunter?
Scotty may have represented the realization of Everyman's secret dream: he had money, notoriety, lived a prodigal, free-born life, and answered to no one. He singlehandedly bucked the Establishment, and like the hero of a thousand classic Westerns, somehow seemed larger than real life. Although only a paper hero, created and re-created by the news media, Scotty exuded a peculiar blend of mystery and showmanship that proved just the right combination to intrigue a credulous public again and again. He gave the masses entertainment and a vicarious sense of adventure. Most people wanted to believe Scotty's tales, and as a result, they often did.
In the cold light of retrospection, Walter Scott accomplished little more than the hiring of a fast train with someone else's money, and later, the reflected fame of a millionaire-companion's unusual palace in the desert. He was a flimflam man by trade - a beguiling desert huckster who, as one judge put it, "sold the city man Death Valley." Yet he became a national celebrity as a result, a living legend, and - although he never produced a single worthwhile claim - surely the most famous prospector the world has ever known.
Perhaps that was the real gold mine he searched for all along.
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