Loafing Along Death Valley Trails

I restrained a gasp as he pointed to the side of a gorge 8000 feet up on Signal Mountain. “No trip at all…”

No argument could convince him that the trip was foolhardy and on the third day we started through Hall’s Canyon opposite the Indian Ranch. The ascent from the canyon is so steep that in many places we had to crawl on hands and knees. The three and a half miles were made in seven hours, but on the return the inevitable happened. Shorty, exhausted, staggered from the trail and collapsed. When he rose, he wobbled, but managed to reach a bush and rolled under it. I ran to his side. It seemed the end. “You go ahead,” he said weakly. “I’m through.”

I had given him all my water and exacting a promise that he would remain under the bush, I started for help at the Indian Ranch, to bring him out.

Coming up, I had paid no attention to the trail and was uncertain of my way – which was further confused by criss-crossed trails of wild burros and mountain sheep. Coming to a canyon that forked, I was not sure which to take and panicked with fear took a sudden uncalculated choice and started up a trail. The desert gods must have guided my feet, for it proved to be the right one and an hour later I came upon the green seepage of water.

I dug a hole; let the scum run off then drank slowly and lay down to rest. In my last conscious moment a huge rattler passed within a few inches of my face. But rattlers were unimportant then and I went to sleep.

The swish of brush awoke me and I saw Shorty staggering down the trail. He fell beside the water and was instantly asleep. Time I knew, was the measure of life and I allowed him twenty minutes to rest, then awoke him and made him go in front. On a ledge, he slumped again, his body hanging over the cliff with a 1000 foot fall to rocks below.

I managed to catch him by the seat of his trousers as he began to slip, and dragged him back on the trail. Somehow I got him to the bottom. There the canyon widens upon a level area covered with dense growth. Walking ahead I suddenly missed him. He had crawled from the trail and it required an hour to find him and this I did by the noise of his rattly breathing.

I half carried, half dragged him to the car and lifted him in. He was asleep before I could close the door and remained unconscious for the entire 11 miles of corduroy road to Ballarat. There Fred Gray and Bob Warnack lifted him from the car and laid him on his bed. None of us believed that Shorty Harris would ever leave that bed alive.

The next morning I tiptoed softly out of the room, went over to the old saloon and had breakfast with Tom, the caretaker. Afterward we sat outside smoking and talking of Hungry Hattie’s feuding and her sister’s mining deals, when we heard steady thumping sounds coming from Shorty’s place. We looked. Bareheaded, Shorty Harris was chopping wood.

Shorty was born near Providence, Rhode Island, July 2, 1856. He had only a hazy memory of his parents. His father, a shoemaker, died impoverished when Shorty was six years old. “… I went to live with my aunt. If she couldn’t catch me doing something, she figured I’d outsmarted her and beat me up on general principles.”

At nine he ran away and obtained work in the textile mills of Governor William Sprague, dipping calico. The village priest taught him to read and write and apart from this, his only school was the alley. The curriculum of the alley is hunger, tears, and pain but somehow in that alley he found time to play and learned that with play came laughter. Thenceforth life to Shorty Harris was just one long playday.

In 1876 he started West and crawled out of a boxcar in Dodge City, Kansas. About were stacks of buffalo hides, bellowing cattle, “chippies,” gamblers, cow hands, and a chance for youngsters who had come out of alleys.

“… Among those I remember at Dodge City were my friends Wyatt Earp and a thin fellow with a cough. If he liked you he’d go to hell for you. He was Doc Holliday – the coldest killer in the West. I had a job in a livery stable. Job was all right, but too much gunplay. Cowboys shooting up the town. Gamblers shooting cowboys.”

Flushed with his pay check, Shorty wandered into a saloon and met one of the percentage girls – a lovely creature, not altogether bad. They danced and Shorty suggested a stroll in the moonlight. And soon Shorty was in love.

“Shorty,” she asked, “why be a sucker? Why don’t you go to Leadville? You might find a good claim.”

“I’m broke,” he told her.

“I’ve got some money,” she said, and reached into her purse.

“I’m no mac,” he snapped.

Finally she thrust the bills into his pocket.

At Leadville he went up a gulch. Luck was kind. He found a good claim and going into Leadville sold it for $15,000. Later it produced millions. Within a week he was penniless. “Why, all I’ve got to do is to go up another gulch,” he told sympathetic friends.

On this trip his feet were frozen and he was carried out on the back of his partner. Taken to the hospital, the surgeon told him that only the amputation of both feet could save his life.

Telling a group of friends about it in the Ballarat cabin later, Shorty of course had to add a few details of his own: “Dan Driscoll came to see me and I told him what the sawbones said. ‘Why hell,’ Dan says. ‘Won’t be nothing left of you. You’ve got to get outa here. When that nurse goes, I’ll take you to a doc who’ll save them feet.’ And the first thing I knew I was in the other hospital.

“The doc whetted his meat cleaver, picked up a saw and was about to go to work, when he found there was nothing to dope me with. ‘I’ll fix it,’ Doc says, and wham – he slapped me stiff. I don’t know what he did, but when I came to I was good as new.”

After selling a second claim to Haw Tabor, Shorty was again in the money and remembered the girl in Dodge City. Returning, he looked her up, took her to dinner. They danced and dined and Shorty toasted her in “bubble water.” “I reckon everybody in Dodge City thought a caliph had come to town. No little girl suffered for new toggery. No bum lacked a tip. In a week I was broke again.

“Going down to the freight yard to steal a ride on the rods I met the girl and the next I knew, I was begging her to marry me. ‘Shorty, you don’t know anything about my past, and still you want to marry me?’

“‘You don’t know anything about my past either,’ I said. But it was no go.”

Years afterward when Shorty and I were camped in Hall Canyon, I asked him if he would actually have married a girl like her.

“Who am I to count slips?” he bristled. “I did ask her,” and he swabbed a tear that had dried fifty years ago.

In 1898, after working for a grubstake he started on the trip that led at last to Death Valley, by way of the San Juan country – one of the world’s roughest regions. “I walked through Arizona, to Northern Mexico – every mile of it desert. A labor strike in Colonel Green’s mines threw me out of a job and I started back. Ran out of water and lived five days on the juice of a bulbous plant – la Flora Morada. Each bulb has a few drops.

“On the Mojave I ran out of water again. Finally saw a mangy old camel drinking at a pool. I had enough sense left to know there were no camels around and went on till I flopped. A fellow picked me up. I told him I’d been so goofy I’d seen a camel and water, but I knew it was just a mirage. ‘You damned fool,’ he said. ‘It was a camel and you saw water. Hi Jolly turned that camel loose.’”

Shorty reached Tintic, Utah, and from there walked over a waterless desert to the Johnnie mine, where he was given shelter, food, and clothing.

Bishop Cannon of the Mormon Church sent him into the Panamint to monument a gold claim. “I was the only fool they could find to cross Death Valley in mid summer. I found the claim but it proved to be patented land.”

Shorty was recuperating from his last operation at my home when he came into the house one morning with fire in his eyes and a paper in his hand. “Read that and let’s get going.” (It has been erroneously stated that Shorty couldn’t read. Though he had little schooling and a cataract impaired his sight, he could read to the end.)

The paper announced a strike in Tuba Canyon near Ballarat. “Why, I know a place nobody ever saw but me and a few eagles…” His losses increased from a thousand to a million dollars a day because he wasn’t on the job, and in May we started for Ballarat by the longer route through Death Valley.

When we reached Jim Dayton’s grave, he asked me to stop and getting out of the car, he walked into the brush, returning with a few yellow and blue wild flowers, laid them on Dayton’s grave. “God bless you, old fellow. You’ll have to move over soon and make room for me.”

Then turning to me, he said: “When I die bury me beside old Jim.” Raising his hand and moving his finger as if he were writing the words, he added: “Above me write, ‘Here lies Shorty Harris, a single blanket jackass prospector.’”

It was his way of saying he had played his game – not by riding over the desert with a deluxe camping outfit, but the hard way – with beans and a single blanket. He was also saying, I think, goodbye to the Death Valley that he loved; its golden dunes, its creeping canyons and pots of gold.

About one o’clock in the morning, Sunday, November 11, 1934, the phone awakened me. At the other end of the line was Charles Brown. Shorty Harris lay dead at Big Pine. “He just went to sleep and didn’t wake up,” Charlie said.

Shorty had died Saturday morning, November 10, and Charlie had arranged for the remains to be brought down into Death Valley and buried beside James Dayton Sunday afternoon.

Out of Los Angeles, out of towns and settlements, canyons, and hills came the largest crowd that had ever assembled in Death Valley, to wait at Furnace Creek Ranch for the hearse that would come nearly 200 miles over the mountains from Big Pine. It was delayed at every village and by burro-men along the road, who wanted a last look upon the face of Shorty.

At one o’clock the caravan arrived and then began the procession down the valley. The sun was setting and the shadows of the Panamint lay halfway across the valley when the grave was reached. Brown had sent Ernest Huhn from Shoshone the night previous, a distance of about 60 miles, to dig the grave.

On the desert a man dies and gets his measure of earth – often with not so much as a tarpaulin. With this in mind Ernie had made the hole to fit the man, but with the coffin it was a foot too short. While waiting for the grave to be lengthened, the casket was opened and in the fading twilight Shorty’s friends passed in file about the casket, while the Indians, silhouetted against the brush paid silent tribute to him whom their fathers and now their children knew as “Short Man.”

So began the first funeral ever held in the bottom of Death Valley. Drama, packed into a few moments of a dying day. No discordant ballyhoo. No persiflage… “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want…” A bugler stepped beside the grave and silvered notes of taps went over the valley. The casket was lowered into the grave as the stars came out, and he was covered with the earth he loved. Thoughtful women placed wreaths of athol and desert holly and, with his face toward his desert stars, Shorty Harris holed-in forever.

Going back to Shoshone with the Browns, I told Charlie of the time I had stopped at Jim Dayton’s grave with Shorty. “I made up my mind then that I would do something about his last wish. There’s no liar like a tombstone, but Shorty deserves a marker.”

“I’ll join you,” Charlie said.

Charlie consulted Park officials and they approved. Chosen to write the epitaph, I knew from the moment the task was assigned to me what it would be. In order to get the reaction of others to the use of the word “jackass” on the monument, I decided to try it out on the Browns. “This epitaph,” I said, “may be unconventional, but unless I am mistaken it will be quoted around the world.”

I read it. “It’s all right,” Mrs. Brown laughed. Charlie approved. The epitaph, as predicted has been quoted and pictures of the plaque published around the world.

It has been stated that the Pacific Coast Borax Company paid for the monument. Actually it was provided by the Park Service. I had the bronze tablet made in Pomona, California, and Charlie Brown insisted that he pay for it. “Shorty left a little money,” he said. “Whatever is lacking, I will pay myself.”

On March 14, 1936, the monument was dedicated. Streamers of dust rolled along every road that led into the Big Sink trailing cars that were bringing friends from all walks of life to pay tribute to Shorty. At the grave the rich and the famous stood beside the tottering prospector, the husky miner, the silent, stoic Indian. Brown was master of ceremonies. Telegrams were read from John Hays Hammond and other distinguished friends. Old timers, whose memories spanned 30 years, one after another wedged through the crowd to tell a funny story that Shorty had told or some homely incident of his career.

One was revealing: “We had the no-’countest, low-downest hooch drinking loafer on the desert at Ballarat. We called him Tarfinger. He came over to Shorty’s cabin one day and said he was hungry. Shorty loaned him $5.00. When I heard about it I went over. I said, ‘You know he’s a no-good loafing thief.’ I figured I was doing Shorty a favor. Instead, he blew up. ‘Well, he can get as hungry as an honest man, can’t he?’”