Chapter XXIII Panamint City. Genial Crooks
The first search for gold in Death Valley country was in Panamint Valley.
From the summit of the Slate Range on the road from Trona, one comes suddenly upon an enchanting and unforgettable view of the Panamint. If you are one who thrills at breath taking scenery you will not speak. You will stand and look and think. Your thoughts will be of dead worlds; of the silence spread like a shroud over all that you see.
Below, a yellow road twists in and out of hidden dry washes, around jutting hills to end in the green mesquite that hides the ghost town of Ballarat. There the Panamint lifts two miles--its gored sides a riot of pastelled colors.
If you have coached yourself with trivia of history it will require imagination's aid to accept the fact that from this wasteland came fortunes and industries of world-wide fame. From New York to San Francisco on envied social thrones, sit the children and grandchildren of those who with pick and shovel, here dug the family fortune in ragged overalls.
Only recently a descendant of one of these, living in a city far removed, informed me her mansion was for sale, "because the neighborhood is being ruined...." A sheep herder newly rich on war profits, was moving in.
Eleven miles north of Ballarat, Surprise Canyon, which leads to Panamint City, opens on a broad, alluvial fan that tilts sharply to the valley floor.
In April, 1873, W. T. Henderson, whose first trip into Death Valley country was made to find the Lost Gunsight, came again with R. B. Stewart and R. C. Jacobs. In Surprise Canyon they discovered silver which ran as high as $4000 a ton and filed more than 80 location notices.
Henderson was an adventurer of uncertain character who had roamed western deserts like a nomad. During the Indian war that threatened extermination of the white settlers in Inyo county, Thieving Charlie, a Piute, was induced by outnumbered whites to approach his warring tribesmen under a flag of truce and succeeded in getting eleven of them to return with him to Camp Independence for a peace talk. Henderson, with two companions waylaid and murdered them.
He had been a member of the posse organized by Harry Love to shoot on sight California's most famous bandit--Joaquin Murietta and boasted that he fired the bullet which killed the glamorous Joaquin. It was he who cut off and pickled the bandit's head as evidence to get the reward. At the same time he pickled the hand of Three Fingered Jack Garcia, Joaquin's chief lieutenant, and the bloodiest monster the West ever saw. Garcia had an odd habit of cutting off the ears of his victims and stringing them for a saddle ornament. The slaying of Joaquin was not a pretty adventure and as the details came out, Henderson renounced the honor.