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Show A . Rorrors of Beat!) Uallevr. The Desolate Region Where So Many Have Perished. H. T. Griswold, in New York Evening Tost.) " Los Angeles The most thorough exploration ex-ploration made of the mysterious and growsome Death valley in California I sine? Lieutenant YV. B. Crawford's expedition there in 1S90 began with t!i cool days of last November, Mid will clone for a season when hut weather comes to Death val-j.y val-j.y in May. The expedition con-i con-i siPtf1 of a dozen mineralogists, ( i botanists and . biologists of California, 1 several geologists from Boston and S t lii.Mgo. The building of the Los An- 1 pels. Fan Pedro & Salt Lake railroad I from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Los B Angeles. Cal., through the desert coun- f v:y adjacent to Death valley has reused interest in the mineral possi- I bilities of this little known corner of j i t ho Union. With a railroad, by which S tires, borax and saline jiroducts may I 1"- hauled cheaply to smelters and! I market, there may be fortunes to be j I l i; nd even in so forbidding a bit of i j ilie earth's surface as this. Thus far! I the explorers have located, under the I United States mineral laws, the largest id.-posits of niter in North America, vrveral beds of naturally formed borax, ! besides numerous outcroppings of silver ! and copper ores. The expedition has j carefully studied the remarkable topog- rr.phy and geology of Death valley. To over the subject thoroughly, however, ! En;uuj iii'niins win oe required, and when cool weather returns next fall I , H:e expedition will resume its work for J " aiiother season. IVath valley lies in Inyo county, shout LT.O miles from the nearest rail-rii.id, rail-rii.id, 350 miles from the Pacific ocean. ! cud close beside the Nevada-California , state line. It is a part of the Mojave r and Colorado deserts, and is the quint essence of all that is melancholy, grim and withered in desert characteristics. The valley proper is about 100 miles long and fifty wide. While most of Inyo county for thousands of square miles is a plateau averaging 5,000 feet in altitude. Death valley in from 300 I to 460 feet below sea level. Mount Whitney, to the east, is over 15,000 feet J high, and the descent from that to the I valley is very precipitous. All about are mountain walls of bleached gran- i ite. in some places the walls rise sheer I several thousand feet. The valley is ! warned with deep canons and desolate ' whitened gulches, and there are but few places where one may cross from one side of it to another. In summer, when the mercury ranges from 125 to 145 in the shade, and when rocks are a shimmering white and the alkali wastes are scorching, even the strongest strong-est cannot make the journey safely. The bottom of the valley is made up c.: great acres of saline deposits, beds of borax and salt, which under a : strong sunshine, present "a ghastly ap pearance with their glistening whiteness. white-ness. The bedrocks are shale and i schist left from the Jura-triassic pe riod, but a most extensive volcanic eruption has so scattered and demoralized demoral-ized the various formations that widely different deposits are often found within a few feet of one another. There are dozens of craters of extinct volcanoes vol-canoes in the valley, and with their blackened ruins and coating of dark cinders, acres in area, the general whiteness of the valley bottoms stands out all thp mnrp bmelv and p-hastlv Sand hills that shift and grow and diminish with every desert whirlwind abound, and great sink holes (half h mile in diameter) are found all over Death valley, as dry as powder with .in alkaline sediment dry on the bottom where it was deposited thousands of years ago. The Indians of the Mojave I j desert call the valley "Devil's Hollow f Oningojunk)," and none will ever go farther into it than the threshold, ni then only in winter. A wealth of uncanny un-canny stories is in the lore of the Mojave Mo-jave tribe about bad Indians who have been condemned to live through all eternity in Death valley. There is no known hotter, drier spot in Africa or Asia. Birds which abound in the Sierras do not wing their way across this spot. Nature is absolutely lifeless in Death valley. While the waters of melting, snows on the lofty mountains run tumultuously down the eanyons on the western sides of the Sierras, they never reach Death valley on the eastern side, for they are sucked away in the vast sandy stretches long before they pass the feet of the mountains. moun-tains. Nowhere else in all America is evaporation so high. One's thirst must be slaked every few hours even in the depth of winter, and. thirst soon becomes be-comes raging, and in half a day may cause insanity. Many a hardy mining prospector -has gone insane with thirst ' ' in a few hours, when on the edge of Death valley. The desert from Mojave to the Searles' borax works on the western edge of Death valley is frequently fre-quently dotted with the graves of teamsters and prospectors who have ,, a eeled and died on the hot sands when they had run short of drinking water. The mirages of Death valley, the explorers ex-plorers say, are the most remarkable in the world. Every day in any season one sees among the parched hills and scalded mountain sides, phantasmic pictures, miles in area, of foaming mountain streams, sylvan shades, alfalfa al-falfa fields and browsing, cattle scenes reflected from the other sides and tops of the Sierras. Occasionally scenes i from the Pacific ocean may be reflected in the mirages, and sailing ships and tossing waves may be seen amid the shimmering desolate sand hills and alkali al-kali canyons of Death valley. The Indians In-dians call the mirages the Big Spirit's pictures. Sometimes in the hottest weather the mirages will remain floating float-ing wonderfully distinct in the valley for a day at a time, but generally it . - lasts only a few minutes. Then the phantasma vanishes in a twinkling, to bp soon succeeded by another until as many as seven different mirages have been seen there in one day. Sandstorms are a serious thing on the s Colorado and Mojave deserts, but no where do they approach the deadliness of a sandstorm in Death valley. The vimoons of the Arabian deserts are well known in literature, but the present pres-ent explorers of Death valley say the simoons are mere babes by the side of a howling gale of hot sand in this place. The hot air rising from the can-ns can-ns and bottoms of the valleys encounters en-counters the cold atmosphere currents from the Sierras and Rockies, and the rushing of the cooler air into the valley instantly creates a storm undreamed of in any other part of the world. Nothing Noth-ing alive can brave the hurricane. The ; man who will keep close within a tent, with his head wrapped in a blanket, win survive, but he will suffer with heat almost as severely as if in an e ven, and for days thereafter with a ! pain from smarting nostrils and In- ;.ained eyes and ears Old-time plains- ient who know about all the hardships ' x.ut Evan's anatomy can experience, ' ;;re a unit in saying that the desert . sandstorm, more particularly a Death j f valley sandstorm, is the most trying i physical ordeal. The mountains, which bulwark Death valley, show the ter- j rifle erosion of their flinty faces by ! successions of these tempests. Here i Jt y and there are starved grease-root i plants, like stunted, starved trees that . have been half buried in sand during j l those storms. Many a man who has been a desert teamster or a mining : Prospector has suffered chronic. inflammation inflam-mation of the eyes by reason of having experienced one of these whirlwinds of alkali sand. The nearest water course to Death valley is the Amargosa river, a little stream that trickles down in an enormous enor-mous bed from away up among the mountains in Nevada. Centuries ago the Amargosa was a mighty roaring torrent that eroded granite rocks and ate a river bed half a mile wide for over eighty miles. The Amargosa touches the extreme southwestern end ;f Death valley, and in the locality lizards and venomous crawling things may be occasionally seen darting from under rocks. In the same locality tiny I nvuiets of heavily charged borax wa- j ter isue from the base of ancient vol- j canoes an'd form in pools. Hundreds i of acres of the purest borax are created cre-ated here by the intense evaporation, and large fortunes have been made by Cahfornians, who haul the product across the desert to the' railroad station sta-tion in Mojave. Death valley gets its name from its ghastly aspect, its desolation, and its deadly effect upon many a venturesome venture-some or ignorant mining prospector ivho has attempted to cross it in summer, sum-mer, and who has died of thirst there. Among all the tales of grim hardships and dreadful suffering by emigrants to California before there were railroads west of the Missouri river, none is so pitiful as that of the party who got lost" in Death valley in 1S49. There j were 500 emigrants in a caravan at fcalt Lake City in August of that year. All were going to the gold fields of California. A division of opinion arose as to the safest and easiest trail across the trackless plains and the Sierras to. the new Eldorado. Some 200 of the party struck -out for the southeast, and found the old Santa Fe trail, which finally led them to southern California. The rest went plodding in a caravan across the wastes of southern Utah. There was nothing to show them the way through the lifeless roasting valleys, val-leys, past the bald mountains, and then westward over the towering Sierras. The caravan was in the Land of Thirst. For Tour months, the starving, half crazed men and women wandered hither and yon through the region of horror, seeking some pass between the mountains to the Pacific ocean. Mirages led them vainly miles away from the trail. Their wagons fell apart from dryness, and horses fell daily under a withering heat. The oxen fell, and stalwart men sickened and died in the camps. One day nine young men became separated from the main party, and years later their whitened bones were found in an extinct volcanic crater, cra-ter, where they had crawled in their delirium and weakness. For days the gaunt, weak men in the party went without food. The days were too hot for them to be out in the sun, and they confined their efforts to the nights for finding paths that might lead out of the roasting tomb. At last , eighty-two of the original party now mere skeletons and so weak that they could scarcely walk found a passage-way through the Funeral mountains, and, summoning all their little remaining strength, managed to get up and out of Death valley into the cool and well watered region of southern south-ern California, beyond the Sierras. One of the party, the Rev. J. W.j Grier, weighed 1S8 pounds when he left Salt Lake City, and when he reached Los Angeles eighteen weeks later his weight was do wxl to ninety-two pounas. iwo of his brothers and one of his sisters-in-law died during the awful journey. |