The White Heart of Mojave: An Adventure with the Outdoors of the Desert

by Edna Brush Perkins

"He was a Swede with yellow hair," he said, "and he stared at the sun. He sank standing up."

The road which crosses the valley below the ranch near the Old Eagle Borax Works is said to be almost the only way to get over the swamp. The Panamint Indians are supposed to have known this route and to have crossed the valley to escape from their enemies, who dared not follow them.

A Government bench-mark by the roadside indicated 258 feet below sea level. The heat was oppressive, and the white ground reflected a blinding light. At one place, rounding the base of a hill which shut off the view of the nearby mountains, we found ourselves in the midst of miles of the shining whiteness. It spread in every direction, reaching to the distant Panamints across the valley and to the hazy outline of the low range at the southern end. The hill which we were passing rose into the sky, white as the plain except for a few streaks of ugly, greenish-yellow-like sulphur. No living green thing appeared. The white expanse was unbroken by a bush or even by an outjutting rock. The desolation was complete. An intense silence lay over it. If we dropped far enough behind the wagon not to hear the creaking of its wheels, we felt utterly alone, the only survivors in a dead universe. That day the sky was a hot purplish-blue; no cloud shadows drifting over the valley relieved its blinding monotony. The rose and silver which we had seen from above were gone, not even the illusion of water far off remained. The sun stared steadily down. It was the far-spread, motionless silence of the last days when the whole earth will be dying.

Winding around the hill we came to the ruins of a borax-works. This had been the first plant in the valley, then the Eagle Borax Works south of the ranch was operated, but now the borax comes from the mines in the mountains at Ryan. Nothing was left of the old borax-works except a few roofless stone buildings and the ruins of the works which looked like a row of immense vats embedded in the side of a low ridge. The vats and the ridge had the same sulphurous color, and melted together. Around the buildings the ground was covered with tin cans and broken bottles, but the square of dark-blue shade beside each house was a blessed relief from the burning sun.

Beyond the old borax-works the road wound through sand covered with large mesquites and greasewoods. Though the mesquite is called a tree it looks more like an overgrown, thorny shrub. It grows near swamps and dry lakes and is supposed to be a sure indication of water, but its roots go down very deep and it appears in desolations of sand where it would be unwise for the wayfarer to dig. Those mesquites in Death Valley looked very hopeless indeed, sprangling, thorny, leafless things with a hillock of sand blown around the roots of each.

As we descended into the valley and came along the edge of the morass a feeling of deep lassitude and inertia gradually crept over Charlotte and me. It had been very hard to leave the dark squares of shade at the borax-works, and now as we crawled along among the mesquites we felt that the white monotony would go on forever. It pressed upon us like a weight that never, never could be lifted. We stared down at the sand with unseeing eyes and went on because we were in the habit of going on. The ranch was only an imagining, born of vain hope.

And then the strange-looking, tufted tops of some tall palms appeared against the sky. They were very striking and we thought they must still be far off or we would have seen them all day, but not a quarter of an hour later we reached the fence which separated the desert from the emerald-green fields. The sudden springing up of the ranch was as unreal as any imagining. The fence was a sharp line of demarcation. On one side the sand drifted up to it, on the other were meadows and big willow trees. It was evening when we arrived, so we camped at once by the irrigation-ditch which made a narrow green ribbon across the sand with grass and trees growing along its banks. We built our fire between an encampment of Indians and the white adobe ranch-buildings beyond the fence. The water rushed down the ditch, clear and cool. How marvelous this running water seemed! How marvelous to dip out all we wanted to wash ourselves and our clothes and our dishes!

Our felicity, however, was short-lived. The Panamint Indians, in common probably with all Indians, do not count cleanliness among their virtues. The rising of the fierce, hot sun brought millions of flies which converted our dishes and camp equipment into black masses that crawled. Between the Indians and the large herd of cattle at the ranch, camping by the irrigation-ditch was impossible. We spent most of the forenoon moving a mile or two away among the mesquites. We were on the gradually sloping ground which leads up from the valley-floor to the rock-walls of the Funeral Mountains. Here in the valley we found that our impression from the Keane Wonder Mine of mountains rising precipitously from the flat white floor had been an illusion. The characteristic mesa of the Mojave curves up on both sides, sandy, covered with stones, but often entirely bare of vegetation. Death Valley is always full of such illusions. Even afterwards, when we knew better, we could never look down into the valley from a height without feeling that the mountains rose precipitously out of it. That camp among the mesquites blazed. The yellow sand seemed to smite our eyes. Across the valley under the edge of the Panamints the mesa looked a beautiful dark-blue, but around us was an even greater ecstasy of light than we had known at Keane Wonder. Everything blazed, the sand, the slow waves of the heat shimmer, the little rounded stony hills between us and the Funeral Mountains, and the steel-blue battlements of the mountains themselves.

The Indians at the ranch are employed as laborers, when they will work. The superintendent, a vigorous, silent Scotchman, was extremely pessimistic about them. While we were there they had "the flu" and all we ever saw them do was sit around the corral waiting for supplies to be handed out. The women and girls, with heavy melancholy faces, gathered and stared at us. They stared with the stolid curiosity of cattle, not like burros who twitch their ears saucily, though they have the burro's reputation for thievishness. The superintendent kept everything under lock and key. The only Indian who showed a sign of life was an old fellow who prowled around with a gun after the birds and wild ducks that make the ranch a resting-place in their flights across the desert. We were told that there was only one gun in the whole encampment and that the younger men hunted with bows and arrows. Most of them looked stunted and their faces were wrinkled like the skins of shrunken, dried-up apples, as though the valley were taking toll of the generations of their race.