The trip ended sooner. “What happened?” I asked Shorty when I read the book and was startled to see in it a statement that Shorty became lost; had never found a mine; and never even looked for one.
“Did he say that?” Shorty laughed.
“And more of the same,” I said.
“Well, let’s let it go for what it’s worth.... He bellyached from the minute we set out.”
Those who knew Shorty best—Dad Fairbanks, Charles Brown, Bob Montgomery, George Naylor, H. W. Eichbaum, and the old timers on the trails had entirely different impressions. There was, however, around the barrooms of Beatty and other border villages a breed of later comers—“professional” old timers always waiting and often succeeding in exchanging “history” for free drinks. Though they may have never known Shorty in person, they were not lacking in yarns about him and rarely failed to get an audience.
There were also among Shorty’s friends a few who had another attitude. “What has he ever done that I haven’t?” the answer being that nothing had been written about them.
With variations the original pattern became the pattern for the succeeding writer. In the interest of accuracy it is not amiss to say that Shorty Harris was not buried standing up. The writer saw him buried. It is not true that he ever protested the removal of the road from the site of the place where he wished to be buried, because he never knew that he would be buried there. Nor did he have the remotest idea that a monument would be erected to him, because the idea of the monument was born after his death, as related elsewhere.
He did not leave Harrisburg on July 4, 1905 to get drunk at Ballarat. Instead, he went to Rhyolite to find Wild Bill Corcoran, his grubstaker.
He did enjoy the yarns attributed to him and their publication in important periodicals. But he was also painfully shy and ill at ease away from his home. Even at the annual Death Valley picnics held at Wilmington, near Los Angeles, he could never be persuaded to face the crowds.
One cannot laugh aside the part he played nor the monument that honors one of God’s humblest. His strike at Rhyolite brought two railroads across the desert, gave profitable employment to thousands of men, added extra shifts in steel mills and factories making heavy machinery and those of tool makers. The building trades felt it, banks, security exchanges, and scores of other industries over the nation—all because Shorty Harris went up a canyon. And it is not amiss to ask if these historians did their jobs as well.