“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.