When we reached Jim Dayton’s grave, he asked me to stop and getting out of the car, he walked into the brush, returning with a few yellow and blue wild flowers, laid them on Dayton’s grave. “God bless you, old fellow. You’ll have to move over soon and make room for me.”
Then turning to me, he said: “When I die bury me beside old Jim.” Raising his hand and moving his finger as if he were writing the words, he added: “Above me write, ‘Here lies Shorty Harris, a single blanket jackass prospector.’”
It was his way of saying he had played his game—not by riding over the desert with a deluxe camping outfit, but the hard way—with beans and a single blanket. He was also saying, I think, goodbye to the Death Valley that he loved; its golden dunes, its creeping canyons and pots of gold.
About one o’clock in the morning, Sunday, November 11, 1934, the phone awakened me. At the other end of the line was Charles Brown. Shorty Harris lay dead at Big Pine. “He just went to sleep and didn’t wake up,” Charlie said.
Shorty had died Saturday morning, November 10, and Charlie had arranged for the remains to be brought down into Death Valley and buried beside James Dayton Sunday afternoon.
Out of Los Angeles, out of towns and settlements, canyons, and hills came the largest crowd that had ever assembled in Death Valley, to wait at Furnace Creek Ranch for the hearse that would come nearly 200 miles over the mountains from Big Pine. It was delayed at every village and by burro-men along the road, who wanted a last look upon the face of Shorty.
At one o’clock the caravan arrived and then began the procession down the valley. The sun was setting and the shadows of the Panamint lay halfway across the valley when the grave was reached. Brown had sent Ernest Huhn from Shoshone the night previous, a distance of about 60 miles, to dig the grave.
On the desert a man dies and gets his measure of earth—often with not so much as a tarpaulin. With this in mind Ernie had made the hole to fit the man, but with the coffin it was a foot too short. While waiting for the grave to be lengthened, the casket was opened and in the fading twilight Shorty’s friends passed in file about the casket, while the Indians, silhouetted against the brush paid silent tribute to him whom their fathers and now their children knew as “Short Man.”
So began the first funeral ever held in the bottom of Death Valley. Drama, packed into a few moments of a dying day. No discordant ballyhoo. No persiflage.... “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want....” A bugler stepped beside the grave and silvered notes of taps went over the valley. The casket was lowered into the grave as the stars came out, and he was covered with the earth he loved. Thoughtful women placed wreaths of athol and desert holly and, with his face toward his desert stars, Shorty Harris holed-in forever.
Going back to Shoshone with the Browns, I told Charlie of the time I had stopped at Jim Dayton’s grave with Shorty. “I made up my mind then that I would do something about his last wish. There’s no liar like a tombstone, but Shorty deserves a marker.”