To Shoshone it meant a few more windshields to wipe; a few more cars to crawl under. Another soft answer to frame for the sightseer cursing the desolation. Another shed for the store that started on the kitchen table.
In 1932 Brown went before the State Highway Commission and urged that all the roads he had built in Death Valley be taken over by the state. The law was passed.
Death Valley became a National Monument February 11, 1933, by order of President Franklin Roosevelt. At that time America was groping its way through depression, worrying about its dinner and its debts as a result of the stock market crash of 1929.
In the nation’s hobo jungles the seasoned “bindle stiff” made room for the newcomer who had always lived on the right side of the tracks. Freight trains carried a new kind of bum when the adolescent female crawled into a car alongside an adolescent male, vainly seeking work anywhere at anything.
To save them and others like them C.C.C. camps were organized and one of these recruited largely from New York City’s Bowery, was sent to Death Valley with headquarters at Cow Creek, a few miles north of Furnace Creek Inn.
The new park was under the supervision of Col. John R. White, later superintendent of the entire National Park System and to Ray Goodwin, assistant superintendent was assigned the task of building additional roads and trails to points of interest to connect with the State System which Brown had built.
Then began in earnest the flow of tourist traffic to the “God-forsaken hole” for which Brown had worked for 14 long and difficult years. But he soon found that to the problems of a small desert community he had added those of a whole county. They were the aftermath of what has since been called in a marvelous understatement by Morrow Mayo, historian of Los Angeles, “The Rape of Owens Valley.”
In the early part of the century, the city of Los Angeles had secretly acquired nearly all sources of water in Inyo and Mono counties. An amazed world applauded the engineering feat by which water was siphoned over mountain ranges to flow through ditches and tunnels, a distance of 259 miles.
The enterprise was announced by its promoters as the answer to the desperate need for water. It is now known that this need was only a mask to hide a scheme to make Los Angeles pay the cost of bringing water to 108,000 acres of waterless land in San Fernando valley so that the owners could make a profit of a hundred million dollars through its subdivision and sale. This they did.
The shameful story glorifies by comparison the cattle wars of the early West when one side hired its Billy the Kids to kill off the other—the only difference being that in the Owens Valley feud the Billy the Kids were the Big Names of Los Angeles who used unscrupulous politicians and laws cunningly passed instead of six-guns.