Remarks given at the Stovepipe Wells centennial celebration, Sunday, November 1, 2026.
While there might be a little uncertainty about the exact date that Stovepipe opened for business — according to the newspapers of the day, the public opening was in and around November 11th, 12th or 13th — there is no uncertainty that exactly one year ago today, I arrived in Death Valley.
Coming in from Beatty, my first view of this desolate wilderness was from Hell’s Gate. I was awestruck. No photo could ever capture the absolute magnificence I was seeing with my own eyes.
In my very first week working here at Stovepipe, out there on the patio, a passerby who had stopped to use the restroom came up to me and asked if this was the place that Amelia Earhart’s husband, George Putnam, had once owned. Keep in mind this was my first week here. I honestly did not know the answer back then.
But that one question prompted me to start learning the history of Stovepipe Wells Village. After going through the official information that is out there on Stovepipe Wells, I noticed some inconsistencies in the official story, and I started an extensive dive into newspaper archives, government records and other more reliable sources of information to piece together the real history of Stovepipe Wells.
As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. The real story of Stovepipe Wells is far more interesting than the engineered legend that Alma Overholt helped Bob Eichbaum create.
So I am not going to give you a list of dates today. Much like the “desert rats” or “old-timers” that Eichbaum liked to keep around the resort in the early days, I am going to tell you stories. And just like most of the “old-timers’” stories, these involve finding fortune.
The money in the tin cans
In the early years, Stovepipe Wells closed for the summer. Well, mostly closed. Someone had to stay behind and keep an eye on the place and collect tolls and pump gas for the occasional thrill seeker coming out in the summer heat, and for years that someone was a “desert rat” named John Wyland.
John came from Germany, and by the time he was watching over this resort he was not a young man. In January of 1930, Death Valley Scotty and Bill Corcoran threw him a seventy-third birthday dinner right here at Stovepipe Wells. Then they put him in an airplane for the first time in his life. Seventy-three years old, and his first flight was out of Death Valley.
As Belden tells it, John was a frugal man. He squirreled away most of his pay. He also handled the toll road money and the gasoline money, and just like today, there was no bank in Death Valley. So John devised a banking system of his own. He kept enough cash on hand to change a twenty-dollar bill, and not a penny more. Everything over twenty dollars went into empty coffee cans and bean cans, and the cans went into the sand around the cabins. John and only John knew where the cans were buried.
It was a perfectly sound system, right up until a sudden rain storm came along, sending flash flood waters roaring down out of Mosaic Canyon.
When Bob and Helene came back that autumn, John reported that it had been a less than stellar season. There was also evidence of what appeared to be a great deal of frantic digging around the cabins.
Then money began to grow on bushes. A utility man found the corner of a twenty-dollar bill sticking out of the sand. A waitress found another one hanging from the branch of a creosote bush. The whole staff, and the guests along with them, simply went fortune hunting. By the time they were finished, they had found two hundred dollars.
Helene worked out what had happened: the flood had carried off some of John’s cans. The historian L. Burr Belden, who told this story in 1958, doubted that John ever realized it.
Belden adds that the flood is believed to have sent John home to Germany. He did not leave right away. He was still keeping this place in 1933. A few years later, about 1936, and nearly eighty years old, John went home to the Germany he talked about to anyone who would listen, the one he called “a land of music and little restraint.” Belden says he paid his way with the money he had “saved.”
The twist: Scotty’s mine
That is the story as Belden told it, a quarter of a century later. He placed it in the fall of 1932. There is just one problem. Belden says the Eichbaums came back that autumn and found the digging. By the fall of 1932, Bob Eichbaum had been dead for eight months.
Then I went back to the newspapers of the day. On December 5, 1931, almost a year earlier and while Bob Eichbaum was still very much alive, the Big Pine Citizen ran a little item under the headline “Money Travels in Death Valley.”
A new rush is on in Death Valley. This week one of the employees at Stove Pipe Wells Hotel, while sauntering around in the sand dunes, found several new $20.00 gold certificates caught in the mesquite trees. When news of the find reached Stove Pipe Wells, all the employees were in favor of closing up the hotel and going prospecting.
Big Pine Citizen, December 5, 1931
Bob, being a practical man, struck a deal. “To keep peace, Mr. Eichbaum allowed that everyone could search for gold certificates after working hours.” The paper even pointed out that the moonlight and the glow of the sand made it light enough to prospect at night. So picture the staff of 1931, their shifts over, out on the dunes in the moonlight, combing the brush for twenty-dollar bills.
In true Death Valley fashion, speculation and wild legend began circulating. The paper then offered its own theories. Perhaps there were counterfeiters hiding in a cave in the Last Chance Mountains. Perhaps a rich Easterner had lost his wallet driving from Scotty’s Castle. Then it gave the real answer:
During a recent wind storm the ancient staple worked loose, and the door to Death Valley Scotty’s mine blew open.
Big Pine Citizen, December 5, 1931
I cannot prove that Bob Eichbaum wrote that item. I can only tell you that it reads exactly like the man who, two years earlier, had the newspapers looking for a giant cave and nine-foot mummies in this valley.
I think it was the same money, and Belden simply had the year wrong. Which means that for one winter, Stovepipe Wells had two explanations for the money in the mesquite. The true one was an old caretaker’s lost coffee cans. The legend was Death Valley Scotty’s mine. I suspect Bob Eichbaum knew which one would sell more rooms.
The man who rode for free
Bob Eichbaum’s road was a toll road: two dollars a car, fifty cents a person. Belden admits that “undoubtedly some slipped through who should have paid toll.” Seldom Seen Slim did not slip through. He simply asked.
Slim lived over in Ballarat and was one of the last of the old single-blanket prospectors. In 1963 he told a visitor this:
When Bob Eichbaum opened his toll road… he tried to make me pay toll for running my flivver over it. I said, ‘Now Bob, you wouldn’t take money from a poor prospector just for using your little old road, would you?’ ‘No, go on through,’ he sez. Old Bob didn’t know it, but I had plenty money in my bedroll. As long as Bob had that road, he let me go through free.
Seldom Seen Slim, 1963
County officials rode that road free by law. Seldom Seen Slim rode it free by charm.
In November of 1952, Slim was back out here for the very first Burro-Flapjack Race: wrangle a packed burro fifty yards, cook a flapjack and feed it to the burro. Slim drew a wild one. He withdrew after the first day, and Desert Magazine caught him protesting to the chairman: “You gave me a wild burro!”
Slim died in 1968 and is buried at Ballarat, under a bronze plaque inside an iron railing. The grave was paid for with money found in his trailer. Old Bob never found out how much money Slim had. The people who buried him did.
The plaque carries his own words: “Me lonely? Hell no! I’m half coyote and half wild burro!”
Half wild burro? Then he should have won the flapjack race.
Three places to keep your money
So, in a century of Stovepipe Wells stories and legends, we learn there are three places to keep your money: a bean can, Death Valley Scotty’s mine and a prospector’s bedroll.
This place exists because one man had a vision and, against all odds, built an impossible resort at the end of his road to nowhere, and then told stories good enough to bring people down it. Some of those stories were true. Plenty of them were about as true as Death Valley Scotty’s mine. One hundred years later, folks are still coming down that road, and we are still telling the stories.
One last thing. Nobody knows how much money John Wyland actually buried around those cabins. We only know about the two hundred dollars that turned up. So if you are out on the dunes and you see something green caught in the scrub, it is almost certainly a creosote leaf.
Almost certainly.
Thank you, and happy one hundredth birthday, Stovepipe Wells.
Sources: L. Burr Belden, San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, March 16, 1958 (the tin cans and John Wyland); Big Pine Citizen, December 5, 1931 (“Money Travels in Death Valley”); Desert Magazine, April 1963 (Seldom Seen Slim on the toll road) and January 1953 (the first Burro-Flapjack Race). The full documented history of the resort is in the History chapters.
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