A Well with a Stovepipe in It
A prospectors’ waterhole and a borrowed name, 1897–1925
The place takes its name from a hole in the sand. Four miles east of today’s village, on the old track between the mining camps of Rhyolite and Skidoo, there was a seep where water could be had by digging two feet down. Somebody marked it with a length of stovepipe stood on end so that the next traveler could find it. Who that was, and when, nobody recorded. Harry Gower of the borax company, who saw the place in the 1920s, hedged it twice: “six-inch pipe, perhaps a stovepipe… no doubt lent its name.” Later owners of the resort told it from the lectern without hedging at all.
The well mattered because the Rhyolite boom of 1904 to 1908 put traffic across the valley. Rhyolite had a telephone line to Stovepipe Wells by March 1907. A prospector named Jack Stewart, who died at Darwin in 1947, remembered taking the trail “down Death Valley to Stovepipe Wells, up Emigrant Wash and through Towne Pass” as early as 1897. During the boom someone dug a cellar beside the well, twelve by eighteen feet, with mud walls bonded with empty beer bottles, and sold beans, bacon and Tonopah beer. The story that it rented two beds, and was therefore “the first hotel in the valley,” comes from a 1992 booklet citing an earlier one and has not been checked. The bottle building itself was real. A Los Angeles Times party found it standing in May 1926, and Desert Magazine photographed its ruin in 1984.
Then the boom ended, and the valley went quiet. Death Valley was a place people drove around, not into. In March 1921 the Automobile Club of Southern California announced it would put up 1,200 metal signs and mark 250 water holes, and it told motorists the truth about the approaches: two southern routes were passable, both “better than any routes leading to the north valley entrance,” and two cars should travel together so that “the occupants will not have to walk to Shoshone for aid.” The Inyo Independent reprinted the article for Owens Valley readers a week later. Nobody on the west side of the Panamints could drive down to the dunes.
The waterhole itself was walled, covered and given a pump by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Inyo Register announced the news in March 1937 under the headline “Civilization Comes.” A state plaque went up there in November 1968, with Ellie Povah of the village holding up the old stovepipes for the photographers. A young Shoshone man, asked in the 1950s where the animals had gone once the wells were capped and fenced, gave Edna Price the shortest history of the valley anyone has written: “Died. No water now. Just roads.”
One thing to keep straight: the well and the village are two places, four miles apart, and the first had nothing to do with the founding of the second. The original Stove Pipe Well was a stop for prospectors and freighters crossing the valley between Rhyolite and Skidoo. Nobody went there for pleasure. The dugout beside it sold beer and beans to men on their way somewhere else, and when the boom ended it was abandoned. It was never a destination, and no one who built the resort ever meant to build it there; the trucks simply stopped four miles short. What the resort took from the well was its name, and with it a history it did not have.
That borrowing set a pattern. Within three years the resort’s publicity was crediting Eichbaum with building the first electric plant at Rhyolite, a plant the record shows he did not own, design, build or operate. The claim was printed in his lifetime, under his publicist’s name, and he let it stand. A name taken from an old waterhole and a power plant taken from another man are the same kind of thing: a new place in the sand dressing itself in the valley’s past. When old-timers wrote about Stovepipe Wells before 1926, they meant the hole in the sand. After 1926 the name meant the hotel, and the hole in the sand became a side trip.
Sources
Big Pine Citizen, Oct 17, 1925 and Mar 11, 1926; Los Angeles Times, Mar 27, 1921 and May 23, 1926; Inyo Independent, Apr 2, 1921; Inyo Register, Mar 4, 1937; Desert Magazine, Nov 1947, Jul 1954 and Nov 1984; L. Burr Belden quoting Harry Gower, San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, Dec 10, 1961; Inyo Independent, Nov 15, 1968; Betty Tucker, Death Valley ’49ers Keepsake No. 32 (1992), for the dugout story, unverified.
