Avalon in the Desert
A resort that was not supposed to stand here, 1926–1927
The first lumber truck was due at Stovepipe Wells on January 15, 1926. According to Harry Gower of the borax company, who told it to a historian thirty-five years later, six trucks came in across the valley floor and one sank to its axles in the sand short of the old waterhole. Eichbaum arrived, had a long look, and told the drivers to dump their loads where they stood. “Without a chance to reach the old wells,” Gower said, “I guess one place was as good as another.” The resort went up about four miles west of where it had been planned, on the fan below Mosaic Canyon. The franchise still ran to the old well, so to keep it Eichbaum dragged a road out to the waterhole once a year, to nowhere in particular.
For a few weeks that February the site was in play. Jack Salsberry, promoting the new camp of Leadfield over Titus Canyon, told a Reno paper that Eichbaum “instead of building a hotel at Stove Pipe, will build in Leadfield.” Leadfield collapsed before the year was out. The resort stayed at the dunes.
What went up was modest. In February the plan was a main building and about a dozen bungalows, with “the extensive hotel” to come later. By the summer shutdown there were ten cottages, a dining room, a kitchen and a water tower. The model was a specific one: the Island Villa at Avalon, Wrigley’s tent-cabin city, whose “bungalettes” had canvas walls inside a wall-board jacket and a double roof. Two Avalon builders, one of them a city trustee, came out to build the cottages; the manager of Eichbaum’s Catalina bus company ran the first winter; the chef came from Wrigley’s St. Catherine Hotel. An Avalon editor who visited in 1927 asked, reasonably, why a party of islanders should not “feel at home.” The press called the place Bungalow City, and so did the county.
The selling started before the doors opened. On August 29, 1926, the Los Angeles Examiner gave the resort the front page of a Sunday section under the banner “Death Valley’s Sting Removed,” with a portrait of Eichbaum, an artist’s drawing of a Spanish-style hotel among palms, and a column by Alma Overholt that opened: “Bathing beauties of 1927 cavorting over shifting sand dunes! Tournaments on the Devil’s Golf Course and tennis matches at Hell’s Gate.” Overholt would write the resort’s publicity for the rest of Eichbaum’s life and well beyond it, and much of what the histories repeat about him, the Virginia diploma, the Rhyolite power plant, the road to nowhere, first appeared under her name. By September the Big Pine Citizen reported more than 800 bookings. Helene, meanwhile, gave an afternoon of bridge at her Catalina home “preparatory to leaving for a month’s visit in Death Valley,” where she would occupy “a bungalette suite.” Catalina was home. The desert was a visit.
The road opened to traffic on November 4, and the resort was “formally opened to the public” on Thursday, November 11, 1926, according to a dispatch datelined Stove Pipe Wells in the next day’s Pasadena Star-News. The Associated Press reported “a crowd of merrymakers” celebrating on Saturday the 13th, with twenty-four bungalettes, a restaurant, a store, a gas station, hot and cold water and trap shooting. The water-well party came on the 15th and Thanksgiving dinner on the 25th. A second hotel, fifty rooms at Hell’s Gate, was announced in the same breath and never built. Seventeen days after the opening a storm closed the road, and the Citizen reported that “Mr. Eichbaum, one of the drivers,” had tried to cross a lake in Panamint Valley and got stuck. The man who built the road was driving his own stages.
The borax company’s railroad hauled his lumber, six carloads of it, and in the same column of the Tonopah Times announced its own twenty-room hotel at Furnace Creek. Furnace Creek Inn opened on February 1, 1927, with twelve rooms at ten dollars a day, against Eichbaum’s fifty-odd at four to seven. For all of 1926 and the first winter, Stovepipe Wells was the only resort in Death Valley. What the Inn had was capital. What Eichbaum had was the road, and after rail service to the valley ended in 1930, most visitors came over it.
On Easter Sunday, April 17, 1927, the hotel held a sunrise service in the dunes “for the Unknown Dead of Death Valley,” with a contralto, an organ lent by Wurlitzer, a federal judge to give the address, schoolchildren strewing desert flowers and hot cross buns afterward. It was a publicity event, and it outlived the business that invented it. The Park Service took it over in 1934, the CCC sang it with a chorus of eighty, and in 1948 the Owens Valley ministers were running it on the same dunes with the hotel unmentioned. A month before that first Easter, the county clerk took the schoolchildren of Independence out to Bungalow City for a Sunday picnic. Four months after the road opened, Death Valley was an outing.
Sources
Inyo Register, Jan 14, 1926 and Mar 10, 1927; Harry Gower in L. Burr Belden, San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, Dec 10, 1961; Nevada State Journal, Feb 10, 1926; Big Pine Citizen, Feb 27, Jun 19, Sep 18 and Dec 4, 1926, and Mar 5, 1927; Los Angeles Examiner, Aug 29, 1926; Catalina Islander, Sep 8, Sep 29 and Nov 3, 1926, May 11 and Dec 7, 1927; Long Beach Press-Telegram, Sep 12, 1926; Pasadena Star-News, Nov 12, 1926; Salt Lake Telegram (AP), Nov 14, 1926; Inyo Independent, Nov 27, 1926; Los Angeles Times, Feb 27 and Apr 8, 1927; Easter 1927 program reproduced in Tucker, Keepsake No. 32; Inyo Register, Apr 9, 1936; Desert Magazine, Apr 1948.
