Helene’s Valley
The First Lady of Death Valley, 1932–1936
Helene Eichbaum took over the resort the week her husband died and opened it for the next season on November 1, 1932. The Catalina Islander, which had called the Eichbaums its own for eight years, now called her a former resident of Avalon who “will carry on in Death Valley the work of her late husband.” In June 1933 the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine profiled her as “The First Lady of Death Valley,” a title the prospectors had given her, and quoted her directly: “Don’t you go feeling sorry for me. I have no time to be sorry for myself.” The same article is where several durable errors were printed, the West Virginia degree among them, and it tells the founding story with Bob alone at the prospectors’ campfires and Helene superintending “a little three-room house in the midst of nowhere,” making the curtains herself. There is no tent in it, and no Mosaic Canyon.
By 1933 the hotel ran its own electric plant, ice plant, bakery, laundry, machine shop and gas station. Her rate card invited guests “Into the Purple Valley of Romance and Adventure,” to “The Hub of Death Valley,” signed “Helene W. Eichbaum, Owner and Manager,” with a season of November 1 to May 1 and villas from $1.50. Her neighbors were Shoshone Johnny, who lived behind the third dike of mesquite at the mouth of Titus Canyon, and the Timbisha families who camped at the resort every Christmas; a Times columnist who spent New Year’s 1933 there noted that Helene knew a child had been born in the camp on Christmas Eve, because she knew her neighbors.
Six weeks later, on February 11, 1933, President Hoover proclaimed Death Valley National Monument, about 1.6 million acres. The campaign for it had run through the borax company, the Park Service and two congressmen; the resort and the road appear nowhere in it, and a later plaque’s claim that the toll road “brought about” the monument is interpretation, not evidence. What the monument did was double the visitors. The Park Service counted 9,000 in the winter of 1932–33, 22,377 the next year and 45,000 the year after. The resort was now a private inholding in a federal reservation, and the road to it was a private toll road carrying the public into a public monument. A state engineer who drove it in April 1934 found more than fifty cars on it at once and called the situation “acute.” In December 1934 the State of California bought 30.35 miles of the Eichbaum Toll Road from the estate for $25,000, and the toll gates came down. Highway 190 runs on it today.
On January 7, 1935, Helene married H. E. “Hal” West, a Los Angeles machinery man, at Agua Caliente. The Inyo Independent reported that the Wests would live at Stovepipe Wells, and that season the San Francisco Chronicle called her “the Princess of Death Valley.” Ernie Pyle came through in 1935 and called the place “a lavish spot for comfort.” She closed her last season on April 30, 1936, and in July sold the hotel to A. K. Bennett and associates of Santa Barbara at “a reported sale price of $50,000,” a figure never confirmed. The county paper said she expected “a well earned rest” in Beverly Hills. She kept Bob’s mining ground longer than she kept his hotel: in June 1936 Father Crowley of Lone Pine was brokering an offer for the Saddle Rock claims in Emigrant Canyon on behalf of Ralph Merritt, and she still owned them in 1945, when she sold them to a prospector called One Match Bill. In 1942, at fifty-nine, she signed an application for a Social Security card as Helene W. West and gave her birthplace as Evansville, Indiana. It is the only document in which she tells her own age correctly.
Sources
Catalina Islander, Nov 9, 1932 and Jan 10, 1935; Los Angeles Times, Jan 1 and Jun 4, 1933, and Jan 15, 1935; San Diego Sun (UP), Feb 11, 1933; NPS annual reports, 1933–1935; Helene-era rate card reproduced in Tucker, Keepsake No. 32; clipping of Apr 13, 1934 (Eastern California Museum); Inyo Independent, Nov 16, 1934, Jan 18, 1935, May 15 and Aug 14, 1936; NPS Historic Resource Study (Greene) on the 1934 sale; San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 18, 1935; Ernie Pyle, Home Country (1935); Crowley letter and telegram, Jun 25 and 27, 1936 (Eastern California Museum); Inyo Register, Oct 8, 1936; Desert Magazine, Sep 1945; Form SS-5, Nov 28, 1942 (Eastern California Museum).
