The Legend Machine
Selling the valley, 1927–1932
Once the road was open, the question was how to make people want to drive it. Eichbaum’s answer was to give the newspapers something to print, and the record of the next five years is a record of placements. In December 1927 the Los Angeles Times reported from Stove Pipe Wells that he was “making plans to entertain a group of scientists” and hoped to bring a former MIT professor to work out “a plan… whereby cheap power may be furnished all of the West directly from Death Valley.” Every verb was conditional; the professor’s description was lifted from a report of a lecture he had given in Boston; no visit, apparatus or result was ever reported. The item ran as filler in some sixty weekly papers for the next year under the headline “To Make Sun Work.”
In August 1929 the wire services carried the discovery of a giant cave and nine-foot mummies in the Death Valley region. The motif did not die. By 1930 the hotel’s advertising listed “the Indian mounds” among the sights on the new road to Scotty’s Castle, and an Examiner writer in 1931 reported that “H. W. Eichbaum himself volunteered to act as guide to a ‘Lost City,’ which he had discovered.” Guests dug for pottery. The description grew by the season, from burial mounds to a prehistoric race to “a tribe of giant men,” and vanished from the advertising the year the monument was proclaimed. What the site actually was has never been established, and this history calls it neither a discovery nor a hoax. In December 1931, ten weeks before he fell ill, the Big Pine Citizen reported that twenty-dollar gold certificates had been found blowing through the mesquite, that the staff wanted to close the hotel and go prospecting, and that the real explanation was that “the door to Death Valley Scotty’s mine blew open.”
Not all of the selling was his. The Automobile Club adopted the toll road as a touring route and sent its sign crew out in 1927. That November the Auto Club and the All-Year Club each bought a double page in the Saturday Evening Post, circulation near three million, selling Mount Whitney and Death Valley together, the pairing Eichbaum had pitched to the supervisors in 1925. In February 1928 the Southern Pacific offered a through ticket, train to Lone Pine and Eichbaum stage to the hotel, for $27.70 round trip from Los Angeles, “about two dollars cheaper than from Los Angeles to Yosemite.” A transcontinental railroad, a private road and one ticket priced under the national park. By December 1927 the San Francisco Bulletin could report that “most of the travel from California now enters the valley over the Eichbaum Toll Road.” In January 1930 Eichbaum counted 200 cars a day over Towne Pass, which was his own toll gate talking.
The place grew. By Christmas 1927 there was a second building phase, sixteen rooms in eight suites with private baths and a lobby more than a hundred feet long for dancing; Helene chose the furnishings in Los Angeles. A flying field was working by late 1928, and in December 1929 scheduled air service was announced from Los Angeles and San Francisco, with a loop over Yosemite and around Whitney on the way. In January 1930 a crew began a road from the hotel to Scotty’s Castle, cutting the trip from eighty-five miles to thirty-five, so that the valley’s most famous legend became a day trip from Eichbaum’s door. He kept the old prospectors around the place. Shorty Harris, “Two-Gun” Charlie and “Johnny-Behind-the-Gun” accepted his invitation to Thanksgiving dinner in 1927, and the menu, Catalina lobster and wild goat from his own island hunting concession, went out on the AP wire. He fed a kit fox through the summer of 1926 and talked about bringing in mountain sheep and deer as an attraction. He bottled blind fish from Salt Creek for the national museums.
Someone had to mind the place in summer. For years it was an old German named John Wyland, who kept the toll gate and the gas pump in the heat; in January 1930 Death Valley Scotty and Bill Corcoran gave him a seventy-third birthday dinner at the hotel and put him in an airplane for the first time in his life. Corcoran was Eichbaum’s mining partner. The Inyo Register of July 1929 named them co-owners of the Emigrant Springs mine, and Eichbaum was still “of Catalina and Bungalow City,” a mining man as well as a hotel man, as he had been since 1907. In January 1930 the Santa Catalina Island Company took over his bus concession on the island, which is the likeliest source of the money he swore was his own.
The 1930 census counted him at Stovepipe Wells, “proprietor, resort,” his home valued at $2,500, with Helene and a radio set. He fell ill with meningitis at the hotel in February 1932. A doctor who was a guest helped fit out a sedan to carry him to Los Angeles, and he died at Good Samaritan Hospital on February 16, 1932, aged forty-eight. He was buried at New Castle. The obituary that went out on the wire said he had opened the road “to nowhere,” as those who disparaged him called it, on the anniversary of the Jayhawkers’ entry into the valley. The anniversary was Alma Overholt’s idea too.
Sources
Los Angeles Times, Dec 9, 1927, Jan 12 and Mar 2, 1930, and Oct 25, 1931 (Examiner); Big Pine Citizen, Nov 12 and Nov 26, 1927, Feb 11, 1928, Nov 16, 1929, Jan 4, 1930 and Dec 5, 1931; Inyo Independent, Oct 29, 1927; Butte Daily Post (AP), Nov 23, 1927; San Francisco Bulletin, Dec 7, 1927; Sunset Magazine, Jan 1929; Inyo Register, Jul 4, 1929; wire services, Aug 27, 1929; Press-Telegram, Dec 26, 1929; Catalina Islander, Jan 15, 1930; Fifteenth Census (1930), Inyo County; New Castle News, Feb 16, 1932; Harrisburg Patriot-News (AP), Feb 17, 1932; Catalina Islander, Feb 24, 1932.
