Back in the Saddle
A publisher buys a hotel, 1947–1950
George Palmer Putnam was a publisher before he was anything else. At G. P. Putnam’s Sons he had rushed Lindbergh’s book into print in 1927, and he had been married to Amelia Earhart from 1931 until she disappeared in 1937. By 1940 he had a cabin at Whitney Portal above Lone Pine, begun by Father Crowley and finished by Putnam, and in 1946 he published Death Valley and Its Country, a book whose informants included “Owen Montgomery of Stovepipe Wells,” the man then running the hotel. He bought the place the next year. “A friend of mine says that I read a book I had written and believed it,” he told the editor of Desert Magazine.
The Inyo Independent of August 1, 1947, announced the sale to “a group headed by George Palmer Putnam of Lone Pine and Frank Morris of Des Moines,” with portraits of both. Morris never seems to have moved to the valley; the working partner became R. R. Henderson of Lone Pine, who also owned most of the Dow Hotel. The property came with eighty acres, water rights at Emigrant Springs and Cottonwood Canyon, room for eighty guests, a tap room and a service station. Air cooling went into the main building that September, the first mechanical cooling on record.
Putnam ran the place the way he ran a publicity campaign. He invited the Lone Pine Lions to hold the first banquet of his first season, hosted the county’s business association with Navy officers from Inyokern on the program, and in January 1948 entertained about forty Los Angeles press photographers at the hotel. He drilled the first rotary well in Death Valley that winter and got 57,000 gallons a day of slightly salty water. He brought a Sierra pack outfit down to winter at the hotel and offer rides to the dunes. In November 1948, sponsored by an oil company, he drove an army vehicle from Badwater to within forty feet of the top of White Mountain, the highest point a car had reached, which was Eichbaum’s lowest-to-highest pitch of 1925 performed as a stunt. He kept the hotel open through the summer of 1948 “as an experiment” and again in 1949, when the high was 119.
His best campaign was a cat. From February 1948 to February 1949, Fritz, the hotel’s golden tomcat, wrote thirteen letters to the children’s page of the San Francisco News and offered a picture of his home, Stove Pipe Wells Hotel, to any child who wrote back. The children wrote; the parents got a photograph of a desert hotel in the mail; the Putnams, the column said, “are secretaries to Fritz.” In February 1949, after record snow, a bobcat stalked Fritz until a young burro named Rhyolite rose on her hind legs and stomped it, and was rewarded at the bar with sugar and cherries. That story went to Portland by way of hotel guests.
He did not get long. Putnam fell ill in December 1949 and died at Trona hospital on January 4, 1950, aged sixty-two, “owner and operator of Stovepipe Wells hotel,” as Desert Magazine put it. He had owned the place for two seasons and part of a third. The friend who said he read his own book and believed it was not far off: Putnam came to Death Valley as an author, bought a hotel to live inside the book, and used every trick of a thirty-year publishing career to sell it. What he left was a resort with a well, an air-cooled lobby, a string of horses, a famous cat and a widow who had been in the valley for about two years.
Sources
Desert Magazine, Jan 1947, Oct 1947, Feb, Mar and Nov 1948, Jun, Jul and Dec 1949, and Feb 1950; Inyo Independent, Aug 1, Aug 22 and Sep 5, 1947; Inyo Register, Nov 7, 1947 and Feb 17, 1949; Alabama Journal, Jan 16, 1948; San Francisco News, Feb 21, 1948–Feb 19, 1949; Oregon Daily Journal, Feb 11, 1949; Randall Henderson, “Panamint Pack Trip,” Desert Magazine, Dec 1949.
