The Road to Nowhere
Four trips to the county board, 1925–1926
In the first week of May 1925, “H. W. Eichbaum, of Avalon, Cal.” walked into the Inyo County Board of Supervisors with a proposition for a toll road “into and through Death Valley.” It was not the road he built. The first scheme ran 130 to 140 miles, past Mount Whitney, over the White Mountains and through the valley from end to end, and it already carried the selling line he would use for the rest of his life: the highest point in the nation and the lowest, on one trip. The board laid it over.
In June he came back with a shorter idea, from the end of Darwin Wash through Towne Pass into the valley. The pass itself was the suggestion of P. W. Smith of Lone Pine, who had tramped the Panamints twenty years earlier; nobody else at the chamber of commerce had heard of it. The story that the supervisors laughed and refused to spend taxpayers’ money on “a road to nowhere” is a good one. Its earliest printing is 1933, in a magazine piece by the resort’s publicist, and no contemporaneous account has the exchange. The board’s minutes record no action.
The third hearing, on August 3, 1925, was under oath. Eichbaum, G. W. Dow of the Dow Hotel in Lone Pine, Pete Smith and the editor of the Mount Whitney Observer swore in favor. C. M. Rasor swore against, “representing interests in Death Valley,” meaning the Pacific Coast Borax Company, and a petition in three sections came in with him. Two supervisors voted yes and three voted no. The application failed.
Twelve days later the Big Pine Citizen told its readers exactly what to do about it: get up a petition, and have the board negotiate with the borax company. Its editor, A. G. Barmore, would later be sworn for the franchise himself. In the last week of August, Eichbaum, Smith and a sitting supervisor, Amos Hancock, drove the circuit of the valley collecting signatures, and stopped at a concrete mansion going up at the north end. Death Valley Scotty took the time to approve the road, and signed. The same week Eichbaum gave up the eastern half of his route: “to alleviate any objections,” the road would now run only to Stovepipe Wells. The borax company’s territory was left alone, and the site of the resort was fixed by the politics of the franchise, not by anybody’s choice of ground.
On October 5, 1925, the application came back with a petition in seven sections “signed by Walter Spear and 383 others.” The motion carried. The county’s reason was printed plainly by the Citizen: Los Angeles had taken the farmland, so “it is but natural that we should look with eager eye upon such opportunities to develop our tourist attractions.” Advertising in Los Angeles began the same week, and the machinery, a scraper, a grader, a caterpillar and a scarifier, arrived within a month. Eichbaum had told the Mount Whitney Observer in September that the project would break even at about twenty-five passengers a day.
Nine days after the vote the Inyo Register printed a rumor from “the southern end of the valley” that the road was backed by Wrigley, “of chewing-gum fame.” Within a fortnight the story was in Reno, Elko, Sacramento and Los Angeles, grown into a Wrigley health resort with sunken gardens, and by November the sheriff of Inyo County was vouching for a Wrigley sanitarium and a cable tramway up Mount Whitney. No printing ever quoted Wrigley, his companies or Eichbaum. Under oath before the Railroad Commission in January 1926, Eichbaum said the road, the stages and the hotel would cost at least $100,000, “all to be financed by applicant.” In March 1927 Helene told the Register that the Wrigley story was “a completely mistaken belief.” The real Wrigley tie was the bus concession on Wrigley’s island, which Eichbaum kept running the whole time.
The road was built in a winter. By Christmas 1925 the crew was over the summit and coming down into Emigrant Wash. By March the road was “scraped and graded all through from the foot of Darwin Wash to the sand dunes of Mesquite Flat,” and mining men were already driving it. The standard histories say “no blasting was done,” and the claim has been repeated for fifty years. Two people who were there say otherwise. A reporter who drove the route with Eichbaum in June 1926 wrote that boulders along a seven-mile straightaway were moved “by hand, by tractor, and often dynamite,” and a Hearst Sunday feature of February 1927 described holes drilled for high explosives and canyons echoing with the blasts. The crew ate lunch at 124 degrees and the contractor wanted a thermometer that read to 150. Work stopped for the summer, which is why a resort promised for March opened in November.
On May 3 and 4, 1926, the county certified the road complete and fixed the tolls: two dollars a car, fifty cents a person, animals a dollar a head, county officers on county business free. The original wooden sign survives in the Eastern California Museum. The road ran about thirty-five miles, from Whippoorwill Springs in Darwin Wash to the dunes, and the reporter who drove it with Eichbaum reckoned it had cost about three times what it would have near Los Angeles.
Sources
Inyo Register, May 7 and Oct 22, 1925, Jan 14 and Mar 11, 1926; Inyo Independent, May 9, Jun 6 and Aug 29, 1925; Big Pine Citizen, Jun 13, Aug 15, Sep 5, Sep 26, Oct 17, Oct 31, Nov 14, Nov 21 and Dec 26, 1925, and May 15 and Jun 19, 1926; Inyo County Board of Supervisors proceedings, Aug 3 and Oct 5, 1925 (Eastern California Museum); Nevada State Journal, Oct 27, 1925; Railroad Commission Decision No. 15860, Jan 15, 1926; Los Angeles Evening Express, Oct 16, 1925 and Mar 12, 1926; San Antonio Light (American Weekly), Feb 6, 1927; Inyo Register, Mar 10, 1927.
