Below Rock Bottom
Yellowstone people, a fire and a new name, 1966–1979
In April 1966 the General Hotel Company sold the business to Trevell, Inc., for $25,000 cash and a $25,000 note for the inventory, plus the land by separate deed. Trevell was a subsidiary of Hamilton Stores, the Yellowstone concessioner, named for Trevor “Bud” and Eleanor “Ellie” Povah, and it gave their seasonal Yellowstone staff a winter job. In August 1966 the company registered a new fictitious name for the grocery store, curio shop, gas station, bar, restaurant and hotel at Stove Pipe Wells: “Stove Pipe Wells Village.” The county paper adopted it fourteen months later, in October 1967, and “Hotel” stayed on the sign for a couple of seasons anyway. The Povahs’ first move, like Bennett’s and Putnam’s, was to feed the county: sixty ’49ers to dinner in October 1966, with an architect already at work on a master plan.
The master plan became urgent on April 23, 1967, when the kitchen and dining building caught fire. The resort had no fire protection and its own water supply was “totally inadequate,” so the staff and a few guests stood and watched it burn to the ground, with three guest cottages. A seventeen-year-old was arrested for arson. The old Jayhawker room had held the length of stovepipe Eichbaum retrieved from the original well. What replaced it, opened for the 1968 season, is the dining complex that stands today: native stone fireplaces, a waterfall over native stone, a replica mine tunnel of old timbers connecting the dining room to the ’49er saloon, a kitchen “geared to handle 1500 diners,” and a bill you paid in an old mining car. The hotel’s own advertising that year said, carefully, that “it is said” Bob Eichbaum built the first electric light plant in Rhyolite. Scores of new motel rooms followed. The pool predates the Povahs; Peg Putnam had one by 1964.
The Village became the ’49ers’ west-side headquarters: the campfire and dancing on opening night, the historical breakfast, the burro race, the Desert Trek riding in to the blacksmith shop, the society’s portrait gallery on the walls. In November 1970 the ’49ers dedicated a monument to the Eichbaum Toll Road on the highway just west of the Village, with the original wooden toll sign mounted on it and Peg Putnam Lewis as principal speaker. The keepsake booklet that year was Mary DeDecker’s “The Eichbaum Toll Road,” which became the source of most of what has been written about Eichbaum since, errors included; the state landmark plaque placed on the monument a year later copied two of them. Horace Albright, who had been director of the Park Service when the monument was proclaimed, spoke at the Village’s historical breakfast in 1972. The Park Service’s western advisory committee met in the Village’s meeting room in 1973 to discuss ending mining in the parks and making Death Valley a national park. Both happened, in 1976 and 1994.
In February 1970 the National Parks Advisory Board came through with Lady Bird Johnson, and the superintendent told the board that the monument’s most pressing needs included “new water systems, especially at Stovepipe Wells.” The Service drilled a test well near the mouth of Mosaic Canyon in 1971 and built a reverse-osmosis plant about 1975, which ended a practice that went back to Eichbaum’s first winter: hauling drinking water down the grade from Emigrant Spring in a tank truck, in the 1970s “an old truck with bad brakes.” As late as November 1975 some rooms “still do not have drinkable water.” The summer of 1970 was the first in which the Village stayed open all year with a full staff; July alone brought 21,233 visitors to the monument. The 1929 airstrip was paved in 1971. The toll-station telephone, reached by asking the long-distance operator for “Stove Pipe Wells #1,” was the Village’s number into the late 1970s.
What the Povahs did not do was keep the place alive as a story. Eichbaum had manufactured legends and Putnam had placed them in newspapers; the Village under Trevell generated almost no press outside the county. Its advertising in the 1970s was a list of amenities, a heated pool, a landing strip, a campground, under a toll-station telephone number. The founder appeared in the hotel’s own voice only as “it is said.” The buildings got newer and the water got better, and the personality that had carried the resort through three widows and a world war was allowed to lapse, not by any decision anyone recorded, but by nobody taking the trouble to tell the story. By the end of the decade a Park Service safety engineer would recommend burning the place down.
Visitation passed 600,000 in 1973 and fell by more than a third in the energy crisis of 1974. The Village’s last advertisement ran in January 1978, and by then the Park Service, which had wanted the property since the 1960s and had bought Scotty’s Castle in 1970, had an appraisal in hand. On January 23, 1979, the United States bought Stovepipe Wells Village from Trevell, Inc., for $5 million. A Reno paper reported that the Village “now operates from October through April, with limited services available during the broiling summer months,” which was still the shape Eichbaum had given it in 1926. Fred Harvey, the Furnace Creek concessioner since 1956, took over the operation that autumn. The rivalry the borax company had opened by announcing its own hotel in the same newspaper column as Eichbaum’s lumber delivery ended, fifty-two years later, under one operator and federal ownership.
Sources
Inyo Register, May 12–Jun 2 and Oct 27, 1966, and Nov 9, 1967; Inyo Independent, Oct 14, 1966, Apr 28 and May 5, 1967, Oct 20, 1967, Nov 8 and Nov 15, 1968, Mar 5, 1970, Apr 1, 1971, Nov 18, 1971, Nov 16, 1972, Sep 27 and Oct 4, 1973, Jan 23, 1975, and Feb 19, 1976; San Bernardino Sun, Apr 25 and Oct 28, 1967, and Nov 10, 1968; Tucson Daily Citizen, Dec 12, 1972; Desert Magazine, Dec 1967, Nov 1970, Nov 1971, Nov 1973, Nov 1975, Nov 1978 and Feb 1980; Mary DeDecker, Keepsake No. 10 (1970); DPR 523 inventory form, Nov 18, 1974; Massie appraisal, May 1, 1978; NRHP nomination (2012); Hal Rothman, To Ride Alone (2004); Reno Evening Gazette, Feb 7, 1979.
