Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1894 — CLOSE TO FIRE [ARTICLE]

CLOSE TO FIRE

Are the Feet of Those Who Walk on the Sand of Death Valley. Mr. Frederick Momson’s lecture on Death Valley, which was delivered at Metropolitan Temple on Friday, added something to our knowledge of one of the most curious spots in the State. It was a year or two after the discovery of gold that its existence was made known by the frightful destruction of an immigrant party by thirst within its limits. The immigrants were coming in through Nye County, Nev.; they crossed a pass in the Paramint Mountains and struck into the valley, where their skeletons lie to this day. Some ten years afterward the United States Boundary Commission surveyed the valley and pronounced it to be the bed of a former lake, which had been drained in one of the last volcanic convulsions on this side of the mountains. Since then it has been visited by occasional explorers and gatherers of borax; but as it contains no water, as the air is inpregnated with mephitic gases, and as the thermometer sometimes registers as much as 140 degrees in the shade in summer, visitors have been few and far between.

Yet it is an interesting spot. It is part of the belated world, to which the great Salt Lake, the subterranean river of Mojave and the Colorado Desert belong, and of which the geysers of Sonoma are an offshoot. As Greenland is a relic of the last glacial age, so this distressed region is a surviving relic of the latest igneous age; an era when nothing was finally settled, and fire and water were contending for supremacy over the soil. Similar regions exist in southern Calabria and in the vicinity of the Dead Sea in Palestine; the volcanic force has so far lost its primitive energy that earthquakes are light, and there are no eruptions; but the volcanic gases continue to escape in such quantity that travel is attended with danger to life, and the water springs are polluted with salt, sulphur and poisonous ingredients. In the California Solfatara excessive heat is added to the other horrors of the place. The center of the valley is hotter than Sennaar, and the only animal life is a few specimens of tropical reptiles. Mr. Momson is reported to have said that the bottom of the valley is the lowest depression on the earth’s surface. This is not strictly correct. The lowest levels obtained in Valley are about 430 feet below the sea, whereas the surface of the Dead Sea in Palestine is 1,300 feet below. But the hole which goes by the name of Death Valley is pretty deep. The crust of the earth throughout the valleys of San Bernardino and Inyo counties must be very thin. The traveller’s feet are separated from the internal body of everlasting fire by a slim sheet of earth and rock, which would offer but a slight resistance to seismic force. A few miles distant from Death Valley there is a region which may be surveyed by the eye, and which contains a thousand active volcanoes—small of their kind, to be sure, baby volcanoes, so to speak, but still actively engaged in throwing up mud and water. And not many miles away is the range of granite mountains, among which Mount Whitney rears its head through the clouds; solid masses of primeval rock which must have worn the shape in which we see them now when the plain at their feet wasl a seething, raging caldron in which fire and water contended for the mastery. To see such marvels of nature people cross oceans, spend fortunes and carry their lives in their hands. Neither Mauna Loa nor Hecla offers such wonders to the beholder as Death Valley and the Colorado Desert. In January and February the heat in the valley is bearable —not over 90 Q in the shade. Excursion parties might be fitted out with supplies of food And water, and, in a few days, the visitors might see enough to realize what the world was like in the Plutbnic age. The contrast between the pleasant valleys of the rivers, with their fruit trees bursting into blossom, and these dreadful deserts, with their awful chasms and their hideous inhabitants, would be a thing not easily forgotten.—[San Francisco Call.