Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 105, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 May 1910 — CONQUERED DEATH VALLEY. [ARTICLE]

CONQUERED DEATH VALLEY.

A Man Loaf in the Desert Tramped Elshty Miles to Safety. Death Valley is the most barren part of the great American desert. More men have died In its arid wastes than on any other equal area of the world’s surface, barring the great battle fields. It lies, a great sink in the sandy plain, about 250 miles north and east of Los Angeles. Cal., and within the bound aries of that State. The valley received its sinister name owing to the fact that in the early ’so’s a party of emigrants, some 220 in number, traveling overland by wagon from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Los Angeles, perished in its awful solitudes, barely a man es caping. In the Wide World Magazine is given the story of a man who, alone and unaided, conquered Death Valley in the hottest month of the desert year. The tale of awful suffering endured by this man, H. W. Manton, of Rhyolite. Cal., is told for the first time in hi# own words. For almost a week Manton was lost, in the heart of Death Valley. In three days he tramped eighty miles over sands so. hot that he could scarcely walk on them, though shod with heavy shoes. During those never-ending days he had no food and but one drink of water. When he staggered up to Cub Lee’s Furnace Creek ranch, more dead than alive, his tongue was swollen to such a size that his 'mouth could no longer contain it. His lips and eyelids were cracked open; his clothing was in tatters, and his shoes were coated with a heavy encrustation of borax and other alkalines, which had eaten great holes in the leather. At first he could nqt drink, and the touch of water was as fire to his parched lips and tongue. Kind-hearted ranchmen and miners forced the precious fluid into his mouth with a straw, with a spoon—any way to get him revived. And eventually he spoke, telling the strange story of his crossing the dread pit; of how he had wandered therein for many days with no companions save the lizards and the snake of the barren sands.