The initial investor in Scotty's gold mine in Death Valley was Julian Gerard. In 1902 he bought one-third interest for $1500 after he assayed ore samples that Scotty provided but, alas, the ore came from a Colorado mine where Scotty had once worked. I don't know what happened when Gerard discovered the truth, but whatever it was, it didn't slow Scotty down; he promoted himself on grubstake money, stayed at the best hotels from Los Angeles to New York, left gigantic tips after buying rounds of drinks, and bragged about his mine: "My mine is where the devil himself can't find it. It's in Death Valley in the mountains where no man can ever go - no man but Wallie Scott... I'm worth $1 million to $20 million and it's all there in the mine." Then he would disappear back into the desert.
Three years later Scotty hired a three-car Santa Fe Railroad train that he called the Coyote Special and made the trip from LA to Chicago in just under 45 hours. He said, "We got there so fast nobody had time to sober up." The public loved him (presumably the public that had not invested money), awarding him folk hero status. This trip led to a meeting with an earlier investor, Albert Johnson.
Johnson was the polar opposite of Death Valley Scotty: a quiet, religious man who did not smoke, swear, or drink. He grew up in a wealthy family and made another fortune in the insurance business in Chicago. The meeting in 1905 led to a further investment in Scotty's mine. Johnson visited Scotty in 1906 and 1909 but never managed to see the mine. Even after realizing he's been duped, he continued to provide shelter and food for Scotty, saying, "Whether he has any mine or not I shall have a delightful outing and know I shall come out in much better health for Scotty is a prince of good fellows and a delightful companion."
Johnson and his wife Bessie decided to build a place to stay. If I understood the tour guide correctly, the castle was built on land that Johnson did not own. It was government land but Johnson thought it was nicer than his own property and construction began. When the "error" was discovered, construction halted until he and the government worked out a swap and this is what became their home in the desert:
It's actually quite nice. Some people loosely compare it to Hearst Castle but it's nowhere near as opulent or over the top.
The house has a central courtyard, maybe designed for cars to be able to drive to the front door, midway down the wing on the left.
Inside the lovely gate, looking to the west, toward the bell tower.
On the wall on the right is this sundial. HH and I overheard a guide tell his group, as he shepherded them into the courtyard, that it works.
I'm not sure what the significance of Janus is to a sundial.
It's said the devil is in the details, but I think it's beauty, imagination, and whimsy that's in the details. Just look!
Here,
here,
here, on the second floor, so the screen over the little window is not for security. As my mother would have said, it's "decoration."
And here. The gate is at some distance from the castle; maybe a service entrance?
The great room of the house has a fireplace on one end and a water wall on the other. The water, unfortunately, was not running. Imagine the sound it would make.
This is a broader view of the same room. I'm not a big fan of overly high ceilings, but I like the gallery and the light, and think that otherwise this is an easy room to be in.
In one of the photos above I pointed out the bell tower. Bessie Johnson learned the musical preferences of her guests and programmed the bells from this machine to play that music as her guests arrived.
Albert Johnson envisioned the room below as his library. You can see that his vision didn't mesh with Bessie's.
Scotty hired the men who worked on the ranch to be in the basement when he had dinner parties, with the instruction to make the kind of noise that one would associate with digging in a gold mine. Then he would tell his guests that the noise was miners, digging gold even as the guests were having their dinner upstairs.
This upstairs room has a gigantic player organ on one side. As it plays, wide louvers that cover the entire wall behind it open and close in time with the music. A feast for the senses.
This concludes the upstairs portion of our tour.
Meanwhile, in the basement, which includes a quarter mile of tunnels, there are thousands, probably tens of thousands, of tiles that were intended for the swimming pool that never got built. The excavation was made and some bridges and such were built, but the pool never came into being.
Scotty never did own the Castle but it seems Johnson didn't care that he footed the bill for years. As one of the signs in the Visitor Center says, "Johnson was intrigued by the romance of the Wild West and the reality of the desert landscape. In Scotty, he found a colorful Old West character and companion. In the desert he found relief from his back injuries [from a train wreck] and asthma. In Grapevine Canyon, he found an isolated place to build a home away from home, a castle in the desert."
Shortly before Johnson died in 1948, he set up the Gospel Foundation specifically to care for his properties and fund charitable work. Scotty continued to live there and when he died in 1954 he was buried on a hill overlooking the property; the Park Service bought the property from the Foundation in 1970 for $850,000. After the purchase there was no money to also buy the furnishings, so the Gospel Foundation donated them.
I made the steep hike to see Death Valley Scotty's grave and his shiny nose, which immediately brought to mind.......
.....the grave of Victor Noir, in Pere Lechaise Cemetery in Paris. I don't make the news, folks, I just report it.
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Thought of the day:
There's a sucker born every minute. - attributed to P.T. Barnum, but it's not his quote.
