23 Skidoo

The history of Death Valley and the history of mining in Mohave Desert are one in the same. The mining history includes gold in Rhyolite, borax and talc in the Valley, and silver in the Panamints. The human part of the history is filled with tales of “varmints, virgins, vandals, and visionaries”. (quotes are subtitle to the book "An Unnatural History of Death Valley", by Paul Bailey)

This past December my wife and I drove into the Panamint Mountains on the West side of Death Valley to the 6,000 plus foot altitude. About six miles off the Emigrant Canyon Road is an overlook called Aguereberry Point. The Point provides a spectacular view of Death Valley to the east, and the very highest peaks of the Sierras to the west. Although there are barely 50 miles between the two points, there is a difference in elevation of almost 3 miles.

Pete Aguereberry, for whom the point was named, was a miner who in the early part of the century claimed the Napoleon Mine. He lived until the early 1940’s and we found old beds, clothes and furniture in the buildings near the mine. Pete led a colorful life. Shortly after the discovery of the mine, his partner shot him in the gut because he was having an affair with the man’s wife. He lived on but the partnership dissolved. In later years, he was often mentioned in the chronicles of the great city of 23 Skidoo.

Skidoo was a large mining town several miles to the north and they used to hold a founders’ day party each year. Part of the celebration was a foot race. Apparently, Pete won the race every year, except the year he was tripped by running the race bare foot.

Skidoo was also famous as the town that hung the same man twice and buried him three times. The man was Joe “Hooch” Simpson, and he was hung for the murder of James Arnold, the local banker. After the inquest, the armed citizenry snatched Hooch from the hands of the sheriff and hung him from a nearby telegraph pole. The event stirred up the big city papers interest, after all, these were civilized times and lynchings just weren’t done anymore. So they dug up Hooch’s body a second time and re-hung it, so the big city papers could capture the moment.

It wasn't over for Hooch and he was dug up a second time. This time to accommodate a visiting doctors in need for an office skull. Hooch should have skedaddled Skidoo, because in the end, it was there he lost his head.

To supply water to Skidoo a 25 mile line was build, at a cost of $200,000+ from the Wildrose Canyon. We drove up that Canyon to see the charcoal kilns. The kilns are at 6,800 feet. It was cold, windy, and there was snow on the ground. The juniper and pine that grow here were burned into charcoal to fire silver smelters, between 1876 and 1879.

The smelters were at the Modoc and Minetta Mines in the Argus Range (one more range to the west) and can be seen in the post card standing below the white capped Sierras. The Modoc Mine was discovered in 1875. With rich deposits of Silver-Lead ore, it was sold to a group of investors which included George Hearst, the famed mining engineer, U.S. Senator, and father of William Randolph Hearst. The Modoc Consolidated Mining Company was formed with the Modoc mine as the principal mine. Together with the discovery of other nearby mines, which included the Minnietta Belle below Lookout Mountain, these mines formed the basis for the Modoc District with the townsite of Lookout located on top of Lookout Mountain.

The kilns stand about 35 feet tall and are almost perfect parabolas. This shape gives them amazing sound acoustic qualities; we could whisper sweet nothings standing back to back at opposite ends of the interiors and hear each other perfectly.

Abandoned Mines in Death Valley Gunsight Breyfogle Garibaldi Lost Burro Keeler Quackenbush Lemoigne Big Four Eagle Harmony Ashfield Monte Blanco Lila C. Skidoo Napoleon Argenta Tucki Widow Chloride Cliff Rhyolite Inyo Keene Greenwater Lead Field

Up the hills from Ballarat some 40 miles or more The Man who made the Panamints, He left a ledge of ore, The Man who made the Panamints, had something on his Mind, He left the ledge of ore in sight for you and me to find. It’s forty miles from Ballarat, the mountains there are blue, The place is numberd 23, they’ve named the camp “Skidoo!” From GOLD by Craig Macdonald

Dad the CCC and the SF Migration

In the summer of 1935 my father (32 years old) took his first family and moved to the Washington DC area so that he could accept a position with the Civilian Conservation Corp as a statistician grade 6 at $1,800/yr. Over the next five years he received regular increases in pay and responsibility. These responsibilities included drafting a "Study of German Labor Services," and writing two presentations which he made to the Senate Budget Committee the second one being titled "The Job Placement Program of the Civilian Conservation Corps."

In the 18 months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the end of 1941 his income increased 35%, his first wife died of diabetes, he met and married my mom, lost his daughter to pneumonia (she was in the hospital at the time with complications from her own type 1 diabetes), and saw the birth of his first son. It was in June of that same year that he was appointed to the position of shipping analyst in the Office of Exports a division of the Board of Economic Warfare and received another 9+% pay hike.

The Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) was established by the President on December 17, 1941 and was abolished by Executive Order on July 15, 1943, when its functions were consolidated into the Foreign Economic Administration[1]. As a side story to this one I should note that a number of Americans who worked for the BEW were later discovered to have been secretly members of the Communist Party of America and had established covert liaisons with Soviet intelligence in what was known as the Silvermaster network named for Gregory Silvermaster a Russian immigrant and naturalized citizen who acted as their handler and courier. None of the papers that I possess from my fathers employment in the agency contains any of the names I found associated with the spymaster's ring but one of the persistent and unsubstantiated tales from my fathers years in the government are that he was conscripted to look for spies. Silvermaster himself was detailed to the BEW in 1942 where he was able to obtain and provide the Soviet Union with a large amount of data on arms, aircraft, and shipping production[2]. With the dissolution of the BEW in 1943 my father left for work in the private section and took a job with Bethlehem Steel.

As my Mom tells it, Dad was obsessed with the notion that California was were the opportunity was and he was hell bent on getting out of Washington DC and over to the West Coast to be a part of what my history book referred to as the "West's Second Gold Rush." As to whether the job offer came before or after the train trip to California I don't know but very little time elapsed between his leaving the post at the BEW in April 1943 and starting at Bethlehem Steel's plant near the shipyards in San Francisco. At Bethlehem he worked as a design draftsman and his name appears as draftsman for things like reduction gear dehumidifiers and emergency steering room pumps. Not exactly the big guns that others names are next to on the work rosters I found in his old papers but he does seem to be the one that had to sign off on the overall work schedule and certify its on time completion.

The Bay Area had managed to gather into one small geographic corner the operations of Bethlehem Steel, the Bechtel Corporation, Standard Oil, and the Kaiser Ship works. My parents took a flat way out on Geary Blvd. and Dad continued to work at Bechtel until the end of the war when he was terminated. He garnered several letters of recommendation from supervisors but the termination letter simply says "terminated due to the end of the war."

I found no record of another job for six months. Then in February of 1946 he began working as the San Francisco Office Manager for a Los Angeles based PR company that performed customer surveys and market analysis - but that just starts a whole 'nother story because he was about to leverage the business contacts he had made at Bethlehem, Bechtel and Standard Oil.

[1][1]From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[2][2] http://www.answers.com/topic/greg-silvermaster