MY DEATH VALLEY GAME PRESERVE 



By HARRY H. DUNN 



O one who is at all 

 familiar with the 

 haunts of America's 

 game — feathered, 

 hoofed or furred — 

 the desert, even its 

 most fertile and best 

 watered parts, would 

 not appeal as a 

 sportsman's par- 

 adise. But that arbiter of all news- 

 paper men's destinies an "assignment," 

 sent me into the sink of the Amargosa 

 River some months ago, and there I 

 found some business for shotgun and 

 rifle that gave me a higher opinion of 

 the Great American Sahara as a game 

 country than I had hitherto held. Some 

 of the hunting I had there was of the 

 best, — better by far than any I have 

 ever enjoyed before or since ; some of 

 it was very mediocre, and of both I am 

 going to strive to tell a little in the tale 

 hereto appended. 



Perhaps I should have said before 

 that the last resting place of the river 

 mentioned above is put down on the 

 maps as Death Valley, a much-lied- 

 about land, as are most places little 

 known of men and that have a ten- 

 dency to the sinister or the forbidding 

 in climate or history. Death Valley is 

 not, however, so called because this 

 river finds its sepulchre there, but be- 

 cause a handful of Mormons, foolishly 

 endeavoring to make a short cut across 

 the desert from Salt Lake to San Ber- 



nardino, California, died there, but few 

 of them escaping alive to tell the horri- 

 ble tale — which, to tell the truth, has 

 not grown any less horrible through 

 repetition. It is, in reality, the bed of 

 one of the last pits of the Juro-Triassic 

 Sea, which overlaid this whole desert 

 at one time, and is now but a stinking 

 borax marsh about seventy-five miles 

 long by from five to fifteen wide, dan- 

 gerous to travelers ignorant of its trails, 

 ready some day to give up vast riches 

 to those that approach it in proper man- 

 ner. At one point at least its floor is 

 over 400 feet below sea level, and at an- 

 other a mountain peak rises to a height 

 of over 10,000 feet. There is a great 

 deal of water in it, some good, more 

 that is bad, and here and there a spring 

 that will do in a pinch, but which would 

 be bad medicine to drink steadily. 



We, — there were thirteen of us and 

 twenty-four horses, — drifted into the 

 sink by way of Saratoga Springs, at 

 the southeastern end. These are quite 

 extensive water holes of warm sulphur 

 water, very palatable to drink and fine 

 in temperature and depth for bathing. 

 From the springs a little stream leads 

 out to a lake, hemmed in by sand hills 

 which still mark the line of the great 

 sea. The pond covers perhaps five- 

 acres, possibly less, and has no visible 

 outlet, the water seeping away through 

 the fine sand almost as fast as the 

 springs pour it out. At low "tide," so 

 to speak (the time when I was there, 



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