Illustrated sketches of Death Valley and other borax deserts of the Pacific Coast (1892)

John Randolph Spears (1850 1936) was an American author and journalist.

The author writes:
"THE STORY OF DEATH VALLEY---It is a gruesome story of a rugged country. More than a score of lives were lost in a day when the valley was christened, and its history from that day to this has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with rarely aught to relieve its harshness.

"It is a story, too, of apparent paradoxes and of wonders. Nature, if unkind in a way, has been lavish in her gifts to this desert pit. Well has the valley been named, and yet for more than half of the year it is one of the healthiest spots on the Pacific Coast. It is a place where rain-storms are well nigh unknown, and yet one where the effects of cloud-bursts are almost unparalleled. It is the hottest spot on earth, and yet ice often forms there. It is a place where the air becomes so arid that men have died through lack of moisture when abundant water was at hand, and yet the stopping place of hundreds of ducks, geese, and other migrating water-fowl. It is a region where the beds of lakes are found on the pointed peaks of mountains. It is a region where a mountain system of the most gorgeous-colored rocks is known as the Funeral Range. It is a rent in the earth, the bottom of which, in spite of the washings of centuries, is probably deeper below the level of the sea than that of any other valley in the world.

"Surely the story of Death Valley should have been preserved, but, unfortunately, although scores of articles have appeared in print on the subject, they have usually been imaginative, and even so thorough and accurate a work as "Bancroft's Pacific Coast History " contains only a brief and unsatisfactory reference to the matter."

This book originally published in 1892 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.