Way out in the California desert, near the Nevada border, is a place called Scotty’s Castle. The fact that it is not really a castle and was not built or owned by Scotty only adds to the mystery of a place that in many ways defines Death Valley’s history as a land of mining, danger, tall tales, and adventurous travel.
Death Valley Scotty
Walter E. Scott was born in 1872, in northern Kentucky. As a child, he traveled with his family around the horse racing circuit, and left home at age 11 to join his brothers at their ranch in Wells, Nevada. At age 16, he joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show as a stunt rider and toured the United States and Europe with the show for the next 12 years. By 1900 he had married Ella Milius (whom he called “Jack”), left the Wild West Show and began conning wealthy East Coast investors into backing fictitious gold mining operations in the West. Scotty, as he came to be known, would take a sample of gold ore or gold dust from a different mine, and then present it to potential backers as a misleading example of the potential wealth available from his own mine.
By 1904, Scotty, through an intermediary, had made a connection with wealthy Chicago insurance executive Albert M. Johnson, who was looking to expand his investments into gold mining. Johnson was intrigued by Scotty’s story of finding a mysterious, hidden gold mine in Death Valley.
The Money Man
Albert Mussey Johnson was born in Oberlin, Ohio in 1872, the same year as his eventual partner in gold fever, Walter E. Scott. Johnson studied civil engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he met and fell in love with his future wife, Bessie Penniman. After graduating from Cornell in 1895, and marrying Bessie, Albert Johnson borrowed $40,000 from his father and invested in a zinc mine in Missouri, an investment that proved highly profitable. In 1899, while traveling west on a train to scope out more mining claims, Johnson and his father were involved in a terrible accident. Their train was struck from behind by another train, killing Albert’s father and severely injuring Albert.
Johnson eventually recovered, though it took him 18 months to be able to walk again. He lived the rest of his life with a limp and some other health issues. Those health issues would eventually play into Scotty’s belief that he could con Johnson out of money for so-called mines in Death Valley that Johnson would never be able to personally inspect.
Fool’s gold
After investing in Walter Scott’s mining schemes in 1904, Johnson began to notice by 1906 a distinct lack of return on his investment. Johnson then joined up with some of Scotty’s other investors and purchased train tickets out to Death Valley to inspect Scotty’s claims for themselves. Would they find an actual gold mine, or that they’d been made fools of?
Shootout in the desert
When Scotty encountered his investors in Death Valley, he knew the jig was up. But the wily Scotty, a born con man and charlatan, hatched a plan. As Scotty’s brother Warner guided the group through a canyon on mules, a group of “bandits” suddenly appeared. It was actually a group of Scotty’s friends disguised as bandits, but in the ensuing mock gunfight designed to scare off the investors, Warner ended up getting shot and badly injured. After that incident, which came to be known as “The Battle of Wingate Pass,” most of Scotty’s investors realized they’d been fooled, and pulled out of Scotty’s scheme. This incident was typical of the many schemes and ruses Scotty used to keep investors from learning the truth about his non-existent gold mines. Johnson, however, still believed in Scotty, and beginning in 1909 made many trips out to Death Valley in the hopes of finally seeing the gold mine. Although it’s likely that Johnson at some point realized the gold mine did not exist, he had apparently learned to love Death Valley as well as Scotty’s company.
A desert camp
Over the next 10 winters, Albert Johnson often returned to Death Valley, staying in a rough camp with Scotty and reveling in the desert scenery, climate, and Scotty’s eccentric personality and stories. Johnson had found riches in the desert far better than gold. As his health improved in the dry desert climate, the two men began a lifelong friendship that would change the history of Death Valley.
Death Valley Ranch
After a time, Johnson’s wife Bessie began accompanying him on his desert jaunts, and it was she who suggested they build something more comfortable for their winter vacations, to “get away from the rattlesnakes and scorpions” at the camp. This suggestion led to the construction of Death Valley Ranch in the early 1920s, located on land Johnson had purchased in Grapevine Canyon. Early construction consisted of box-like structures, but this was still better than the canvas tents in which they had been staying.
Later, a plan began to turn Death Valley Ranch into the Spanish-Mediterranean style villa that we see today. The Johnsons hired architect Martin de Dubovay, engineer Matt Roy Thompson, and designer Charles Alexander MacNeilledge to bring their vision to life. They even had a room built for Scotty, with its own private entrance. Scotty, however, preferred living in the five-room cabin Johnson had built for him at Lower Vine, a ranch site five miles away that included a corral for Scotty’s beloved mules.
Always one for a good story, Scotty told everyone he was building a $2 million castle in the desert with the profits from his gold mine. When questioned about this by reporters, Johnson smiled and agreed that Scotty owned the place and that he was just “Scotty’s banker.” It was here that the legend of Scotty’s Castle began. Though not a true castle, and not owned by Scotty, the story took hold and Death Valley Ranch became known as Scotty’s Castle for the rest of time.
An unfinished masterpiece
Work continued on “The Castle” throughout the 1920s, but was halted in the early 1930s when Johnson discovered that due to a surveying error, he was building his home on federal land; his land was actually farther up Grapevine Canyon. The problem was resolved in 1935, but by that time the Great Depression had caused the bankruptcy of Johnson’s National Life Insurance Company, and construction on the Castle was never restarted. Today the structure remains as Albert left it – incomplete but still spectacular.
Death at Towne Pass
The Johnsons continued to vacation at their castle until 1943, when Bessie was killed in a car accident at Towne Pass, elevation 4,961 feet, as they were driving into Death Valley. After Bessie’s death, a bereft Albert stopped visiting Scotty’s Castle altogether, and died of cancer in 1948. The Johnsons had no children, and they left their properties to the Gospel Foundation, a charitable organization Albert had created in 1946. His wife Bessie had been a lifelong evangelical Christian and regularly gave long, passionate sermons at the castle. A stipulation was that their good friend Walter Scott (Scotty) would live at the castle and be cared for by the Gospel Foundation for as long as he lived. Scotty died in 1954 and is buried on the hill overlooking his castle.
A national treasure
In 1970 the National Park Service purchased the villa from the Gospel Foundation for $850,000, thus preserving it for all time as a public resource. Scotty’s Castle is a national treasure, and the most popular destination in Death Valley National Park, attracting approximately 100,000 visitors each year. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Park rangers dressed in period costumes have led tours of the house and grounds and told stories of the Johnsons and Death Valley Scotty for decades, but these visits came to an abrupt halt in 2015. No visitors have fully toured the property since.
Flash flood
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll learn about the catastrophic flash flood that hit the Grapevine Canyon area of Death Valley in October of 2015, when the region received three inches of rain — a year’s worth of precipitation — in just five hours. The castle is still recovering from the destructive force of all of that water, mud, and rocks washing down the canyon towards the castle.
I recently visited Scotty’s Castle, on a special ranger-led “flood recovery tour” that brought a small group of visitors over currently closed roads and areas, so that we could see and learn about the flood and what efforts have been made to repair, preserve and protect Scotty’s Castle for the future, and when it might open to the public again.
Up next
In Part 2, we’ll learn about the great flood of 2015 and how the wall of water that poured down Grapevine canyon wiped out roads, damaged the castle, took down power lines, and stranded a group of hikers and campers, who sheltered in place on a high point on the rim of nearby Ubehebe Crater until park rangers could rescue them. All that, plus more current and historic photos, when our story continues.
Contributing writer Steve Gorman has been a resident of Alameda since 2000, when he fell in love with the history and architecture of this unique town. Contact him via [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Steve-Gorman.
