BOB MCCRACKEN Nye County History Special to the PVT Christmastime, complete with an early 20th century "pin-up" and fine wines in the dugout dwelling occupied by Josiah Irving Crowell at his Chloride Cliff mine. Special to the PVT Josiah Irving Crowell?s Chloride Cliff mine mill. It was arranged to process the gold ore produced by the mine. Special to the PVT Christmastime, complete with an early 20th century "pin-up" and fine wines in the dugout dwelling occupied by Josiah Irving Crowell at his Chloride Cliff mine. Special to the PVT This photo of the main highway across Westgard Pass in Fish Lake Valley between 1920-22 gives a good impression of the difficulties of travel at the time. Special to the PVT Josiah Irving Crowell and his son, J. Irving Crowell Jr., in a 1917 Buick at their house at the Chloride Cliff mine. Special to the PVT Josiah Irving Crowell in his dugout dwelling at his Chloride Cliff mine in the Funeral Mountains between Beatty and Death Valley. Judging by the calendar, this photo was taken Oct. 12, 1915. Advertisement

Nye County is huge, larger than many states -- 18,294 square miles to be exact. And every mountaintop and valley has stories to tell.

Six miles south of Beatty on Highway 95, look to the east toward Bare Mountain. Near the base, about two miles north of Carrara, you can see the workings of an old gold mine, the Gold Ace. Originally known as the Bull Moose, it was taken over in 1928 by a fellow named G. Ray Boggs. He had big plans for the mine, but by March 1929, the Gold Ace was looking more like a pair of deuces.

In the meantime, a piece of high-grade float had been found on the property, and Boggs' wife, Leila May, held a "kind of séance" under the stars to determine the source of the rich specimen. Almost as a last resort, Boggs dug on the spot Leila May had divined and, sure enough, after a few feet Boggs hit a pocket of gold that ran up to $23,692 per ton.

Where there's gold, there's heat. That summer, there were more than 100 men working at the Gold Ace and its nearby diggings.

Roland Wiley was a young Las Vegas attorney at the time. In March 1929, he and a friend, Bill Elliot, a tailor who had owned shops in Tonopah and Goldfield in those cities' heydays, were on their way to Reno, where Elliot planned to establish a tailor shop. They stopped at Carrara just prior to the discovery of the high-grade and were advised things were not going well at the Gold Ace.

Elliot opened his shop in Reno. Not long after that, he traded Harry Stimler, co-discoverer of the gold at Goldfield, two suits for 5,000 shares of Gold Ace stock. The stock was selling at 3 cents per share at the time, amounting to $75 per suit.

Not long after that, Boggs hit the high-grade at the Gold Ace and the stock's value shot through the roof. (I'm told that pocket or another one like it produced millions.)

Bill Elliot soon sold the 5000 shares he'd received from Stimler for $1 each. That amounted to $2,500 per suit -- more than $25,000 in today's economy -- perhaps making those suits the most expensive ever sold on the Western frontier. Yes, the frontier, or at least a good remnant of it, still existed in Nye County at that time.

Still at the six-mile point south of Beatty, focus your attention directly across the Amargosa Valley from the Gold Ace to the Funeral Mountains (my map calls it the Amargosa Range). Follow the crest of the range, looking for a flat-topped mountain midway along the ridge line. That's where the Chloride Cliff Mine is located, right on top of the mountain.

In 1871, three prospectors from San Bernardino -- August Franklin, Eugene Lander and a man named Hanson -- discovered promising float high up in the Funeral Mountains south of Daylight Pass. They followed the specimens up the hill and found a big belt of quartz laced with what they thought was silver chloride. As Richard Lingenfelter notes in his wonderful book "Death Valley and the Amargosa" (1986), samples assayed in San Bernardino ran from $200 to $1,000 per ton in silver.

The three men formed the Chloride Cliff Mining Co. and sold interests in the claim to friends, including William Stockton. Interestingly, Lander went on to establish a ranch in Oasis Valley not far from the present site of Beatty. When Lander quit the ranch after a few years, Stockton, whom Lingenfelter referred to as "that ubiquitous 'Old Man of the Desert'" with an "all-consuming quest for the [Lost] Gunsight silver and Breyfogle's gold," took it over.

The partners worked the Chloride Cliff for two years.

They sank a 150-foot shaft and took out 100 tons of what they thought was good ore. Much to their disappointment, they discovered their hard work had produced not silver chloride but lead chloride worth less than $28 per ton. All the men except Franklin left in disgust. Franklin, however, held on, maintaining his rights to the claim until he died in 1904.

Ironically, as Lingenfelter points out, while the partners at Chloride Cliff labored futilely, down the mountain on the west side of the Funerals sat $1 million in gold at the site of what became famous as the Keane Wonder Mine.

"So close, but so far away," as they say in the mining game.

The Keane Wonder gold was discovered in April 1904, and it generated a lot of heat. By July, 500 men were there. Shorty Harris and Ed Cross didn't get there until August, too late to locate a good claim. But Shorty and Ed had their own rendezvous with history. They headed north out of the Funerals and soon discovered gold in the green rock at Bullfrog, which set off the amazing Rhyolite gold rush.

Along about this time, George Franklin, the original owner's son, sold his interest in the Chloride Cliff Mine for $110,000 to a promoter -- today he would be known as an entrepreneur -- by the name of J. Irving Crowell.

Crowell was an Easterner from Cape Cod. His wife, Annie L. Crowell, was a native of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and the couple had a home in Los Angeles.

Crowell purchased the Chloride Cliff property with the intention of promoting it -- that is, attracting investors for its development, making a profit in the process. Crowell maintained ownership and resided at Chloride Cliff from about 1905 until around 1917, at which time he moved to Beatty. I interviewed his son J. Irving Crowell Jr. in 1987; he told me his father never made money on the property, but that lessees who worked there did.

In the meantime, Crowell Sr. acquired a fluorspar mine about five miles east of Beatty named the Daisy Group. The Daisy was a good steady producer and sustained the Crowell family in Beatty for the next two generations.

During Crowell's tenure at Chloride Cliff, Rhyolite came and went. In the summer, Young Irving Jr. would go to Chloride Cliff from Los Angeles to be with his father.

It was 18 miles from Rhyolite to Chloride Cliff over a rough dirt road. The trip took five hours one way by horse and buggy. Irving told me he had his first glass of champagne at the Southern Hotel in Rhyolite, located across the street from the Overbury Building.

Sometimes he and his dad or one of the miners went into Rhyolite and picked up needed supplies. On other occasions, supplies were delivered directly to the mine by merchants in Rhyolite. Desert delivery involved somebody walking down to the Keane Wonder Mine, which had a telephone, and calling in an order to Rhyolite that would then be delivered to Chloride Cliff.

In about 1923, bad luck struck the Crowells.

Young Irving Jr. was in his fourth year of college when his father took a Pullman car from Beatty to Los Angeles. Irving Sr. boarded the Pullman in Beatty and the T&T Railroad pulled it to Ludlow, Calif., where the car was dropped off. In Ludlow it was picked up by the Santa Fe Railroad, which then headed for Los Angeles. Somehow, on the way to Los Angeles, Crowell's Pullman came loose from the train. When the engineer realized what had happened he stopped and then backed the train up in order to reconnect with the Pullman.

In backing up, however, he misjudged the distance and hit the Pullman while going 35 miles per hour. Crowell was seriously injured in the collision and was never able to work again. His Nevada days were over. As a result, young Irving Jr. was forced to drop out of college and ended up taking over his dad's fluorspar mine east of Beatty.

Mining the fluorspar was hard work. At one point, the mine had one level at the bottom of a 134-foot shaft. Irving Jr. would work eight hours during the day, digging fluorspar, go home for supper and then return to the mine. He would climb down the shaft, load a bucket, then climb to surface and hoist the bucket. He repeated the effort until 10 p.m. each night.

A trip by automobile from Beatty to Los Angeles was no picnic in those days. It took three days. There were two routes -- you could drive to Las Vegas, then to Searchlight and Goffs, on to Santa Fe, then to Needles, then west through Ludlow and Barstow. Alternately, you could go north up Oasis Valley and across Sarcobatus Flat, then turn west over Westgard Pass to Big Pine, Calif. Then it was down the Owens Valley to Los Angeles by way of Mojave.

Irving told me that flat tires were a constant source of problems on those trips. Flats were repaired on the spot. On one trip to Los Angeles by way of Westgard, he said, they had 27 flat tires.