Desert Gazette

One hundred years ago, this cabin was home- to someone.

This cabin is in a wide valley, at the top of a narrow and twisting canyon, 9 miles away from the main road into the Funeral Mountains of Death Valley. In the late 1800s, renegade Indian, ‘Paiute’ Bob Black, was rumored to have lured prospectors up there with promises of a gold strike, robbed and killed them, leaving their bodies in shallow graves. White man’s life was cheap, an Indian’s life was worthless, and many times previous Bob had been cheated and ridiculed after trusting a prospector for payment showing him the location of a rich strike.

This is one of about six buildings in the ruins of the town around the Inyo mine- An area found, in the early 1900s, to have a thick vein of gold streaked into the mountains behind it. Bob knew where the gold was, but it was against the law for the Indians to mine it. Several other profitable claims and mining towns sprang from the initial discoveries by Bob- each and every time he was cheated, laughed at for being so stupid, and occasionally shot at to chase him away.