The Furnace Cemetery
The Furnace Creek Cemetery on the brink of Death Valley in the Funeral mountains. Is it not an inviting name? Would it not pay any prospector to tramp a hundred weary miles across the burning desert and at last to die of heat and thirst, digging madly in the parched sands for the water unattainable, just to be buried in a place so appropriate ? If any may think the end inviting they may now put it down in their category of the possible for at last a resting place has been selected among the countless unmarked graves of the Funeral range.
The cool shade and tranquil beauty of Cypress Lawn or Evergreen is not for the denizen of the desert. Sagebrush and greasewood, sand and ledges mark the "long home" of the dying prospector. But even so, is it not best? The man of the desert love^his desert home, and even in death the love of a lifetime is not to be disregarded. For decades the wealth of the desert has been sought by wanderers, hundreds of whom went to their great accounting, unwatched, unattended and unknown, victims of the desert, which they thought to rob of her riches, bfit which, even so, they loved. These hundreds lie unknown and forgotten in the great,, reaches of the Funeral mountains and the glaring wastes of the terrible Death Valley.
No news returns to their friends, and year by year the loved ones wait until anxiety darkens into despair and all is accounted over. All this is the tragedy of the desert life, the Funeral mountains and the Valley of Death. It may continue, but with the coming of man there is to be a caring for of those who have gone, a last touch of a friend, a last rite to show that, the man was a man, and so to be treated even in death. Tfie desert was his home. The desert claimed him in death, and in, the desert which he loved he may still lie, but "now with the sign above and around him that he was a man. The Furnace Creek Cemetery on the brink of Death Valley in the Funeral mountains. After all, is it not the best?
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If you think the Chuck-Walla is a joke, don't tell the editor. He may think you are serious.
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History on the desert is what will never be. Everyone is too busy making it to be able to record.
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You will be glad to get to Hell if the road there is as unpleasant as some you have traveled on earth.
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If you are forced to do business with your relatives, marry them. Then they can't testify against you.
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Everything in this maglet is true. If it is not true now it will be sometime, or it has been in the past.
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If a fire should start in Greenwater it's a query with the Chuck-Walla whether it would be cheaper to put it out with water worth two-bits per gallon or to let it burn the- lumber that cost $140 per thousand?
