Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks

Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks, remembered across the Mojave as “Dad” Fairbanks, was born in 1857 in Payson, Utah, to Mormon pioneer parents. From the start he carried the restlessness of a trail man — lean, long-legged, and eager for new ground. The Paiutes of the Death Valley country called him “Long Man,” a fitting name for someone whose strides carried him across some of the hardest landscapes in the West.

Fairbanks came into the Death Valley country at the height of the Tonopah and Goldfield rush in the early 1900s. Freight wagons by the hundreds were grinding north toward Nevada, and the road that became known as the Goldfield Trail cut across the Mojave in a chain of water holes and oases: Cajon Pass, Soda Springs, Devil’s Playground, Silver Lake, the Amargosa basin, and on to Ash Meadows, Beatty, Rhyolite, and finally Goldfield. Where there was water and hay, there was opportunity, and Fairbanks understood that better than most.

At Ash Meadows, he found an abandoned ranch with strong springs and, to his surprise, stands of wild hay worth a fortune to passing teamsters. He bought the place and turned it into a rest station, watering stock and selling feed to the mule skinners hauling supplies north. It was his first foothold in the desert economy — not mining, but providing the lifeline that made mining possible.

From there he moved on to Beatty, Nevada, where he opened the town’s first restaurant and ran his own freight line as far as Goldfield. The work was rough, the roads worse, but Dad was gregarious and never shied from hard labor. He was also a poker player of some skill, and more than once his sharp eyes kept a cheat from getting the better of him.

Like so many, he chased the copper excitement at Greenwater, where engineers swore there was a world-class deposit. When that camp collapsed into dust, he hauled abandoned houses down to a nearby spring, stacked canned goods on a table, and put up a sign: “Store.” That was the humble birth of Shoshone, the little town that would become the southern gateway to Death Valley.

Shoshone was never big, but it endured. Fairbanks, joined by his wife Celestia Abigail — “Ma” Fairbanks — and their family, kept it alive through sheer grit. His daughter Stella married Charles Brown, the sheriff of Greenwater who later became a Nevada state senator. Through that connection, the Fairbanks and Brown families became woven into the history of Inyo County and the Amargosa Valley.

But Dad wasn’t done moving. As automobiles began to replace mule teams, he looked farther south to a lonely siding called Baker, near Soda Lake. There he built a store, a row of cabins, and a gas pump. The place was a slab of hell in summer, a frozen plain in winter, but strategically perfect: it sat on the highway into Death Valley. Travelers had no choice but to stop, and Dad caught them “coming and going.” Standard Oil eventually leased the pumps, providing him with financial security after decades of hustling on the desert’s shifting frontier.

His life was never without color. He traveled once with Panamint Tom, brother of the notorious Hungry Bill, and both admitted they were “heap scared” of one another on that uneasy trip through outlaw country. He loaned money to a prospector named Harry Oakes, who later became one of Canada’s richest men and repaid him decades afterward with a thousand dollars in cash. He witnessed the dying out of old-time outlaws like Tilly Younger and the fading of the desert’s roughest days.

What set Dad Fairbanks apart wasn’t a strike of ore or a lucky gamble, but his instinct to plant himself where others needed help. He turned springs into stations, abandoned shacks into towns, and desolation into waypoints of survival. He built businesses at Ash Meadows, Beatty, Shoshone, and Baker, always moving with the flow of people and freight. Where others gave up, he adapted.

By the time he retired, the stations he had founded were permanent marks on the desert map. Shoshone survived as a village, Baker as a highway town, and his name became part of the legend of Death Valley. He died in 1942, remembered as a pioneer whose real wealth was not measured in dollars but in friendships, reputation, and the towns he left behind.

Also see:

Country Life Realty
Wrightwood, Ca.

Mountain Hardware
Wrightwood, Ca.

Canyon Cartography

G.A. Mercantile

Grizzly Cafe
Family Dining

Abraxas Engineering
privacy

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Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks

Baker,Ca.

Historic Baker, Ca. Photos

Soda Lake

Devil's Playground

Shoshone, Ca.

Dublin Gulch

Greenwater

Ash Meadows

Beatty, Nv.

Death Valley

Goldfield, Nv.

Tonopah, Nv.

Long Man