Goodbye, Death Valley: The Forty-Niners and the Name

Consider the mathematics of the situation. It is late December, eighteen forty-nine. A party of emigrants, several dozen men, women, and children, has been on the road from Salt Lake City for weeks, following what they believe to be a shortcut to the California gold fields. The shortcut has brought them down into a salt basin more than two hundred eighty feet below sea level. Their wagons are failing. Their oxen are dying. The mountains on every side are too steep to climb without abandoning everything. They do not know exactly where they are, except that they are somewhere they cannot stay.

Two young men named William Lewis Manly and John Rogers volunteered to walk out. They would go on foot through the Panamint Range, find help in the settlements to the west, and come back. The journey out and back covered approximately two hundred fifty miles. They were gone for roughly twenty-six days. When they returned to the valley floor with supplies and two mules, some of the party had already given up waiting and tried to leave on their own.

Manly and Rogers led the survivors out. The climb up through the Panamint Range was brutal. When the survivors crested the final ridge and looked back at the valley below, at the salt flats and the dry walls that had nearly killed them, one of them spoke a farewell. The accounts differ on who said it. The phrase that survived is this: Goodbye, Death Valley.

That is where the name came from. Not from a survey. Not from a Spanish colonial map. From a moment of relief at the top of a mountain, spoken by a person whose name history did not bother to record, looking back at a place they had barely escaped.

William Lewis Manly wrote his memoir, Death Valley in Forty-Nine, in eighteen ninety-four, forty-five years after the events. It is one of the primary accounts of what happened in that basin.

The Timbisha Shoshone had been living in this valley for at least a thousand years before that December. Their name for it, Timbisha, means rock face painted with ochre, referring to a specific landmark at Furnace Creek. It is a name that comes from intimacy with the landscape, not terror of it. The forty-niners were passing through. The Timbisha were home.