Scotty's Castle and the World's Greatest Con

About fifty miles north of Beatty, in a remote canyon of Death Valley, stands a sprawling Spanish Colonial mansion built in the nineteen twenties by a Chicago insurance millionaire named Albert Johnson and his wife Bessie, at the instigation of a con man from Kentucky named Walter Scott, who became known to history as Death Valley Scotty.

Scotty had spent years persuading investors that he owned a secret gold mine in Death Valley, collecting thousands of dollars for operations at a mine that did not exist. Albert Johnson gave him money over several years and eventually came to the desert to see his investment. There was no mine. Despite being swindled, Johnson liked Scotty, liked the desert, and found that the dry air was good for his injured back. The two became lifelong friends.

Johnson and his wife began building a permanent winter home in Death Valley in nineteen twenty-two, with quarters for Scotty included. Construction cost somewhere between about one and a half and two and a half million dollars. The project was eventually halted when Johnson discovered the structure had accidentally been built on federal land rather than the land he had purchased, and the Depression had erased his capital in any case.

The unfinished mansion became known as Scotty's Castle, though Scotty never owned it and the structure is not actually a castle. Scotty lived there until his death in nineteen fifty-four. The National Park Service purchased the property in nineteen seventy. A severe flash flood in twenty fifteen damaged the mansion significantly, and it has been under restoration since then.