The Death Valley ’49ers — 1849, the Desert That Got Its Name

Summary

In the winter of 1849–50 a scattered company of gold-seekers, chasing a rumored shortcut to the California mines, drove their wagons off the established Old Spanish Trail and straight into the basin that one of them, looking back from its western rim, would damn forever as "Death Valley." The long overland approach — the wagon roads, the breakup of the larger party, the fateful choice to follow a map of a cutoff that did not exist — is told on our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries. This entry is about what happened after the wheels stopped: the families pinned in the desert with their oxen dying and no way out, and the walk that saved them.

The group at the center of the story is the Bennett-Arcan party — the families of Asabel Bennett and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Arcan (often written Arcane), with their wives and small children, plus a few single men. By the time they understood the trap they were in, late in December 1849, they were camped near a spring on the floor of the valley, their oxen too weak to haul the wagons over the wall of mountains to the west, their food nearly gone. They made a desperate plan: two of the strongest and youngest men, William Lewis Manly and John Rogers, would go ahead on foot to find a settlement and bring back provisions, while the families waited at the spring.

Manly and Rogers were gone far longer than anyone had dared expect — about twenty-six days. They crossed the Panamint Range, struck out across the Mojave for nearly 300 miles, and finally reached the settled country near Mission San Fernando, north of Los Angeles, where they obtained food, three horses, and a one-eyed mule. Then they turned around and walked the whole brutal route back into the valley, fully expecting to find the families dead. They were not all dead. Most of the Bennett-Arcan people were still alive at the spring, just barely, and Manly and Rogers led them out on foot over the mountains, reaching the safety of Rancho San Francisco — near present-day Santa Clarita — in March 1850.

The death toll in Death Valley was, remarkably, very low — only one man of the Bennett-Arcan group, the ailing Captain Richard Culverwell, died in the valley itself, and the families and children all came through. What gave the place its terrible name was not a mass grave but the experience of it: the heat, the salt, the dead oxen, the weeks of waiting, and the conviction of everyone in it that they had walked into a country that meant to kill them. As they climbed out at last over the mountains, one of the party is remembered to have turned and said, "Goodbye, Death Valley" — and the name stuck to the map.

The Setup

The Death Valley '49ers were not a single organized wagon train but a loose collection of gold-rush emigrants who, late in 1849 and worried that they had started too late to cross the Sierra Nevada before winter, decided to swing south and take the Old Spanish Trail toward Los Angeles. At a camp on that trail, someone produced a map showing a cutoff that supposedly ran due west, slicing hundreds of miles off the route. The temptation was irresistible to men chasing gold, and a large group struck out across unmapped country. Almost immediately it began to break apart into smaller bands as the terrain turned hostile — among them the group of single men who called themselves the Jayhawkers, and the family party that became the Bennett-Arcan company.

The Bennett-Arcan party was built around two households: Asabel "A." Bennett, with his wife Sarah and their children, and Jean-Baptiste Arcan with his wife Abigail and their young son, traveling with a handful of teamsters and single men, including the young William Lewis Manly and John Haney Rogers. Manly was a Vermont-born woodsman in his mid-twenties who had attached himself to the Bennett family; he would become both the hero and the chronicler of the ordeal, publishing his memoir Death Valley in '49 decades later. These were ordinary emigrant families, not desert experts, hauling wagons and small children into one of the harshest landscapes on the continent on the strength of a shortcut they could not verify.

The plan, such as it was, had been simply to get to California faster. Instead the cutoff led the wagons into a maze of dry ranges and salt flats with little water and no forage. Bit by bit the larger company fragmented as different groups chose different escape routes; the Jayhawkers eventually abandoned and burned their wagons to dry the meat of their slaughtered oxen and pushed out on foot. The Bennett-Arcan families, slowed by children and unwilling to abandon everything, pressed on toward the lowest, hottest ground of all — the great sink that would soon bear the name Death Valley — until their animals could pull no farther.

The Disaster

By the end of December 1849 the Bennett-Arcan party had come to a halt near a spring on the floor of the valley, in the area now associated with the long-running tradition of "Bennetts Well." The wagons could go no farther: the oxen were starved to skin and bone, the route west was blocked by the sheer rampart of the Panamint Range, and the families had no idea where the nearest settlement lay or how far. They were, in the most literal sense, trapped — surrounded by waterless mountains, their food dwindling, their draft animals dying one by one. To stay was to starve; to push the wagons over the mountains was impossible with the animals they had left.

Out of that dead end came the decision that defines the story. Manly and Rogers, the two strongest young men and the ones without families of their own to guard, volunteered to go ahead on foot, find a settlement, and bring back food and pack animals. The families would butcher some of the failing oxen, dry the meat, and wait at the spring. Everyone understood the gamble: if the two men did not return, or returned too late, the families would die where they sat. Manly's memoir records the wrenching scene of leaving women and children behind in the desert on the strength of a promise to come back.

The two set out westward, climbed out of the valley over the Panamints, and were swallowed by a country far larger and drier than they had imagined. What they expected to be a short scout to a nearby ranch became an epic in itself: ridge after waterless ridge, dry lakebeds, and the Mojave's emptiness stretching on for days. They found the body of at least one earlier traveler who had died of thirst on the route. Behind them, at the spring, the families waited and watched the western horizon, killing and eating their last oxen, the children growing weaker, the days stacking up far past the time the men should have been back.

The Ordeal

Manly and Rogers walked nearly 300 miles, across the breadth of the Mojave, to reach the settled ranch country near Mission San Fernando, north of Los Angeles. There they obtained a supply of food, three horses, and a one-eyed mule, and, almost at once, turned around to retrace the entire punishing route back into the desert. Most men would have counted the journey out as survival enough; the whole moral weight of the Death Valley story rests on the fact that the two went back. The return crossing cost them their horses to thirst and exhaustion, and they reached the valley leading only the surviving mule, fully braced to find a camp of corpses.

What they found instead was that the families had held on. Most of the Bennett-Arcan party was still alive at the spring after roughly twenty-five or twenty-six days of waiting — gaunt, sun-scorched, and at the very end of their food, but living. Manly's account describes the children running out to meet them and the families' disbelief that the two had actually returned. They had brought enough to get everyone moving. The wagons were abandoned for good; the surviving oxen were loaded with the smallest children, and the whole party set out on foot to walk over the Panamints and across the desert by the route Manly and Rogers had now traveled three times.

The walk-out was its own ordeal — a long, thirsty march over the mountains and across the Mojave with women and small children, sustained by the dwindling supplies and by Manly's and Rogers's hard-won knowledge of where the water lay. Setting out from the valley around February 11, 1850, they were the better part of a month on the trail before they came down at last, on March 7, into the inhabited country of southern California at Rancho San Francisco, ragged and starving but alive. As they crested the divide and looked back at the basin that had nearly killed them, one of the party — by the tradition that comes down through Manly — turned and said, "Goodbye, Death Valley," and the name passed onto the map and into American memory.

How They Survived

Rescue & After

The death toll in Death Valley itself was strikingly small for so terrifying a story. Of the Bennett-Arcan party, only one man — Captain Richard Culverwell, a sickly former government clerk of about forty-eight who grew too weak and turned back toward camp — perished, his body found by Manly and Rogers on their return; he is generally counted the only 1849 emigrant to die within Death Valley itself. The families and all the children survived. Other emigrants who had taken the cutoff fared worse in scattered incidents across the surrounding desert, and the exact total for the whole dispersed company is uncertain, but the valley did not produce the mass grave its name implies. What it produced was an experience so harrowing that the survivors named the place after death itself.

William Lewis Manly went on to a long life in California, and decades later, in 1894, he published Death Valley in '49, the memoir that is the single most important source for the ordeal and one of the classic survival narratives of the American West. John Rogers, his partner in the walk-out, is honored alongside him; the two men's double crossing of the desert to save the families is the heart of the legend, and modern Death Valley National Park preserves and interprets the route and the spring camps associated with the story. The Jayhawkers and other groups who had split off left their own accounts, and place-names across the region — the Panamint passes, the wells, the playa — still carry the marks of that winter.

The phrase "Goodbye, Death Valley" gave a permanent name to what is now the hottest and lowest place in North America and one of the most visited national parks in the country. The 1849 emigrants were neither the first nor the last to suffer there, but they were the ones who named it, and Manly's book ensured the story survived. It endures less as a tale of mass death — it was not that — than as a tale of two young men who walked out of an inescapable place, and then walked back into it on a promise.

Lessons

References

• Death Valley '49ers Wikipedia
• William Lewis Manly, Death Valley in '49 (1894) Project Gutenberg (Manly memoir)
• The Lost '49ers National Park Service — Death Valley
• William Lewis Manly Wikipedia