Anyone fortunate enough to leave Bodie on horseback, with head erect and heart still beating, instead of vertically and heaven-bound, came sooner or later to the next small town, and from there to another small town, and from there to yet another. Bodie was surrounded by small towns, which were in turn surrounded by small towns indistinguishable from each other. The Wild West differed little in that respect from the Black Forest, Tuscany or the Alps, except that American small towns are not situated within sight of each other, but separated by tracts of land capable of swallowing up the whole of the Black Forest, all of Tuscany, and the entire Swiss Alps.
Within these expanses there are fire-spewing volcanoes and mountains of magnetic iron, petrified forests, boiling hot rivers and frightful chasms that yawn so deep into the earth’s interior you feel you’re looking at the dawn of Creation and wouldn’t be surprised to see dinosaurs browsing down there. The trees soar into the sky, so tall and massive you can bore holes through the trunks and drive carriages through them, and the bears, when they rise on their hind paws to attack, are not the height of a man but twice or three times as tall. I can well imagine how terrified the earliest prospectors of 1849 must have been – men who until a few months previously had been bank clerks in Cracow or policemen in Toulouse or farmhands in Tuscany – the first time they saw a grizzly bounding towards them, and how horrified they would have been by the fact that the beast did not drop dead when you emptied the magazine of your Smith & Wesson into its fur, and I wonder why, given that America’s flora, fauna, topography and climate were so far off the human scale, those people didn’t simply turn around and go home to Cracow, Toulouse or Tuscany.
Many of them really did turn around. There are also said to have been some who kept on heading west until they had rounded the globe and ended up back in Europe. But a remarkable number – possibly because they lacked the price of a passage home – put down roots on the way, usually in small towns, because nearly all American towns were small. In 1875, for instance, the Californian coastal settlement of Los Angeles had 7,000 inhabitants, only twice as many as 19th-century Olten, my home town.
On the western edge of Death Valley lies Panamint City, which is reputed to have been founded by some desperados who had attacked a Wells Fargo stagecoach and fled with their haul to the remote Surprise Canyon to wait until the guardians of the law either lost their urge to pursue them or transferred it to the next stagecoach robbers. That could take a very long time or a very short one. On the one hand, Wells Fargo had made it a rule to put 300 dollars on the head of every robber, regardless of identity; on the other, stagecoaches were always being robbed, and bounty hunters tended to hunt the most recent quarry because any traces of earlier robberies quickly disappeared in the trackless West.
The bandits waited for three days, two weeks, a month. They had brought plenty of food with them and got their drinking water from a small stream at the foot of the canyon. The canyon was situated in the Shoshone Indians’ tribal area, but there was no sign of the Indians themselves. Although a little vegetation grew on the banks of the stream, the rest of the terrain was all stones and rattlesnakes. From time to time a rabbit or a coyote would scamper past. By day the desperados played cards; at night they roasted a rabbit or a coyote.
In movies a bandit’s daily routine looks picturesque and romantic, but the reality of life outside the law was insufferably monotonous and boring. Personally, I only once renounced the company of women and children – this was in the late summer of 1964 – in order to lead an outlaw’s life of freedom and independence behind the bramble hedge. I had to cut this venture short after only a few hours because I realized that the company of earthworms, snails and ants would not entirely satisfy me in the long term.
At some stage, one of the desperados filled in time by going for a walk up the side of the canyon. He hummed a tune and picked some wild thyme with which to season the next roast rabbit, then sat down in the shade of an overhanging rock and tossed stones at lizards standing stock-still in the blazing sun as they diagonally raised one foreleg and one hind leg in the air to cool them. The bandit suddenly noticed a strangely glittering quality about the stone he was about to throw. Having hammered it to bits with his pistol butt, he discovered that it contained a large proportion of high-grade silver. He summoned his friends, and it transpired that Surprise Canyon embraced an area five miles long and two-and-a-half wide in which veins of silver ran close together.
The men were overjoyed by their discovery. They were now richer than they could ever have become by robbing stagecoaches. The only trouble was, their wealth would have to remain hypothetical for as long as the Wells Fargo stagecoach incident prevented their return to legality. The record would have to be wiped clean in some way.
At that time in Virginia City, Nevada, there was a state senator named William W. Stewart who had made a fortune as a lawyer specializing in prospectors’ licences and was known to be helpful in such cases. Legend has it that the robbers decided to fill their saddlebags with silver ore, ride to Virginia City, and ask this man for help. The senator thereupon asked Wells Fargo how many kilograms or hundredweight of silver it would take to cancel out the regrettable stagecoach business. One gathers that Wells Fargo promptly quoted a weight – Senator Stewart spoke many years later of 12,000 to 20,000 dollars – and the criminal aspect of the matter was tacitly waived.
Once this had been settled, Senator Stewart bought the bandits’ claims in Surprise Canyon and, in January 1874, founded not just one mining company but nine of them, so as to enable as many investors as possible to participate in the expected silver boom. He offered the shares on the San Francisco stock market for a total price of 50 million dollars.
In the ensuing months, Panamint City sprouted from the desert floor of Surprise Canyon under the eyes of the Shoshone Indians. In March the place boasted 125 inhabitants; by the year’s end there were 2,000. In September alone, 150 itinerant Chinese labourers arrived. As in nearly all small towns in the Wild West, the proportion of male inhabitants to female exceeded 90 per cent, and by far the biggest age group was that of 18 to 25-year-olds.
Upwards of a dozen saloons opened on either side of the main street. While many were just huts or tents, others embellished themselves with crystal chandeliers and cut-glass mirrors and lined their walls with gold silk. The brothel-keeper Martha Camp and her girls set up shop in Little Chief Canyon, a little way off the main street. There being no hospital in Panamint City, they also offered their services – for a fee – as nurses. They splinted broken legs and treated gunshot wounds, and if a miner went down with fever they brought him oatmeal porridge and plied him with tea.
Within a few weeks the town had acquired two banks, a cobbler and a barber, three physicians, four lawyers, a pharmacist, a butcher, and a jeweller. On 26 November 1874 the first issue of the Panamint News appeared, its chief function being to spread favourable reports designed to boost share prices. There never was a school or a church in Panamint City, nor a sheriff, courthouse or jail. In the five months from November 1874 to March 1875, five people were shot dead in the little town, but no one was ever convicted of those crimes. The young and universally popular attorney William Cassius Smith, who acted as a provisional magistrate, ruled that self-defence had been involved in every case.
It was a particularly happy day when a German brewer named Louis Munzinger arrived in Panamint City with a covered wagon full of brewing equipment, his aim being to quench the gold miners’ thirst with German beer. He was 41 years old and had lived in America for seven years, and seated on the box beside him was his very, very young wife Ada. At 15, she was already carrying her second infant in her arms and had been travelling the Wild West at her husband’s side for at least three years.
I’d like to know more about that girl. I’d like to know what had prompted an 11 or 12-year-old to entrust her fate to a man three times her age. I’d like to know if her father and mother had succumbed to starvation, or to some disease or crime, or if she had run away from her parental home because life elsewhere could not be worse. I’d like to know if her choice of Louis Munzinger as her protector – he is reported to have been a good-natured bear of a man – was dictated by shrewd calculation, and if she knew, even at so young an age, what a woman had to do to keep a man at her side.
I know none of these things. I don’t know them because newspapers seldom mentioned women. They committed fewer criminal offences, and when they married they shed their maiden names and disappeared from their family tree, and if they came into money and bought a house, the law prescribed that they must have a husband to sign the contracts for them. That is why all I know for certain is that Ada’s maiden name was Galarone, which smacks of Italian roots, that she was born at Sonora, the Californian gold-mining town, in 1859, and that she must have crossed Louis Munzinger’s path no later than 1871.
So the brewer was called Munzinger. The discovery of his family name caused me some temporary excitement, because Munzingers are strongly represented in my native Olten, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Many of the Olten Munzingers are called Hans or Johann; in fact the Hans/Johann line can be traced back over four centuries. An Oltner named Josef Munzinger became the young Swiss Federation’s finance minister in 1848 and is regarded as the father of the Swiss franc, his son Walter drafted the Swiss law of contracts, and the latter’s brother, Werner, was an African explorer. The family has also produced several distinguished musicians, a female traveller to China named Mizzi, and several painters. I myself have a pretty little oil painting by a Hans Munzinger hanging in my kitchen, and every few months I get my hair cut by my friend Pit or his sister Katrin, both of whom are Oltner Munzingers of the 18th generation. I would thus have been delighted to augment their ancestral portrait gallery with a brewer from Death Valley. In the censuses of 1870, 1880 and 1890, however, Louis Munzinger gave his birthplace as Bavaria, not Olten. I was loath to accept this at face value, because had I been a brewer in America I might also have disavowed my native town and posed as a Bavarian for PR purposes. So I descended his family tree, branch by branch, and eventually came to the conclusion that Louis must also have been an Oltner. I’m fairly sure of this. It’s very probable – or at least, not out of the question.
However, I’m bound to concede that Louis was Bavarian by birth, having first seen the light on 9 November 1832 at Bruchmühlbach in Rheinpfalz, halfway between Saarbrücken and Mannheim. Although this town is situated on the French border, far to the west of Bavaria by today’s reckoning, the Congress of Vienna had awarded the district to the Kingdom of Bavaria after the Napoleonic Wars.
Climbing Louis Munzinger’s family tree, one comes across his father, Johann (!) Christian, also born in Bruchmühlbach in 1798, and his grandfather Johann (!) Adam (b. 1765), who was Imperial Postmaster at Bruchmühlbach and had put Emperor Napoleon up for the night on his retreat from Moscow. Another branch higher we find Great-Grandfather Johann Adam (b. 1721), likewise postmaster of Bruchmühlbach, Great-Great-Grandfather Johann Philipp (b. 1689), founder of the post office in Bruchmühlbach, and finally Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Hans Wilhelm (b. circa 1660), a farmer.
But local records attest that the latter’s father, Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Hans Reinhard Munzinger (b. circa 1630), was not a native Bruchmühlbacher – I knew it! – but an immigrant from Switzerland. That he hailed from Olten cannot be proved beyond all doubt because he does not appear in the Olten Munzingers’ family tree. However, since an estimated 90 per cent of Swiss Munzingers lived in Olten at the time and there was, as far as is known, no Hans Reinhard Munzinger in the rest of Switzerland, I venture to assert that he came from Olten.
It is possible that he emigrated to the Pfalz before the age of 20 and was thus excluded from the family tree. Or he may have been conscripted into the French army, as was then customary. Or his branch of the family had settled in one of the farming villages outside town whose inhabitants were never listed in writing.
At all events, Hans Reinhard Munzinger the Swiss moved to the Pfalz, which had been depopulated by the Thirty Years’ War, in 1661. On 7 May of that year he purchased a garden plot in Bruchmühlbach, which means that his great-great-great-great-grandson Louis Munzinger, the Death Valley brewer, although not a son of my native town, was its great-great-great-great-nephew in the sixth degree. Or may have been.
Climbing back up the Pfalz Munzingers’ family tree, one finds that the Swiss immigrant had, in addition to the aforesaid Hans Wilhelm (b. 1660), an older son named Hans Theobald (b. 1657), whose son Hans Michel (b. 1679) became a farmer in the neighbouring village of Gerhardsbrunn and left the farm to his son and namesake, Hans Michel (b. 1708). The latter left it to his son Johann Adam (b. 1745), who handed it over to his son Johann Jakob (b. 1768). Then came Jakob (b. 1807), who became by marriage a publican, brewer, and mayor of neighbouring Quirnbach, and was one of the ringleaders of the Pfalz Revolution of 1849. His son Adolf (b. 1834) took over his father’s brewery and mayoralty but was unable to bequeath them both to his first-born son Ernst August (b. 1855) because the latter emigrated to Russia to brew beer with his brothers Adolf and Freidrich.
The last male scion of this branch of the Munzinger family was Ernst Gustav Munzinger (1887–1945). He went down in history because, having initially been an enthusiastic Nazi, he joined the circle of conspirators involved in the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. On the night of 23 April 1945, he and 14 other resistance fighters were shot by the Gestapo in Invalidenstrasse, Berlin. In the few extant photographs of him he could be the brother of my Olten friend Pit Munzinger. To my mind, this is sufficient proof that we Oltners were responsible not only for brewing beer in Death Valley, but for an attempt on Hitler’s life. Even if everything didn’t always go according to plan.
But let us go back beyond the Sierra Nevada, where Louis Munzinger turned up in 1870, impregnated and married a young girl named Ada Galarone, and brewed beer in the trading post of Lone Pine until, at half past two on the night of 26 March 1872, the place was shaken by a powerful earthquake felt from Canada in the north to Panama in the south. The Shoshone Indians in the surrounding tepee villages were only briefly woken by it and slept on, but the brick buildings in the Lone Pine were reduced to rubble within seconds. Thirty of the 300 inhabitants died, and 52 of 59 buildings collapsed.
Louis and Ada Munzinger were unscathed, but their first-born son, Louis Munzinger Jr., was crushed to death by some falling masonry. They buried him next morning in the dusty soil, which continued to be shaken for a week by over 1,000 aftershocks. Modern geologists estimate that the first shock measured 7.5 to 8 on the Richter scale, and that in the Lone Pine rift valley an earthquake of such magnitude occurs only every three to four thousand years.
On 4 July of the following year, when she was only just 14, Ada Munzinger gave birth to a second baby boy who was also christened Louis Jr. and, because of his date of birth, given the patriotic middle name ‘Washington’. A few months later, when the Panamint City boom began, Louis Munzinger loaded his brewing utensils into a covered wagon and headed for Surprise Canyon with his wife and infant son. He dug a hole in the hillside, found some sufficiently soft water, and started brewing beer. His best customer was the ‘Inyo Saloon’, which was popular with the miners because of the big billiard table the landlord had ordered from San Francisco, whence it had been hauled 500 miles by a team of oxen.
The ore extracted in Surprise Canyon contained silver worth a respectable 900 dollars a ton. Share prices rose and Senator Stewart became temporarily wealthy. However, Panamint City was a lawless place where no day went by without a shooting. Lurking in the surrounding hillsides were all manner of shady characters eager to secure a share in the town’s new-found prosperity. The four bandits who had triggered the silver boom were also still in the area, living it up, without any discernible form of livelihood, on the money they had quite legally acquired from Senator Stewart.
One problem affecting the mining company derived from the fact that Wells Fargo refused, on security grounds, to haul the silver to the strongrooms of the big banks in San Francisco. Senator Stewart solved this problem by casting it in ingots weighing as much as 400 pounds, not in handy bars. This rendered them so theft-proof that they could be trundled past the crooks and bandits and out of Surprise Canyon in ordinary, unguarded wagons.
Even during the second year of operation, however, it became apparent that the silver deposits were only shallow. No sooner had the miners driven shafts a few yards into the mountainside than the silver content dramatically decreased. It was clear that the veins would soon be exhausted. What was more, world demand for silver slumped because Germany, having received five billion gold francs in reparation payments from France after winning the Franco-German War, had stopped minting silver thalers. The result was a chain reaction in which all the industrial nations switched from silver to the gold standard. Shares in the Panamint companies, already hit by the collapse of the Viennese stock market, went into free fall. Senator Stewart sustained big losses, although some critics claimed that he had knowingly staged a short-lived boom from the outset, his aim being to extract money from the pockets of gullible investors with criminal intent.
In the middle of May the mining company suspended operations. One saloon after another closed down, the itinerant Chinese labourers moved 200 miles north to the gold-mining town of Bodie, which was just experiencing its initial boom, and Martha Camp and her girls left Little Chief Canyon. The stagecoach no longer came daily but only once a month. On 21 October 1875 the Panamint News ceased publication. The final catastrophe occurred on 24 July 1876, when a cloudburst descended on the mountains. The stream the stagecoach bandits had camped beside three years earlier became a raging torrent. The remaining inhabitants of Panamint City, Louis Munzinger and his wife and child among them, managed to scramble to safety up the mountainside, but nearly all the houses and saloons were swept away, likewise the post office, the banks, the law office, the cobbler’s workshop and the brewery.
The billiard table from the ‘Inyo Saloon’ was so heavy it managed to withstand the force of the deluge. When the flood subsided and the clouds dispersed, there it remained, standing in the open air, its green baize bleaching in the desert sun.
The mining companies had no money to spend on reconstruction and declared themselves bankrupt. Louis Munzinger retrieved his brewing equipment from the ruins and set off to find a new home in his covered wagon. At some point his child-wife Ada ran off, without Louis Washington Jr. but, one hopes, accompanied by some hot-blooded youth of her own age. When last heard of in 1897, she was somewhere down south, running a post-house on the old desert road between Lone Pine and Los Angeles.
Louis Munzinger settled down five days’ journey north of Panamint City in Bishop, Inyo County, where he continued to brew beer and became a prosperous saloon-keeper. Louis Washington Jr. remained – and brewed beer – with his father until the old man died. In 1899 he married a woman named Leonora May Deck and had two daughters whom he christened Leonora and Estelle and brought up in his father’s home, which, according to the girls, was a happy household. When Louis Sr. became bedridden, his son devotedly nursed him until his death on 6 January 1913. Sixteen years later, when Louis Washington also died on the morning of 22 January 1929, he was buried beside his father in the East Line Street Cemetery (Sector 32, Row 9, Graves 14 and 15).
Only a few steadfast souls continued to live in the ruins of Panamint City in the following years, digging for silver on their own account and playing billards on the open-air table from the ‘Inyo Saloon’ until the baize perished, the cues warped, and the ivory balls were worn away to ovoids.
And, when everything was finally over, the Shoshone Indians who had lived in Surprise Canyon for millennia returned. They had always known it was unwise to settle on the valley floor because it was inundated every few years.