The Battle of Wingate Pass

Here's a job I'd have turned down. Lie up in the rocks above a desert pass, wait for a party of moneyed men to ride through, and shoot one of their mules, all for the good of a gold mine that didn't exist. The year is nineteen hundred and six, up in the Death Valley country, and the plan belongs to Walter Scott. Death Valley Scotty. The year before, he'd chartered a special train on the Santa Fe and run it to Chicago for the headlines. Now he had some New York men ready to buy into western mines, and he'd told them about a rich one of his own. "Scotty had done some big talking," as Bill Keys remembered it. There was no such mine. Keys had one, though. He was twenty-six, the son of Quaker parents in Nebraska, gone from home at fifteen and never to see his family again, and he held a dozen claims in the Funeral Mountains. The idea was to show the Easterners his Desert Hound and call it Scotty's. Then Scotty got cold feet. These men wanted millions, and the Desert Hound wasn't millions. So he hatched something better, a phony holdup of his own outfit, to scare them off the trail and leave them hungrier for whatever somebody was so set on hiding. Keys and two other men climbed into the rocks at Wingate Pass. It was hot up there, and a jug of whiskey had come along. By the time Scotty's party rode in, neither shooter could aim. One shot missed the mule by a good deal and hit Warner Scott, Scotty's own brother, in the leg. That's when Scotty lost his head. He spurred straight at his own ambush, hollering, "Stop shooting. You hit one of my men." Those Easterners were frightened, not simple. Warrants went out. Sheriff John Ralphs went after Keys, lost a boot on the way, and finished the chase hobbling in dress shoes. Keys joked about those patent leather shoes all the way back, and the sheriff didn't laugh. Then surveyors put the ambush in Inyo County, not San Bernardino. The Easterners got tired of waiting and went home, and with no witnesses the charges were dropped. There's a story Scotty slipped out and shifted the county marker himself. I wouldn't put it past him. Keys later sold that Desert Hound, and it turned out a productive mine. So the one real thing in that swindle was the hole they'd been too proud to show. A young man under arrest, laughing at a lame sheriff's shoes. Four years shy of the desert that would keep him for life.