A Swedish miner named John Samuelson carves what he believes into desert boulders, spelling and all, and spins tall tales for a famous writer. Then he loses his homestead, and the road from there runs somewhere nobody could have predicted. The end of it is still a blank.
Eternal verities of existence. That's what John Samuelson called the words he cut into desert boulders, and he spelled a good many of them wrong. He was a Swedish miner who worked a year for Bill Keys, then homesteaded near Quail Springs. The Rock of Faith and Truth, he carved, spelled F-A-I-H-T and T-R-U-H-T, and he signed that one, nineteen twenty-seven. In February of nineteen twenty-eight he told a lawyer named Erle Stanley Gardner, who'd go on to invent Perry Mason, how he'd been shanghaied at Cape Town, how giant ants guarded a ledge of gold on the African coast, and how he'd loved a princess. Gardner figured him for a big liar and a great actor, paid him twenty dollars for the rights, and sold it to Argosy magazine for two hundred and fifty. He was refused title to his homestead because he was still a Swedish citizen. His house burned, with everything he and his wife owned. "Bill Keys did it," he wrote Gardner years later, from a jail cell. That charge rests on his one letter, so weigh it that way. That cell dated from Christmas Eve of nineteen forty-two, in a Compton tavern. He was sixty-eight. He killed a man. A court found him insane and sent him to the state hospital at Mendocino. On July first, nineteen forty-six, he walked away. Gardner wrote to ask after him. No word had been heard, the superintendent answered. "He did not go home, and he did not contact his wife." There's talk of a lumber camp, and a later line in a hospital ledger, and neither settles it. Gardner had his own guess, that the old prospector and his princess were living out their years somewhere in Africa. He'd paid twenty dollars for that princess. I'm leaving the old man with her.
Photo: NPS / Melanie Spoo · Public domain (NPS staff photo)