Death Valley in the 1930s

by Cheri Rae

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps built roads and campgrounds in the then-new Death Valley National Monument while the Federal Writers Project produced a guidebook.

Originally titled Death Valley: A Guide, the volume was written in 1938 as part of the American Guide Series produced by the Federal Writers’ Project. To defray costs to the government, the book was sponsored by the Bret Harte Associates, a nonprofit organization founded by San Francisco novelist Charles Caldwell Dobie. Published in 1939 by Houghton Mifflin, it sold for one dollar.

Although Project writers generally were un-credited, staff member Cora Vernon Lee is mentioned in the original forward as the primary writer and the person with the vision and energy behind this book. Although Lee’s interest in the subject is obvious from her work, it’s difficult for today’s researcher to discover anything about her.

Imagine a spunky woman, leaving the Project offices in San Francisco for the wide-open—and almost uncharted—spaces of Death Valley. Lee insisted on working in the heat of the summer for the most authentic experience possible.

The book’s purpose was twofold: to tell the story of Death Valley and to function as an on-site guidebook to enable visitors to explore the place. It succeeded on both counts, and does so today as well.

Because the book was carefully researched and meticulously fact-checked by a host of writers and editors, the nature and history notes hold up well, as do descriptions of landforms and viewpoints. But it’s the quality of the writing—clear concise and full of interesting quotes and anecdotes from old-timers—that gives the book its timeless appeal. Most travel writing of the 1930s, especially work about the desert, is characterized by boosterism and hyperbole that obscures the essence of a place. Not so in this guide.

In short, the book is a very good guide to what Death Valley was like many years ago. It’s a chance to glimpse Death Valley as it was when first designated a national monument and made accessible to the general public.

The traveler who picks up the WPA guide to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara of Monterey will have some difficulty using the book as a guide, since those areas have been substantially transformed. This Death Valley guide, however, is still surprisingly accurate. It details then-populated mining towns and Indian camps; with a few exceptions, most of the land features described are very much the same as they were more than fifty years ago.

Elevations may have been exaggerated a bit, or just measured inaccurately, and prices have changed considerably. Some of the places are now gone, washed away, reduced to rubble over time—Gnomes’ Workshop, the Indian Trading Post, Chris Wicht’s Camp, the  monorail in Wingate Pass—and a few suggested tours are now within the nearby Naval Weapons Center, but the information presented here reads like a moment frozen in time.