From Beatty to Ballarat, On the Trail of Shorty Harris
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Further up the road is Rhyolite's famous bottle house. Built by Tom Kelly in 1906, it took 50,000 beer bottles to construct it. It's a testament to the thirst of Rhyolite's natives that the two-year-old town could quickly generate that many bottles.
The bottle house, as is most of the town, is under the protection of the BLM. A caretaker lives in a travel trailer next to the bottle house, there to answer questions and protect the remaining structures.
The caretaker looks the part. Clint Boehringer, a retiree from Oregon, has been staying as Rhyolite's BLM caretaker every winter, from November to April, for the last seven years. His sun-darkened face is offset by a long gray beard, and flowing gray hair. His suspender-slung jeans are worn and faded, as was his cotton shirt.
"I've been come here every winter since 1955," he said. "I had a union job, and we had the Christmas season off. There's no better time to be here. We used to come down the old prospectors' trails. Some of them have been closed off by the BLM now as wilderness territory so you can't travel them any more."
Boehringer's passionate interest is the history of Death Valley, and particularly Rhyolite. One of the attractions he favors is the bottle house. Until the BLM took it over, it had been in use by several Rhyolite residents. Boehringer, as befitting a local historian, was well familiar with the stories about Shorty Harris.
"Did you see the statue of the miner with the penguin behind him?" He asked. "That's a tribute to Shorty. When he'd be out on the desert and would take up drinking from his bottle of O, be Joyful, after a time he'd look behind him and see a penguin following him around. He didn't see pink elephants, he saw penguins."
Following Boehringer's directions, we drove past the site of Bullfrog now just a mud wall or two, fading back into the desert, blending in approved BLM style and followed a dirt road toward the Original Bullfrog. About two and a half miles from Rhyolite we took the fork to the right, and wheeled along a cut in the hillside till we came to the tailings of a mine.
Climbing out of the Jeep, we stepped on the desert sand that Shorty Harris walked, and examined the bits of quartz and the few odd floats of green rock that remained after nearly a century of mining and prospecting. With Shorty looking over our shoulder we wandered downstream, prospecting as we went.
But our stop in the gullies below the Original Bullfrog didn't make us any money, not even as much as Shorty Harris's prospecting benefited him a century ago. But then, O, be Joyful got the best of Shorty. Not long after his strike he threw a major toot and sold his interest in the discovery claim for $1000. When he woke up from his drunken spree he found himself to be nothing but a single-blanket-jackass-prospector again, and promptly blew the rest of his money on more O, be Joyful.
But his partner Cross did very well. He also sold his claim, but for $125,000, and bought a ranch with the proceeds of his Rainbow-Chasing. Shorty loaded up his burros and headed for Ballarat.
