Tungsten Over Darwin
IN 1876 the city of Darwin, California, boasted a population greater than that of Los Angeles. Darwin never forgot it. In 1941 Greater Los Angeles boasted a population of more than two million, while Darwin was reduced to ten lonely souls wondering why they stayed on. Darwin’s chances of ever catching up to the City of the Angels looked very dark indeed. And as yet it has not caught up, but its hat is in the ring. Its population has increased by about 2000 per cent since the spring of 1941. It is the fastestgrowing community in America, and, according to Darwinites, it never intends to stop. The reason for all this can be put in one word: Tungsten.
In April 1941, Darwin’s ten citizens faced the desert slopes of the Argus Mountains with little hope. Then the impossible happened. The first citizen of the town, Mr. Curley W. Fletcher, whose name is not without renown in the West for a number of reasons (the best, perhaps, being the fact that he is the author of ‘The Strawberry Roan,’ a ballad sung wherever cowboys may roam), let it be known that certain mining properties acquired by him by default in years past were that very day sold to the Cord interests for a tidy sum.
Darwin pricked up its ears. How much was the tidy sum? A hundred dollars?
No — nothing like it. Mr. Fletcher had just sold his Darwin mining property for $600,000. And with this news each of the other nine citizens of a town of lost hope — a town so near to becoming a ghost that it needed to be put in an iron lung — reacted in his or her own peculiar way. As it is told by Darwinites today, one fainted; another one dropped dead; a third got drunk on the spot without drinking anything; a fourth let out a yell and went racing over the mountains and has not been seen since; a fifth called Mr. Fletcher a liar; a sixth stood on his head; a seventh shot up the town; an eighth shot the man who was shooting up the town; and the ninth thought it was ‘April Fool.’ But it was not quite All Fools’ Day. The facts were true; Darwin had just cleared a deal for $600,000. Tungsten, it seems, may readily win a war, and wars these days are expensive to wage and even more expensive to lose. Tungsten is invaluable.
When the other nine citizens recovered their balance and sanity, they moved as a unit (except those who were casualties to the news) out from Darwin in various directions, combing the hills and abandoned mines and skeletons of the town’s dead past — all, of course, searching for tungsten. In the past months they have not been the only ones to react to the same urge. The tungsten rush is on, not only in Darwin, but in all the mining districts of California and Nevada, and at this writing the wave has no doubt washed easterly as far as Colorado.
The town, named for Dr. Darwin French, who explored the area in 1860, was originally a jumping-off place for mining men, connected by stagecoach with Lone Pine and civilization to the west, and with the more remote desert points to the east such as the outlaw town of Panamint City. Panamint leaped ahead of Darwin and became a typical hell-hole Western town, supported a newspaper, hoped for a railroad, and made itself famous for silver, graft, and murder. In 1876 the silver veins pinched out and Panamint was doomed. New strikes were located in the Argus and Coso ranges. Panamint editor T. S. Harris moved his press and his fonts of type to Darwin, along with the miners and merchants and peddlers and prostitutes. Darwin then reached its zenith of population and passed Los Angeles. It now had saloons and preachers and a stamp mill; garnets, girls, and gold; silver, lead, and untold mineralogical wealth; a stagecoach line, a railroad to come, and editor T. S. Harris and his Coso Mining News. Darwin was destined to be the greatest city west of Chicago — and it was only a question when Chicago, too, would be left behind.
Now mining activity of one kind or another has gone on around Darwin ever since 1876, but it has been, for the most part, the pick, canteen, and burro type — individual prospectors searching and hoping and searching again. The population of Darwin followed a fever-chart pattern, but the mean was always dropping, until it hit ten and stayed at ten for many a year. Houses rotted and collapsed; there was no water, no plumbing; and finally there were no accommodations of any description up to 1941, wdien the vulture of death was banking gracefully over the dying town, soaring nearer and nearer with an eye cocked for the last gasp. Then, when Darwinites could hear the wings of doom in the desert air, Curley Fletcher found tungsten.
The sky was the limit again, and today the town is pleasantly mad. The hysteria of 1876 has returned, but it is hysteria of a 1941 version. As you approach the cluster of shacks from far across the desert, with the forbidding Argus Mountains to the east and the more forbidding Panamints beyond, you are aware that this is a boom town living at blitzkrieg tempo wdth tungsten as king. This is no longer the Old West on a rampage, no silver camp of stagecoach days; this is a scramble for wealth in the streamlined civilization of a second world war, with picks, burros, and canteens present, to be sure, but also Dusenbergs, ‘land-yacht’ trailers, and airplanes. The men of the gold rush of 1849 would not feel at home in the tungsten rush of 1941.
Incongruities, of course, are legion. A suntanned miner, once an emigrant from Bohemia, who has spent forty years grubbing the deserts of Nevada, arrives at the same time as a Life photographer. Two hard-rock prospectors in a model T jalopy pull up beside the Dusenberg with a swerving skid, blanketing both cars with dust. A ‘jackass’ prospector hitches his burros to a $2000 trailer. A barber whose shop is the floor of the desert, its ceiling the sky, charges a dollar for a shave. A tank truck arrives loaded with aviation gasoline to serve the airport, although there is no airport except the hard bottom of the nearest dry lake. A man is building a restaurant and bar, — ‘It’ll be the best joint for miles around,’ he boasts, — but as yet there is no water, gas, electricity, or ice. Tucker’s Miner’s Club is installing a Servel Electrolux in anticipation of gas and advertises a ‘floor show.’ But the town has few women and the floor show consists of miners who dance together for the want of feminine partners, like sailors on shipboard. The walls of the Miner’s Club are decorated with colored drawings of girls with sexy figures and gossamer garments, clipped from the not-very-naughty Esquire, and a local artist has added a few nudes of a style obviously influenced by the same publication Since Mr. Tucker (‘Tin Horn’ being his accepted first name in Darwin) once admired the horses, the pictures alternate — girl on a telephone, horse in a paddock — all around the barroom, with one glorious nude spreadeagled on the ceiling causing a great deal of neck craning.
Oddly enough, there is very little hard liquor. It has to be kept under control, or there would be no mining and plenty of violence. The men drink beer in lieu of whiskey, and they do a good job of it. A moderate drinker in Darwin will consume thirty bottles of beer a day, and a fairly steady drinker is he who guzzles forty-five bottles a day. As one habitué put it, ‘It might be better to let ‘em have liquor and kill each other right; this beer drinkin’ makes ‘em soft.’ ‘The Beer Barrel Polka,’ incidentally, and justly, is one of the favorite musical numbers.
There is no hotel yet, though that oversight will soon be corrected. Nor are there enough of the old houses remaining from the days of 1876 to take care of the influx of 1941. So men sleep in their cars or trailers, or on the floor of the Miner’s Club (though Mr. Tucker discourages this except on the part of a twofisted drinker who may consume sixty bottles of beer in the course of twelve hours and cannot be prevented from sleeping where he will), or on the ground, or in the soft sand of the dry Darwin wash.
One chap, on a warm night in midsummer, conceived the idea of sleeping in the pit used as a swimming pool, but was forcibly ejected by those who disapproved of using the community pool for such a purpose, since the water had to be hauled from a point forty miles away and was definitely to swim in and not to sleep in. As he was kicked off the premises he was told by the leader of the ousting committee, ‘That’s swimmin’ water, not sleepin’ water. Keep the hell out of it unless you want to wash.’ This crude pool is called the Dirty Socks, and it is accurately named.
Other domiciles have been old mining tunnels and du gouts in the banks of the dry Darwin wash. In the vicinity there are a few Paiute Indians who live in ramshackle houses just above the sandy bottom land — houses that are palaces beside the standard of living set by those who reside in Darwin wash. But the Indians receive a mite from Uncle Sam, and the citizens of the caves of Darwin wash are receiving hope from the new magic in the word ‘tungsten.’
So tungsten today is the rainbow over the West. It is a vital alloy for guns and cannons and has more uses in destructive war than in constructive peace. Mad man must have it, and he is getting it. Previous generations did not comprehend its numerous uses or its full value. It took an unprepossessing Austrian paperhanger with an economic ideology enclosed by obsession to bring the world to the point where a material essential for destruction can create millionaires. Truly our values have run around the clock until the moment between individual sanity and collective insanity is but a measureless split second.
Men will find more tungsten in the West. In any country that has produced silver, and which contains granite, limestone, and garnet, there may be tungsten. So valuable is this metal today that a yield from the ore of only one half of one per cent is profitable. A good tungsten mine will yield one per cent; two per cent is excellent, and a fortune is waiting; three per cent is fabulous. And Darwin is assaying slightly better than three per cent. So Darwin is understandably hysterical over the future. Cannons must roar; blood must flow; Darwin must get drunk with riches. Moloch and Midas were pikers. All hail the Great God Tungsten. Life is to be lived!
Only the ghosts in the graveyard greet it all with a smile.
EDWIN CORLE