Adventure Magazine Cover — page 198: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Camp Our Camp-Fire came into being May 5, 1912, with our June issue, and since then its fire has never died down. Many have gathered about it and they are of all classes and degrees, rae and low, rich and poor, adventurers and stay-at-homes, and from all parts of the earth. Some whose voices we used to know have taken the Long Trail and are heard no more, but they are still memories among us, and new voices are heard, and welcomed. We are drawn together by a common liking for the sirens, clean things of out-of-doors, for word from the earth’s far places, for man in action instead of caged by circumstance. The spirit of adventure lives in all men; the rest is chance. But something besides a common interest holds us together. Somehow a real comradeship has grown up among us. Men can not thus meet and talk together without growing into friendlier relations; many a time does one of us come to the rest for facts and guidance; many a close personal friendship WHO can give us more infor- mation concerning this cave in Nevada or the cliff dwellings in the general neighborhood of Death Valley? Washington, D. C. In a September issue, I note interesting communi- cations from Mrs. G. M. Bridgham and Mr. Wood- ward regarding Indian caves and inscriptions in the desert region of California and Nevada. It may be of interest to note the existence of an Indian cave just off the old wagon road from Sodaville to Tono- pah, Nevada. It is a short distance from a spring, the only one in the entire sixty-five miles of desert, midway between the two places named. The chief interest to me was the evidence in the shape of numerous chips of obsidian that it had been used as a workshop for the manufacture of arrow-heads, knives, etc., from that material, coupled with the fact that so far as I could ever learn the nearest deposit of volcanic glass is in Lake County, Cal- ifornia, several hundred miles north. My recollec- tion is that there were paintings on the protected rock surfaces, but only a very limited time was available for investigation, while my visit took place twenty-five years ago—in the spring of 1901. I am wondering whether any of your readers could throw any light upon an account of the discovery of some cliff dwellings in the vicinity of Ash Mead- ows, more or less contiguous to Death Valley, made by a “desert rat” who brought the information to San Bernardino, where I made it the subject of a short article in the newspaper with which I was then connected—some forty-five years ago. I have been trying to “run down” the story in this city, but find that none of the Governmental bureaus dealing with such matters has any information regarding it. The prospector who told me the yarn had no reason for ‘‘stuffing’”’? me, but merely mentioned it as an interesting incident of desert travel. Perhaps some reader of Adventure may know of this matter, in which case I shall be glad to correspond with him, and exchange desert lore, of which I have quite an accumulation, gained in fifty years of acquaintance. —G. F. WEEKS. 192 COmiclboooks.c©