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Packet 1, Pouch 4 Harry Oliver's Desert Rat Scrap Book.
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Nevada 
Bad Men Buried Alone
The Murphy mine was the only producer of any importance in this district, located on the east flank of the Toiyabe range, about 50 miles south of Austin, but in Nye county. A party of French prospectors wandered into the area in 1863. It was a costly operation, with supplies hauled in from Austin over the summit of the Toiyabes at an elevation of over 10,000 feet. The Murphy mine is credited with a production of $750,000, but the mine paid no dividends. An enormous mill building, built of brick, and ruins of several stone houses on the side of the canyon above the mill, are about all that remain today. Ophir creek, a small clear stream of tumbling water is a favorite trout stream, and each year is visited by dozens of fishing parties.
At the mouth of the Ophir Canyon, placer gold was discovered a few years ago, but so far nothing has come of the discovery. On the side-hill where the canyon breaks down into Smoky Valley, is a small cemetery, with perhaps 25 graves, many of them containing children. Names of most of those buried there, are now forgotten. Below the main cluster of mounds are several isolated graves. In one of these a gunman, name now unknown, was buried. "Rutabega Tom," an old Indian, still living, tells the following story of this lone grave:
[[Image]] "One bad man, nobody like, buried there, because nobody wants him close to good people. He mean man, killum man just for fun. One time he pick fight with young fellow called Black Bart. They promise fight battle. Each take gun, stand back to back, then walk off thirty steps, but this bad mans he walk only take twenty steps, then he turn quick like rattlesnake striking and shoots at Black Bart. Mebbyso he excited, for he miss target. Black Bart he walk 30 steps, turn, and bad man he is running off. One shot-and he fall-dead. Dead all over. Good people bury bad man all by himself, so he won't go to happy hunting ground, with other mans." 
-From 50th Anniversary Edition, Tonopah Times Bonanza
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A true desert turtle story [[Image]]  
   Any of you old Desert Rats want to bet a gallon of good whiskey that the following turtle story aint true?
   Old Bill Goeglein a retired assayer, now living in Wickenburg, Ariz., is noted for his veracity all over this desert.
   In May, 1921, he went to Los Angeles and drove back a new Ford car. About five miles west of Amboy, Calif., he noticed the whole country ahead seemed to be moving and it was. A great migration of turtles was crossing the road ahead. The deep ruts in the road were filled with turtles and hundreds and thousands were crossing over them, moving in a northerly direction.
   To the south as far as he could see and to the north as far as he could see was a moving mass of turtles spaced a few feet apart. As there seemed no end in sight, he decided to drive through them. He put her into low and ground through turtle meat, blood and guts for a full quarter mile before getting clear of the great migration.
   When he arrived at the little filling station at Amboy, he stopped to clean the wheels and fenders of turtle meat. While there a small truck came in with the same experience.
   After Old Bill told me his story, I made it a point to ask every old Desert Rat I met if he ever saw anything like this. In time I found an old cow puncher who saw the same thing in southwestern New Mexico. Thousands of turtles were crossing the Southern Pacific tracks and were piled up trying to get over the rails. A number of Indian Squaws were there filling gunny sacks with turtles. One old Squaw said that the turtles from all over the desert went to a certain place to lay their eggs. After which they all migrated so as to leave the feed for the young turtles. Sounds reasonable.
-John C. Herr, Wickenburg, Ariz.
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Manana [[Image]]
By S. Omar Barker
Manana is a Spanish word I'd sometimes like to borrow. 
It means "don't skeen no wolfs today that you don't shot tomorrow!
An' eef you got some jobs to do, in case you do not wanna,
Go 'head an' take siesta now! Tomorrow ees manana!"
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BURROS
Fair play Burro
Race Denied
Betting Permit
July 4th-1950
From Denver Post
   The state racing commission Monday turned down a request to permit pari-mutual betting on a burro race between Leadville and Fairplay.
   The commission cited a statute which prohibits pari-mutual betting on Sundays. The race is scheduled for Sunday, July 20. It is sponsored by the Rocky Mountain News and the Fairplay Chamber of Commerce.
    A spokesman for the commission said members had taken the request under advisement, but "when they found out the race was on Sunday, that settled it."
                    • • •
   Frankly, we are hopelessly confused over the question whether "Fairplay," the animal which was not allowed to compete in the burro race over Mosquito pass last summer, was a victim of race discrimination.
   "Fairplay" - some unkind wag has nicknamed her. "Slaughterhouse," a name which might be more appropriate for a lady wrestler than a female marathoner-has raised this issue herself. She has done it by giving birth to a jackass, which has been dubbed "Foulplay" as a rebuke to the judges who put Mama "Fairplay" out of the trans-mountain race.
   The judges said "Fairplay" was ineligible because she was a mule-not a burro-and the race was for burros only. Mules, of course, are not supposed to have babies. A famous wit once called the mule an "animal without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity."
   "Fairplay" believes she has proved conclusively, by producing "Foulplay," that she is not a mule but a burro after all, in spite of the unkind things that the judges said about her. But one of the judges has replied that "Fairplay" was not put out the race on the ground that she was a regular mule but that she was a "Spanish mule."
   A "Spanish mule," he says, is not a mule at all but a large-sized ass, while a burro is a small-sized ass. An ass, it seems, is a donkey and a donkey may be either a mule's father or a hinny's mother-but all this isn't getting us anyplace.
   The town of Fairplay, one of the sponsors of the Mosquito pass race, got its name from the fact that in pioneer times it offered all comers an equal chance to stake out mining claims-something which the late arriving gold rushers were denied at Tarryall and some of the other mining camps.
   In the interest of fair play, we hope Fairplay will at least present "Fairplay" with a proper certificate of ancestry saying she isn't a mule at all and that any slur which mave have been cast on her maternal ability, intentionally or unintentionally, is deeply regretted. Whatever "Fairplay" is, she obviously is a sensitive creature and her feelings have been hurt.
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Dry Gamp Blackie
[[Image]]"A city feller pulled in to a gas station on the desert looking for the room marked "Gents." He saw a crude lock hanging on the outside of the door and assumed the door was locked. He asked the gas feller for the key.
   The sleepy desert rat opened one eye and yawned: "That door ain't locked buddy. That lock's jes' a- hangin' there."
   Ain't that jest like life sez Dry Camp Blackie. A guy goes around looking at the doors thinkin' they're locked..when they ain't locked at all. The lock's jes' a-hangin' there."
-Dana Howard
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   There are more than 7500 miles of passages, drifts, crosscuts, tunnels and shafts in the copper mines at Butte, Montana.
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Unnatural History
   "The jackalope," says the Douglas, Wyoming, Chamber of Commerce, "is perhaps the rarest animal in North America." It is so rare that if we were not accustomed to believing all we read in the newspapers we should be inclined to dismiss it as the farmer did the giraffe, "There ain't no such animal."
  Jack Ward, secretary of the chamber, describes the jackalope as being distinguished from the rabbit family by its horns, and yet differing in shape and color from the deer family. From this we infer that it is a jackrabbit that has grown up on the waters of Antelope Creek, in the northern part of Converse County, of which Douglas is the county seat. 
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THE BURRO LED MEN TO GOLD AND SILVER; HIS REWARD - EXTINCTION OR REFUGE?
-From the Calicao Print-Grail Fuller, publisher; Lucile Coke, editor-Published at Daggett, Calif., (25c a copy) comes this plan to save the Burros. Desert Rat Scrapbook wishes to endorse the Weight's park idea 100 percent and asks you readers to work for it...Let's get behind the burro.
The Burro: Is the only animal with a sense of humor.
By LUCILE & HAROLD WEIGHT
  Old Calico ghost town with its fascinating historical background and the spectacular canyons of the Calico Mountain are far more worthy of preservation as a national monument than many areas so designated. But so far efforts to obtain monument status have failed. Perhaps one reason is that backers of the movement have not been able to use the often-successful argument that the action will preserve some interesting form of plant or animal life-say a cactus or Joshua tree or wild sheep. So with the idea of advancing two important causes we suggest that in addition to preserving the Calicos for their history and beauty. Calico National Monument be made refuge for the desert burro-one of the great and characteristic figures of the American West.
   Perhaps you think the burro can take care of himself? He's a mighty smart fellow and he could-if left alone. But now he's being blitzed by one of our government agencies-the National Park Service. We are told that burros must be eliminated in Death Valley National Monument and in Lake Mead recreational area, because they are threating the existence of the bands of wild sheep there. Some fantastic figures on burro population are given to support the idea.
   Now we already have two refuges in Arizona set aside for the desert sheep-Kofa and Cabeza Prieta. If the burros are threatening the sheep in their refuges, some remedial action should be taken. But, strangely, there has been no public complaint on that score from Kofa or Cabeza Prieta. The noise is coming from Death Valley and Lake Mead. Death Valley was not set aside as a sheep refuge, or for the benefit of any one particular form of wild life. Visitors there seem to be interested chiefly in its scenery, history and desert atmosphere. The burro adds to all three more than the wild sheep. Lake Mead is a recreational area. Which would add to its recreational interest-unseen sheep or desert burros?
   One of the chief complaints against the burro seems to be that his is an "exotic." that means evolution didn't design him on the exact spot which he inhabits today. In other words, he is an immigrant. But neither did the bighorn sheep originate in the desert. Some experts hold that they came from Asia originally, across the Bering Straits. It is quite certain that they were immigrants into the desert from the Canadian Rockies. so the sheep are favored over the burros because they emigrated earlier. That theory could lead to disastrous consequences if applied to all competing birds, beasts and plants in our national parks and monuments. Which came first to our western ranges - the coyote we kill or the calves we rescue from him? Even the white man wouldn't fare so well on that basis. He is one of the most recent "exotics" on the desert. the burro was in Death Valley long before the park service.
Until recently the principal charge against the burro by the sheep conservationists was that he - and the wild horses and domestic cattle - fouled the springs and waterholes until the wild sheep would not use them. The argument that the burros are taking the food out of the sheep's mouths is a new one not likely to hold up well under investigation. Yet somehow it seems more logical to these one-line-of-thought sheep protectors to kill off the burros than to take the same amount of time and money to develop watering places that neither the burros nor any other animal could foul. That's the sort of hole conservationists' work themselves into when, with the best of intentions, they go wild on one subject. They have been known to endanger the very thing they sought to protect by upsetting the balance of nature in attempting to protect it.
   And nto all the experts agree on the status of he wild sheep in the areas under question. Joseph Grinnell of the University of California in his "Mammals of Death Valley" wrote that in 1933- a year that the park service naturalist declared marked the maximum decline of the big-horn - the sheep remained "about as numerous as the limits of subsistence of least food-supply allow." And he said that perhaps their only non-human restrictive factor in this region were the Golden eagles, which killed the lambs. If the burros are disposed of, a delicate problem may arise here - which came first, the eagle or the sheep?
   Personally, we're in favor of burros, eagles, wild sheep, coyotes, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes. They all have their place in the pattern, and not one of them is as destructive as man. But if it has reached the stage where persons in authority have the notion that the burro must be exterminated to protect a few sheep, then it has reached the stage where some desert area must be set aside for the protection and preservation of the burro.
   In many trips through the length and breath of the desert country, we have never seen even a fraction of the thousands of wild burros which are pictured as encroaching upon the sheep, and it does not seem possible that they exist. But infrequently we have come upon small bands of the wise little fellows at some of the loneliest watering places, and finding them has been among the genuine thrills of desert traveling. With the aid of public opinion, they survived the attempt of ruthless hunters to convert them all into dog and cat food. They must not now fall victims to the conservationist. 
   So if those in authority insist that the burros must be done away with in favor of the wild sheep, in areas that are not refuges for the wild sheep, we must insist that a refuge must be set up for them elsewhere. The burros played an important part in the mining history of the desert, and therefore it seems only appropriate that Calico National Monument-to-be, with its own great mining history, should be their protected range. 
   Let's fix up a few watering places, develop some browsing ground, put up a few "No Sheep Allowed" signs and let the four-footed pioneers of the American Southwest peacefully follow their own devices. Surely they would be a far greater tourist attraction that wild sheep which are never seen. And future generations of Americans will praise us more for preserving the burro in his native state than they would if we saved a few more wild sheep at the burro's expense.
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Phat Graettinger tells one:
A tourist asked the old Indian Chief what he did all day. -
"Drink and hunt," he answered.
"What do you hunt," the tourist asked.
"Drink," answered the Old Chief
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In a remote part of northern Arizona, Guy Hazen of Kingman was doing some prospecting. He sat down to rest among some curious-looking black rocks, after a few minute idly hit one with his hammer. He was surprised by the musical tone that rang out.
Hazen dug out some of the black rocks, took them home, and arranged them into chimes. The tones are said to be true and beautiful.
Desert Magazine
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CAT CUTS CAPERS
Released from between the dual tires of an Arizona truck, Peggy Bloom's kitten acted as though it was in the depths of a hideous nightmare. It cut all kinds of strange capers. The reason for its odd antics was logical.
The truck driver reported that Peggy's cat got caught in between the two tires. For approximately 12 miles, 5,000 times, the kitten went round and round before being rescued. And it required an hour to unwind the feline.
Truck Driver
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The Choctaw Indians have a word, okeh, which means "It is so and in no other way." This may have been the origination of the term or expression O. K., so widely used today. 
 

Transcription Notes:
"nto" instead of "not" and "he" instead of "the" in the "THE BURRO LED MEN TO GOLD AND SILVER.." article is transcribed as was written in the paper.