Everybody loves an eccentric, especially when the eccentric was rich enough to live a life of comfortable derring-do.
Walter Scott and Albert Johnson were just such men.
Scott, a former stunt rider in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, was, by all accounts, a charismatic alpha dog of a character, a teller of tall tales and a gold digger, if not in the literal sense. Folklore has it that, in the first decade of the 20th century, the man swaggered around the country using his entertainment skills to fleece investors in a nonexistent Death Valley gold mine. Who could resist a guy who carried huge wads of cash, produced thumb-size gold nuggets from his pocket and lit his cigars with $100 bills?
One of the takers was Albert Johnson, a Chicago insurance magnate who was on to Scotty's scheme from the beginning. The two became fast friends despite the attempted fleecing, and over the years shared many adventures in the desert. Johnson, who suffered from ill health, found the Death Valley climate so restorative that he built a castle, in the Spanish provincial style, to be his part-time home.
Scott was allowed to live in it, and Death Valley Ranch, as it officially was called, soon became associated as much with its boarder as with the man who really held the keys.
Scotty's Castle isn't as over-the-top lavish as California's other famous castle, the San Simeon estate of William Randolph Hearst. But it was well on its way when the Depression hit, cramping John- son's style. In 1970, the National Park Service took it over.
Today it's one of the most popular attractions in Death Valley, a retreat as exotic for its story of unlikely friendship as for the beauty of its architecture, furnishings and location. Touring it, one can only wish to have been on the guest list in its rollicking heyday.
– Janet Fullwood
