Columnist Ken McCall: ‘New Lost 49ers’ complete successful trek across West

Ken McCall

Friday, Jan. 10, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

AFTER 300 MILES and 32 days of eating desert dust, shivering through winter winds and surviving on camp food, Jerry Freeman and his "New Lost 49ers" trudged down the Furnace Creek wash into Death Valley.

Much to their surprise, on the day before Christmas, people were lined up along the road to cheer them on. A few, including Utah historian Lavoid Leavitt and his grandson, joined them to walk the last mile or so.

Their journey ended at the monument to the ill-fated 1849ers who got lost looking for a shortcut to the California gold fields and gave Death Valley its baleful name.

Unlike the 147-year-old wagon train whose tragic path they had been following, Freeman and his band of five history-drunk trekkers arrived at the monument almost on schedule. Instead of noon, they arrived at 1:30.

Freeman says he and his very patient wife, Donna, who was in charge of ferrying supplies to the hikers, immediately checked into the Furnace Creek Inn.

"The first thing I did was turn up the hot water and fill that bathtub to the brim," Freeman says. "When I slid into that thing I said, 'Jerry, you've died and gone to heaven.'"

Long-awaited baths aside, Freeman says he's very pleased with the historical fact-finding journey. The group found a previously undiscovered inscription by the "Lost 49ers" in western Utah, a wagon wheel, several wagon parts, tools, a possible gravesite, and -- they believe -- an error in previous calculations about a section of the Lost 49ers' route.

"It met all of our expectations," says Freeman, from his home in Antelope Valley, Calif. "With the exception of the Air Force."

Freeman is still upset with the Air Force's truculent refusal to allow them access to parts of restricted land around Groom and Papoose dry lakes -- in other words, Area 51.

But he's not even close to giving up.

He's drafted a statement aimed squarely at the Air Force, which he accuses of "gross misappropriation of the public trust" and exceeding "their mandated authority."

While the Department of Energy allowed the group onto the Nevada Test Site, Freeman says, the Air Force is sitting there "like a petulant child, with their hands cupped over their assigned section of OUR desert."

The rub, for Freeman, is a rumored inscription by the Lost 49ers just off the test site on Air Force land.

"There's really only one key site I need to see," he says, "and that's the inscription in Nye Canyon."

A photograph of the inscription is contained in George Koenig's book on the Lost 49ers, "Beyond This Place There Be Dragons," but Freeman says there's no documentation for the photo, other than it's supposed to be up a side canyon called Triple Tanks.

In fact, Freeman's group was allowed to visit part of Nye Canyon during their chaperoned day on the Test Site.

After visiting several other places, Desert Research Institute archaeologist Lonnie Pippin drove them up the canyon.

They were supposed to stop at a barrier marking Air Force property, Freeman says, but it had been washed out. By the time Pippin stopped and asked for a reading from Freeman's global positioning system unit, they had driven 1.6 miles into the Air Force's forbidden zone.

"We passed that side canyon," Freeman says. "I know that's where the inscription is."

But the group had an agreement with the DOE that it wouldn't go on or photograph Air Force land, so it came straight back down the canyon.

"I'm kind of eating my heart out now," Freeman says.

Nye Canyon seems to fit descriptions in diaries of the Lost 49ers, says historian and author Leroy Johnson, who accompanied Freeman's group on the Test Site excursion, but such things are hard to prove just from descriptions.

"One of the problems with this research," Johnson says, "is it takes years and years."

Johnson and his wife, Jean, took 13 years to document in their book, "Escape From Death Valley," the route some of the Lost 49ers took once they climbed out of their claim to fame.

"They drive out to the canyon and it fits the description," Freeman says, "but they don't realize the next 10 canyons look just the same."

That's why the inscription is so important to Freeman: It would be "definitive proof they were there."

So he'll keep lobbying the Air Force, as will Johnson.

"Some day we might get on it," says Johnson, a retired forester for the federal government who knows how to massage the proper channels. "We were successful in getting into China Lake, which is pretty difficult to get into."

Below Nye Canyon, in an area called Cane Springs, Johnson says the group found terrain that "precisely fit" a description by one 1849 pilgrim. Johnson says he's "90 percent sure" some of the Lost 49ers were at that site.

They also found stone "sleeping circles" that Indians built their shelters on.

"That's one of the fortunate things about these restricted areas," Johnson says, "the pot hunters and people who don't have any respect for our heritage can't get in there and desecrate things."

Johnson says he's met many people out in the field who brag about all the artifacts they've got in their collection, even though taking such artifacts -- from public land, at least -- is against federal law.

Freeman's group, by contrast, only documented the artifacts they found, using the GPS system to get precise latitude and longitude, photographs and drawings.

Those findings, Freeman says, were the high points of the trip. He plans to go back to western Utah, once the snow melts, to finish documenting one of the possible encampments.

And he's going to keep hammering the Air Force for access.

But he's also looking ahead to his next expedition.

The Johnsons have documented one of the Lost 49er splinter groups out of Death Valley, he says, but nobody's tracked the "Jayhawkers," a group of men from Illinois on their way to California.

"Researchers can't decide which way they went," Freeman says. "I'm going to perhaps research that, and maybe the girls and I will track them."