Nearly every newspaperman looks forward to the time when he can get away from the pressure of his journalistic job and retire to a little cottage by the sea, or a cabin in the mountains, and write a book.

The only difference between William Caruthers—Bill, to his friends—and a majority of the others is that he did write his book on the spot, preserved it and after retiring to his orange grove near Ontario, California he got around to the job of revision, which resulted in these pages.

Born on the banks of the Cumberland River in Tennessee, Caruthers’ career as a journalist began when he became editor of the local weekly paper at the age of 16. He took the job, he explains, because no one else wanted it.

His family wanted him to be a lawyer, and in compliance with their wishes he returned to school and was admitted to the bar in Tennessee when he was 19. But he wanted to be a newspaperman, and vowed that when he won his first $2,000 fee he would quit law. Successful as a young lawyer, the time soon came when he won a tough case against a big insurance company—and that was his chance. He closed his law office forever.

For a time he was editor of Illustrated Youth and Age, the largest monthly in the South. He wrote feature articles for the Nashville American, Nashville Banner, the old New York World, the Christian Science Monitor, fiction for Collier’s Weekly and other important magazines. His writings have appeared in most Western magazines.

After coming to California he first went to work on the Los Angeles Examiner, quitting that job to become a publisher and his little magazine, The Bystander gained nationwide circulation. While editing this magazine he became editor of Los Angeles’ first theatrical magazine, The Rounder, which was a “must” on the list of early movie stars and soon discovered that the most lucrative field for a journalist was in ghost writing. As a “ghost” he addressed big political conventions, assemblies of governors and mayors and in one instance, a jury as the prosecutor. One eastern industrialist paid him a fabulous fee when the address Caruthers wrote for him brought a great ovation.

Finally his physician warned him to slow down. It was then—in 1926—that he came to the desert, and, during the intervening 25 years, has spent much of his time in the Death Valley region. He has witnessed the transition of Death Valley from a prospector’s hunting ground to a mecca for winter tourists. This is a book of the old days in Death Valley.