How Death Valley Got Its Apt Name

When Juliette Brier walked into it that day in 1849, it was just a desert sink, one more wilderness obstacle--more terrible than most--on the way to a new life in the promised land of California.

But when Brier and the rest of the party that would celebrate her heroic conduct walked out, they left behind not only four dead companions, but also a name for that hellish place: Death Valley.

On Oct. 1, 1849, more than 100 prairie schooners, 500 horses and oxen and 200 daring adventurers from Illinois, Michigan and Iowa set out for California, organizing themselves into a group called the Sand Walking Company (or possibly the “San Joaquin Co.”).

Remembering the misfortunes of the Donner party, which had been trapped two years earlier by snow in the Sierra Nevada, their leader, Jefferson Hunt, a Mormon battalion captain familiar with the Old Spanish Trail across the desert, elected to bypass the mountains and swing the party south, charging $10 a wagon for his services. Hunt would later help found the city of San Bernardino and represent Los Angeles County in the state Legislature.

Just five months earlier, in May, 12,000 men and 5,000 wagons had rolled westward toward the beckoning California gold fields. Two weeks later, the fevered overland surge increased to 40,000, and hundreds of others crowded aboard 61 ships sailing from the East Coast around the Horn to San Francisco.

The Hunt party, to which Brier belonged, set out late. Turning south in Utah, the caravan stopped near what is now Cedar City. There a passing wagon train gave the impatient and impetuous pioneers a dubious map that appeared to show a shortcut through the mountains, coming out in Tulare Valley, nearer to the gold fields than Los Angeles, where the Spanish Trail ended.

Hunt warned that they might well be “walking into the jaws of hell.” But Juliette’s husband, the Rev. John Wells Brier, stubborn and eager to strike it rich, urged others to join him in setting out on their own.

“Go west . . . and in six weeks we will be loaded with gold,” he promised.

On Nov. 7, after three days of following the bogus map, Brier’s caravan spotted mountains ahead, and more than half the wagons backtracked to rejoin Hunt’s crew. Seven weeks later that group would arrive in Los Angeles without mishap.

But about 27 wagons--including those of the Brier, Wade, Bennett and Arcan families--forged ahead on their own, crawling through the cactus-studded terrain on a nightmare journey.

In a desperate search for a way out, the other three families eventually took another route, while the Briers followed a group of 34 young men from Illinois. When one man suggested that Juliette--the only woman--stay behind, she adamantly refused.

Though hunger and dehydration had by then reduced her to a mere 75 pounds, she nursed her impulsive husband through dysentery, cared for their children, loaded the oxen each morning, took the packs off at night, built the fires and cooked the food.

Once, when one of her oxen sank chest deep in mud, she went in after it and refused to abandon the beast until the rest of the party came to help them both.

Her husband, meanwhile, sat ineffectually by: A fellow pioneer disgustedly described his conduct as that of an “invalid preacher who had never earned his bread by the sweat of his brow.”

Juliette’s eldest child, an 8-year-old prophetically named Christopher Columbus, watched over 6-year-old John and 4-year-old Kirke.

Thanksgiving offered little solace. Their meal consisted of bones boiled in ox blood.

Lack of progress led the Briers to burn their wagons to roast the dying oxen and to load their few remaining supplies on the forlorn animals that survived.

“It was a fatal mistake,” wrote Juliette in later years, “as we were about 500 miles from Los Angeles and had only our feet to take us there.”

On Christmas Eve, Juliette found her husband crouched and hidden behind a boulder, not visible to the hapless wanderers, warming himself with a fire.

“Mr. Brier was always ahead to explore and find water, so I was left with the three boys to help bring up the cattle. . . . I was sick and weary . . . and poor little Kirke gave out, and I carried him on my back, barely seeing where I was going. Night came, and we lost track of those ahead.”

About midnight, pressing forward, crawling on her hands and looking for tracks in the moonlight, she came around a big rock and there she found her husband, comfortably settled in for the night.

On Christmas Day they reached Furnace Creek, where the Rev. Brier tried to lift everyone’s spirits by lecturing on the value of education.

Herding the remaining oxen and her husband and children behind their companions--four of whom perished in the desert--the Brier family finally emerged from purgatory.

Looking back over their shoulders they said “goodbye to Death Valley,” passing from beneath the shadow of mortality into a richly promising life.

On Feb. 4, the party was the first of the year to reach the Del Valles’ San Francisco Ranch near what is now Magic Mountain. An advance party backtracked to inform the Brier family of 10,000 head of cattle and the sprawling meadows on the rancho. Eight days later, exactly 134 days after their journey began, the Briers were welcomed by a group of vaqueros who stood in awe at the sunken-eyed skeletons stumbling out of the desert.

Celebrating life, amid nourishment and new friends, the party regrouped, and most continued north to the gold fields.

Heading south to Los Angeles with the profits from the sale of their 12 remaining oxen, the Briers purchased a half interest in the El Dorado Saloon, where Juliette took command of the kitchen, though in memory of her ordeal she never served a piece of beef jerky, a popular staple of the time.

After the Rev. Brier recuperated from the loss of 100 pounds, he preached the message of salvation from his friend’s house in the tiny pueblo. It was reportedly the first Protestant sermon ever heard in Los Angeles.

The overwhelmingly Roman Catholic people of the little pueblo were unsympathetic to both the man and his message. Weary of their indifference, the Briers decamped again, migrating north, where three daughters were added to the family circle.

Before Juliette died in Marysville in 1913--outliving all but one of her sons--she returned many times to Los Angeles, attending annual pioneer reunions, which traditionally were held Feb. 4, on the San Francisco Ranch.

The group was bound together because--in the popular 19th century phrase for what we call “paying your dues”--they all had “seen the elephant.”