George's age has been a favorite topic of writers of Death Valley history for the last 30 years.
I stopped for water once at the little stream flumed out of Hall's Canyon to supply the ranch. He was irrigating his alfalfa in a temperature of 122 degrees. I had brought him three or four dozen oranges and suggested that Mabel would like some of the fruit.
"Heavy work for a man of your age," I said.
He bit into an orange, eating both peeling and pulp. "Me papoose. Me only 107 years old."
There were less than a dozen oranges left when I began to cast about for a tactful way to preserve a few for Mabel. Seeing her chopping wood in the scorching sun I said, "I'll bet Mabel would like an orange just now. Shall I call her?"
"No--no--" George grunted. "Oranges heap bad for squaw," and speeding up his eating, he removed the last menace to Mabel.
Once George told me of watching the sufferings of the Jayhawkers and Bennett-Arcane party:
"Me little boy, first time I see white man. Whiskers make me think him devil. I run. I see some of Bennett party die. When all dead, we go down. First time Indians ever see flour. Squaws think it what make white men white and put it on their faces."
I asked George why he didn't go down and aid the whites. "Why?" he asked, "to get shot?"
"How many Shoshones are left?" I asked George.
He counted them on his fingers. "Nineteen. Soon, none."
George died in 1944 and it is safe I believe, to say that for 110 years he had baffled every agency of death on America's worst desert. Because his ranch was a landmark and the water that came from the mountains was good, it was a natural stopping place and he was known to thousands. Following a curious custom of Indians George adopted the Swedish name Hansen because it had euphony he liked.
The Panamint is the locale of the legend of Swamper Ike, first told I believe by Old Ranger over a nation-wide hookup, while he was M.C. of the program "Death Valley Days."
A daring, but foolhardy youngster, with wife and baby, undertook to cross the range. Unacquainted with the country and scornful of its perils, he reached the crest, but there ran out of water. He left his wife and the baby on the trail, comfortably protected in the shade of a bluff and started down the Death Valley side of the range to find water.