Shorty Harris, man of the desert

If you travel to the ghost town of Rhyolite, just outside of Beatty, Nevada, you’ll find this whimsical sculpture of a miner and his able bodied companion, a penguin.  What a hard rock miner would be doing with a penguin is beyond me, but then again nothing in the Goldwell Open Air Museum is a true reflection of reality (see my blog entry of May 2011).  The sculpture is a tribute to a local legendary character of the early days in Nevada, one Shorty Harris.  Shorty’s life mirrored the many mining towns that became Nevada ghost towns...rags to riches and back to rags.  (Side note: the artist, Fred Bervoets, said the penguin represented himself.  A penguin would be out of place in the desert and that’s just how Bervoets felt.)

    Frank “Shorty” Harris was born in Rhode Island in 1856.  He became an orphan at the tender age of seven and by age fourteen traveled from mining town to mining town, from Colorado to Arizona to Idaho.  Eventually he made his way to Death Valley and it must have agreed with him because he stayed in the area for the rest of his life.

    He stood 5’ 4”, had big ears, blue eyes and a bushy mustache.  Shorty was a teller of tall tells and a friend to anyone who was down on his luck.  In fact he was generous to a fault.

    Evidently Shorty could “smell” gold.  He made several discoveries, many worth a great deal of money, but Shorty rarely profited from them.  He was more interested in the searching than he was in amassing fortunes.  Then there was the fact that he like drinking and didn’t like the hard work of mining, so ultimately with each find he would sell it off for a pittance of its true value.

    His biggest discovery came as a lucky hapintance.  One morning he was camped with his partner, Ernest “Ed” Cross.  While Cross was fixing breakfast, Shorty was out chasing after his mule that had run off during the night.  Shorty tripped over a rock and as he stood up and brushed himself off he was amazed by the rest of rocks in the area.  He immediately yelled for Ed and they scooped up a bunch of the rocks and headed for Goldfield and an assayer.  The rocks where rich in gold and that was the beginning of the fabulous Bullfrog Claim.  Shorty named it that because of the color of the rocks.  To celebrate he went on a bender that lasted for days.  When he finally sobered up he learned he had lost or sold his interest in the discovery.

    Undaunted Shorty continued to wander the desert.  In 1904 he managed to get a grubstake and with a new partner headed for the Panamint Mountains where they found rich gold pockets.  And once again Shorty got drunk and spent much of time completely out of it while others were profiting.  As usual he came up penniless.

    A year later once again he convinced backers to grubstake him.  Now his partner was Jean Pierre “Pete” Aguereberry.  It was Aguereberry who made the discovery and this time Shorty’s backers kept Shorty from getting drunk and rushed him to San Francisco to find investors.  Finally Shorty came out of a discovery with money in his pocket: 50,000 shares in the Cashier Gold Mining Company and $10,000 in cash.  The town that sprung up around the claim was named Harrisberry and then a couple years later it was changed to Harrisburg.  Today there is very little left.

    Shorty Harris lived a long adventurous life.  He continued to prospect, but never really owning a mine of his own.  He simply loved the looking more than the having.  He died in 1934 in his cabin in Big Pine, California.  Shorty was laid to rest just as he requested, beside his old friend, Jim Dayton in the valley both of them loved, Death Valley.  The site is at base of the Panamint Range on the West Side Road.  He wrote his own epitaph.  He wanted it to read, “Here lies Shorty Harris, a single blanket jackass prospector.”