They went together into the mountains as Johnson explained, “because I was all hepped up with his ... claims.” Further explaining his connection with Scotty, he said: “I was crippled in a railroad accident. My back was broken. I was paralyzed from the hips down. Through the years I got to have a great fondness for him.” Albert Johnson, whose fortune came from the National Insurance Company, died in 1948, leaving a will that contained no mention of Scotty. But one laurel none can deny Walter Scott. He did more to put Death Valley on the must list of the American tourists than all the histories and all the millions spent for books, pamphlets, and radio broadcasts. The almost incredible case of Jack and Myra Benson proves that P. T. Barnum was not wholly wrong in his dictum regarding the birthrate of suckers. Newly married in Montana they loaded their car and set out to seek fortune in the West. “We didn’t know anything about gold,” Jack confided. “If anyone had told us to throw a forked stick up a hillside and dig where it fell, we would have done it.” Near Parker, Arizona, they were having supper in camp when another traveler stopped and asked permission to erect his tent nearby. Myra invited him to share their supper and during the meal the stranger told them he was a chemist and that he had prospected over most of the West. He had found a clay that cured meningitis, he said, and this had led to fortune. In one town he had found the entire population, including doctors and nurses down and out. The clay had cured them within a week. Among the cured, was the son of a rich woman who had given him $5000. Grateful for the fate that had brought this man into their lives, the Bensons confided that they had hoped to reach the California gold fields, but car trouble had depleted their cash and asked if he knew of any place where they could pan gold. “Go to Silver Lake, in San Bernardino County, California,” he advised them, “and your troubles will be over. On the edges of the lake is a thick mud. Get some tanks and boil it. You’ll have a residue of gold.” Jack and Myra set out over the Colorado Desert; then climbed the Providence Mountains to worry through the deep blow sand of the Devil’s Playground. After three gruelling weeks they reached the lake. There they boiled the mud. Then an old prospector became curious about their unusual performance. The world slipped out from under the Bensons when he told them they were the victims of a liar. With $5.00 they headed for Death Valley; found themselves broke and gasless at Cave Spring. Jack knocked upon the door of a shack he saw there. The woman who opened the door was Jack’s former school teacher, Mrs. Ira Sweatman, who was keeping house for her cousin, Adrian Egbert—there for his health.