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Jun 28 15 4:07 PM
The Freebies Pizza / Pork Chop King
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Jun 29 15 12:07 PM
I like bitchy and obnoxious.... weren't they two of the dwarves?MODERATOR
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Jun 29 15 2:55 PM
LOST SHIPS OF THE DESERT
Is there an ancient sailing craft lying half-concealed in the sands of the Colorado Desert? Such a ship has been reported by emigrants, prospectors and other travelers who claim that she lies with her bow buried deep and her richly carved stem raised high above the sands. The usual theory is that it is a mirage-like most of the exciting tales that come out of the desert-always a few miles away, but when a mirage really gets down to business, the results can be startling!
Tales of a Spanish galleon lost in the sands of the Colorado Desert keep recurring, from an amazing variety of sources. One of the most persistent made the pages of the Los Angeles Star in 1870. It seems that hundreds of years ago, when the waters of the Gulf of California came up into the desert, a pirate ship sailed up the Gulf. It was caught in some cross currents and went aground on a sand bar. The crew died, and the ship was left stranded there with almost a million doubloons and pieces of eight in her hulk. It's only when the wind blows and the sand clears that you can get a good look at her, and then the same wind comes along and covers her up again. The Star locates the wreck about ten miles from Dos Palmas. The newspaper gives a graphic description of the time when the Gulf occupied the entire valley, and, in fact, connected up with the Pacific Ocean through San Gorgonio Pass and Los Angeles. The Star did a series of articles speculating that the ship might have been one of the units of King Solomon's navy, or the craft that carried the ten lost tribes of Israel to America; and for the latter offered proof that the tribes never reached America but died of diptheria in the Sandwich Islands! Another idea advanced was that a war-like people from the Indian Sea took a tempestuous voyage to the Gulf of California. Here their ship, Bully Boy, sank in treacherous quicksands. Her hull was made of teakwood and did not rot. The Digger Indians of California are descendants of this Shoo-fly tribe.
The Los Angeles Star continued to keep its readers buying papers by reporting a search for the ship in its edition of November 12, 1870. It wrote, "Charley Clusker and a party started out again this morning to find the mythical ship upon the desert this side of Dos Palmas . Charley made the trip three or four weeks ago, but made the wrong chute and mired his wagon fifteen miles from Dos Palmas. He is satisfied from information he has received from the Indians that the ship is no myth. He is prepared with a good wagon, pack saddles, and planks to cross the sandy ground." On December 1 the Star printed this story from the San Bernardino Guardian, "Charley Clusker and party returned from the desert yesterday, just as we were going to press. They had a hard time of it, but they have succeeded in their effort. The ship has been found! Charley returns to the desert today, to reap the fruition of his labors. He was without food or water, under a hot broiling sun for over twenty-four hours, and came near perishing." Charley had found a great Spanish galleon, with ornate carvings, crosses and broken masts, sunk in the desert sands several miles from any water. The Star readers waited in vain for further news of the galleon. Historical novelist, Antonio de Fierro Blanco, in his book The Journey of the Flame, tells of a party that left Mazatlan in 1615 on a pearl-hunting and trading expedition into the northern end of the Vermilion Sea - the Gulf of California. After they passed Point San Felipe, homeward bound, they began to look for the Straits of Anian that would carry them from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Instead they found a narrow entrance leading to an inland sea (presumably the area now occupied by the Salton Sea). While they were exploring the shores of this body of water, a great cloud burst occurred in the adjacent mountains, sending quantities of debris into the sea. This landslide choked the narrow inlet through which they had come. They spent weeks trying to find another outlet, until the water began to recede as if by enchantment, and their ship was finally grounded. They were obliged to leave it in the desert with its vast treasure of pearls aboard.
Subsequently, a boy named Manquerna, from Sinaloa, said dig in 1774 he was taken by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza as a mule-driver on the exploring trip from Sonora to the California coast. When they started crossing the desert westward from the Colorado River, he was sent out to the right of the course traveled by the main body of explorers, to seek a different route. While he was traveling at night to avoid the heat, he stumbled upon an ancient ship, and in its hold were so many pearls that they were beyond imagination. He took what he could carry, deserted de Anza, and finally reached the Mission of San Luis Rey. Later, he spent many years trying to find the ship again.
The desert actually has had several ships sailing its sands. Before the present Salton Sea was formed, the Liverpool Salt Works, operating in the bottom of the dry sink, built a three wheeled sand yacht similar to an ice boat, and used it on the packed bottom of the old salt bed. In the late 1890s an inventor came to the desert with a wagonload of lumber and the necessary ironwork for building a ship. He pitched his tent in the vicinity of Kane Springs and proceeded to build a contraption in the general shape of a boat, with mast and sail and four broad-tired wheels. But the wheels were not big enough and the craft made only about a hundred feet before it wobbled into an eroded cut, shook the one-man crew overboard, and staggered unguided across the sand. it finally bumped into a weed hill and toppled over, breaking the mast off about four feet above the one-piece cross-board deck.
In 1862, according to the Desert Magazine of El Centro, California, when the gold rush to La Paz, Arizona was in full swing, a boat twenty-one feet long was built by the Los Angeles firm of Perry and Woodworth for a band of gold-seekers. They expected to use it crossing the Colorado River. The boat had a mast and sail and four wheels. They loaded the amphibian with provisions, hitched two teams to it, and started out on the two hundred fifty mile journey. Somewhere between Whitewater and Dos Palmas the teams gave out and the craft was abandoned.
But back to those legendary ships. The very real navigational hazard of the Colorado River's immense tidal bore might well have caught an unsuspecting sailing ship, carried it inland and dumped it there. Persistence of such legends in both Indian and frontiersmen lore make it hard to completely discount them. The sands tell no tale.
Jun 29 15 2:57 PM
At least one of the myths about the Salton Sea is true:
The lost city of Salton has been underwater for nearly 100 years -- not as long as Atlantis, but a long time for California.
Fifty feet below the surface, the old wooden buildings of a saltworks factory, a few homes, telephone poles and miles of railroad tracks have been gathering moss, snagging fishing lines and providing a hiding place for corvina, croaker and tilapia.
But another myth, perhaps because it remains a myth, is the one that engages the imagination.
A 16th century Spanish galleon, laden with pearls, is said to have sailed up the Gulf of California into what is now the Salton Sea. A landslide or sandbar apparently blocked its escape, forcing the crew to abandon the ship and its precious cargo and walk out of the desert. As the water dried up, the hulk gradually sank beneath the shifting sands.
And there's another mystery about the Salton Sea -- its environment.
The landlocked, super-salty desert sinkhole, 35 miles long and 15 miles wide, survives on agricultural runoff but is a fish and wildlife sanctuary and boating spot.
The lake came about by accident in 1905, when two men, a land developer and an engineer, cut a small channel from the Colorado River into a northbound canal just south of the Mexican border, intending to steal water. Their plan must have seemed simple. But nearly as soon as the cut was finished, the mighty Colorado punched its way through 100 square miles of sediment and ran amok. Water rushed into a salt-covered ancient lakebed 265 feet below sea level, flooding a Cahuilla (pronounced ku-WEE-yah) Indian reservation and the little town of Salton.
It took 16 months for farmers, with the help of the Southern Pacific Railroad, to restore the river to its banks. (The railroad had an investment there; it had laid tracks across the sink.)
The Salton Sea is only the most recent of a series of much larger lakes that have dried up and been reincarnated in that spot. Collectively called prehistoric Lake Cahuilla, it was named for a tribe whose members have lived in the area for thousands of years.
In the early 16th century, Lake Cahuilla was larger than the state of Delaware, ranging from what is now Indio down 115 miles into Mexico. It was navigable from the Sea of Cortez, known today in the U.S. as the Gulf of California.
That same century, the lake's feeder river, the Colorado, changed course, moving back to the Gulf of California. The lake disappeared, leaving behind a salt marsh and a still visible water line, like a bathtub ring, along the base of the San Jacinto Mountains. The lake also, quite possibly, abandoned the storied Spanish galleon to the desert.
Like the mud pots in the southeast area of the sea that still hiss and pop in the hot soil, the lake's history has bubbled up through the ages, providing the template for generations of legends and myths.
Some of those legends came from the Cahuilla, who thrived in the area, fishing in Lake Cahuilla, gathering acorns and other seeds and hunting on the steep slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains.
Spanish conquistador Hernando de Alarcon reputedly discovered the Colorado River Delta in 1540, lusting after another myth -- the gold- and gem-encrusted Seven Cities of Cibola. Before then -- no one is sure when -- a Spanish ship is said to have slipped past English and Dutch pirates who lurked at the entrance of the gulf to plunder treasure-laden Spanish galleons.
Amid the tangle of tales surrounding this mystery ship, one thing is definite: It was possible to sail this sea route north, beyond where the Salton Sea is now. And reports of an ancient ship in the desert, successively buried and uncovered by the shifting sands, have persisted for centuries.
On Nov. 12, 1870, the Los Angeles Star newspaper claimed that prospector Charley Clusker had hit the mother lode in the desert about 10 miles from Dos Palmas. Clusker, the newspaper said, had found an "ornately carved Spanish galleon with crosses and a broken mast."
Less than three weeks later, the Star continued to sell papers by reporting that Clusker had returned to the desert where the wreck lay in the "midst of boiling springs, where the animals sunk to their knees in alkaline mud, which removed the hair from their legs."
Ten years later, the San Bernardino Daily Times reported that Clusker had never found the "Lost Ship," but had returned to town "with new visions of wealth floating before his eyes." The gist of the story was how good Clusker was at finding someone to bankroll his treasure hunts.
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