Okay, my shorts are actually GT boxers and usually serve as my PJ's. However, I figured they would be comfortable for a long ride home from AZ to Mammoth Lakes in the GT. I wasn't anticipating walking around and hiking and taking pictures in them (not that this would have stopped me).
Here's the scoop on Scotty's Castle... Walter Scott (also known as Death Valley Scotty) went to Death Valley the first time in the late 1800s with a surveying team when he was young. He worked at Harmony Borax Works (now a Death Valley attraction) in his early teens and fell in love with Death Valley. He also was one of the guys who worked with the 20-mule teams to move the borax across the Mojave Desert. (Another attraction in Death Valley is the 20-mule Canyon road.) Scotty also toured as a stunt man with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show for many years. Ralphie, being a train expert of sorts, also told me that he attempted to shatter the world record in speed going across the country. He succeeded, breaking the previous record by more than 8 hours.
He was a wannabe gold prospector. Basically, he conned some investors out of a lot of money by telling them that he had found gold and needed the money to continue mining. No one ever saw this mysterious gold. One day, he supposedly took $12,000 (a lot of money at that time) worth of gold to NY and it was "stolen". He then found new investors who gave more money for the same thing (and this continued for a few years)... One of his investors who was also a friend refused to believe that he was a fraud and went out to see the mine, but came back seeing nothing.
Scott also stole ore from active mines in the area, and when he claimed later to have sold his mine for millions, he was sued and put in jail for all the people he owed money to. They even made a play about him and his fraud with the gold mines.
Some say he really did have a secret gold mine and he used that money to buy the castle in Death Valley's desert, but that's not really what happened.
Anyways, down the road he was released from jail and his old friend and investor Albert Johnson came to see him and forgave him for what he did. Johnson had a lot of money and built ranches and cabins for himself and Scotty in Grapevine. Before the stock market crash, Johnson was in the process of building a huge ranch / vacation home. Scotty, not being able to change his ways, spread tales of how he was building this "castle" for himself and it became known as "Scotty's Castle". Even though Scotty didn't live there and it was a ranch - not a castle, he did go there to have dinners and parties to entertain people and to continue telling his famous stories. In the early 1930's, Johnson had to stop construction on the castle because there was a mistake with whether or not he actually owned that property. Unfortunately, by the time he corrected the issue, the insurance company (and most other businesses) were bankrupt and it didn't get finished, though I didn't notice where it wasn't done.
