William L. Manly
William Manly was born in New England, moved to Ohio at the age of nine, and developed his woodsman and exploring skills as a hunter and fur trapper in Michigan, Wisconsin, and as far west as the Dakota territory. He was in Wisconsin when he learned of the gold strikes in California and at the age of 29 he began an overland journey to strike it rich in the west. Manly kept a diary of his journey, which was later destroyed by fire. When he wrote his autobiography which described the trip it was after more than thirty years had passed.
According to Manly, when he reached the Green River in Wyoming he joined a party of men who rafted downstream to the vicinity of the Old Spanish Trail in Utah. Upon arrival in the area they encountered a Shoshone named Walkara, the leader of a band of Utah Indians, who guided or directed them to the area south of what is now Provo, where they encountered a group of gold seekers intent on using a map provided to follow a short cut rather than use the Old Spanish Trail. Unknown to them, the map was inaccurate.
They spent the next three weeks attempting to follow the map and reconcile its depiction with land features that could not be found. Hopelessly lost and short of drinking water, they found themselves on the edge of Death Valley, and camped at a fortuitously found spring now called Bennett’s Wells. Aware of the seriousness of their plight they decided that the entire party could not possibly make it out of their dilemma, and sought volunteers to find a way out. Manly volunteered, along with another man named John Haney Rogers.
Rogers and Manly walked across the Mojave Desert, surviving on jerked meat and small canteens of water, for two weeks before they reached Rancho San Fernando, roughly 30 miles from Los Angeles. After obtaining horses and a mule and sufficient provisions and water they retraced their steps, arriving at Bennett’s Wells a full month after leaving it, to find all of the party but one still alive. Both of Manly’s horses had died during the return trip. They were the first known white men in North America to traverse Death Valley.
Manly made a brief trip to Wisconsin before he returned to California for good in 1851. By 1859 he had mined enough gold to purchase a small farm, where he died in 1903. The dried lake in Death Valley, Lake Manly, is named for him, as is Manly Peak and Manly Beacon. Rogers settled on a farm in Merced, California, where he died from mercury poisoning in 1906. As mercury was used to extract gold from low grade ore it is likely his quest for gold eventually killed him.