Death Valley is the driest and lowest place in North America, and holds the record for the world’s hottest measured temperature. The lore of its name is attributed to “a group of pioneers lost here in the winter of 1849-1850” who headed west as part of the Gold Rush. Stovepipe Wells, which currently is home to the small motel where the Death Valley film is set, was the only way station with water between the two gold mining towns of Rhyolite and Skidoo. From there it became a hotel when a businessman named Bob Eichmann began development in 1925 marking “the beginning of the transition from mining community to tourist destination.” This transition happened within the burgeoning National Park, which was designated as a national monument by Herbert Hoover in February of 1933.

Death Valley is home to indigenous communities including the Timbisha Shoshone. Death Valley was harder for settlers to traverse, but changes followed roughly the same patterns as other parts of the country. Prospectors arrived, seized land and water sources, displaced the Timbisha and eventually moved them to a reservation. The National Park (NPS) often leaves out that during its development of the area as public land, it employed aggressive tactics against the tribe including prohibitions, evictions, and property destruction. It took the Timbisha over twenty years of active legal fighting to secure tribal status and nearly forty years to secure a fraction of their ancestral homeland. United States national parks often hold such hidden histories in the movement from expansion to preservation.