The Great Race

At first glance, it is a scene from a Saturday-matinee two-reeler: Six men in cowboy hats and gambler's mustaches--thin black lines on the rim of the upper lip--sit at a table, drawling and plotting. Their leader, a slight figure in a vest, with a pronounced expression of cupidity stamped across his narrow face, listens but seldom speaks. One crony, doubtless a landowner who has caused wholesale numbers of sodbusters to haul off and bust sod elsewhere, is studying a map and working up a leer that is at once servile and ferocious, the sort of look made famous by Jack Elam in many a similar scenario. Others in the group make mutterings of discontented appeasement, the kind that signifies mutiny in the ranks after the boss has said something on the order of, "Better tell your boys to lay low for a while, till we see how this new marshal works out." In this particular episode, however, no such immortal cliché has disturbed the smoky air; and the men at the table, far from being unscrupulous schemers, are the nucleus of the local branch of the Lions Club, good fellows tried and true who would no sooner lay a violent finger on a sodbuster than they would be able without considerable thought to tell anyone what a sodbuster was.

On closer examination, it becomes apparent that the faces of these worthy citizens are incapable of leering, unmarked by a familiarity with either ferocity or servility and almost certainly unacquainted with evil in any form. Still, the wish being father to the thought, and this being the basement of a barroom in the Nevada desert, the first impression takes a strong grip on the imagination, and though it turns out to be totally inaccurate, it is the sort of flavor the setting demands, and let the facts fall where they will.

The basement is that of the Exchange Club in Beatty, Nevada, and the purpose of the meeting is to summarize, for the benefit of a visiting stranger, the attractions of Beatty and the program of events that has been drawn up for the town's most auspicious occasion--the World Championship Wild Burro Race.

This momentous affair, now in the second day of its three-day run, has been beset by various small calamities, not the least of which are the reduced number of spectators and the rumor that hookers from every brothel in the state have drifted into town and carried off some of the more promising contestants.

Viewed in the light of other globe-shrinking crises, these misfortunes may be dismissed by some as trivial; but to the good and hospitable people of Beatty, it is yet another expression of the evil luck that has intermittently plagued the locality ever since the golden days of the town's birth, when it seemed the good times would never run out.

As with individuals, some towns are born great, some acquire greatness and others have it thrust upon them. In the case of Beatty, however, fate and history seem to have combined in relentless apathy to ensure that the town never fell into any of these categories. Beatty is one of those places that might have been and almost was, but isn't; an echo of a promise that never quite materialized.

Everything looked so rosy back in 1904, when the town was a community of tents, and men were out in the nearby hills, digging gold ore by the wagonload. Tents soon gave way to houses, offices, saloons and hotels. New towns sprang up all over the desert: Bullfrog, Goldfield, Bonanza, Johnnie. Rhyolite, just four miles west of Beatty, had a stock exchange, four newspapers, 56 saloons, three banks, an ice plant and a population of 10,000 or 23,000, depending on the source consulted.

Beatty at first grew faster than its rivals, for it had the Armagosa River, which meant water and feed for horses, wood for building and a cooler climate. Three railroads--the Las Vegas & Tonopah, Bullfrog & Goldfield, Tonopah & Tidewater--carried ore shipments from Beatty to Las Vegas, some 115 miles to the south, and helped establish that city as an important freight center. The future of the new towns stretched into an infinity of wealth; even if the gold gave out, there was still copper, silver and lead. Nothing could go wrong.

Then Wall Street delivered itself of the panic of '07 and very suddenly it was all over. The mines closed, the people left and the lights in the desert were extinguished. All the towns dwindled and died except Beatty, but it has been in a prolonged state of dwindling ever since.

Even the tracks and ties of the railroads disappeared, and lengthy stretches of Highway 95 now conceal the roadbed of the Las Vegas & Tonopah. The fancy Montgomery Hotel, where they once served lobster and suckling pig, with silver cutlery and glassware imported all the way from Paris, France, was long ago carted off to a more promising location.

Many people might find it hard to sustain faith and pride in a town where they come and take the buildings away, but the people of Beatty never lost hope. They are believers. Not too long ago, it looked as though they might be called upon to play a big part in the development of nuclear fission through the important work going on in the nearby atomic proving grounds. Alas, this was not to be. All that happened when the Government decided to let off a big one underground was that some dude in a suit and horn-rims came into town and advised those who lived in old buildings to get out and cross to the other side of the street for the explosion.

But there was a soiled ace up the civic sleeve, and though nobody thought to produce it until more than 50 years after the disaster of '07, it was undeniably a winner. Better yet, it meant that the town would never again have to fear the machinations of Wall Street and the international money jugglers, nor would it have to rely on the unfeeling Federal Government for its salvation.

It was on an unrecorded date at the end of the Fifties that some of the greatest brains in town met in solemn congress and forged the creation that would establish Beatty permanently as a truly famous name, restoring triumph and a modest, seasonable prosperity.

What they did was they invented the now-legendary World Championship Wild Burro Race, an annual event of such outstanding futility that it has survived for a dozen years--which, if nothing else, is four times longer than Beatty's golden era.

There were, of course, this being Beatty, problems from the beginning. Perhaps the most memorable was the very first race, which had been trumpeted in advance throughout the adjacent states. A tidy crowd of tourists arrived, all seduced by the novelty and all heartily welcomed as transient investors in the Beatty economy.

It was regrettable, therefore, that the genius of the Beatty Lions, having conceived the idea, neglected to take into account the fact that if the event were to benefit the town, then the course of the race should at some point pass through the town. Instead, they decreed a finishing line some 46 miles to the west, on the edge of Death Valley.

Thus it was that on the first of the three days, all the spectators gathered at the starting line to watch about 40 men and an equal number of burros prepare themselves for the gunshots.

The Beatty Lions were bursting with pride at their achievement. Owners of local bars, restaurants and other tourist facilities rubbed their hands briskly at the size of the crowd. Many of the people had just arrived and had not yet had time for a drink, a meal or a spell at the crap table, but tonight--with this thirsty, hungry, gambling (continued on page 186) Great Race(continued from page 112) crowd?--big business!

There was a ragged volley of shots and the contestants moved off in a cloud of dust. Accompanying them, on foot, horseback, in cars, pickup trucks and campers, went the spectators. Over the next three days, this swarm of people, animals and vehicles receded gradually farther into the desert, never to be seen in Beatty again. Stovepipe Wells, a few miles distant, did a roaring trade; someone said they had to send clear back to Beatty for a couple extra cases of beer. But in Beatty itself, where the town's thin dogs slunk through the empty streets, there was a pregnant solitude and an unusual amount of bunting flapping in the silence.

The mistake was never repeated. These days, the race starts and finishes in Beatty with intermediate stops in Beatty and a route through the safely deserted ghost town of Rhyolite. It is reported that this strategy was ordained at the post-mortem of the first race, when a Lion was said to have remarked, "I don't know about you fellers, but I think this thing just plumb wasn't done right."

Other and larger communities might well envy the classic simplicity of the Wild Burro Race, but since Beatty thought of it first (or at least borrowed it from an event staged in Rhyolite's good old days), it is unlikely that any self-respecting town would dare hold a similar function. There is also the consideration, as one veteran has observed, that "a little hunk of burro racing goes an awful long way for most folks."

This is a reasonable attitude, because, in point of fact, there is very little to see. Boiled down to its essentials and stripped of the accompanying pageantry, the race consists of a number of men leading the same number of donkeys across 40 miles of blistering desert.

This is done in four stages over two days (the third day is for the parade, crowning of the Burro Race Queen and presentation of prizes) and the wranglers, as the contestants are colorfully described, do not so much lead the animals as drag, push and wrestle them along the course. The burros, which are rounded up from wild herds in Death Valley, do not always prove amenable to this challenge and often demonstrate their reluctance accordingly. During one race, a couple of members of the Mustanger's Club--competent horsemen who patrol the course as outriders--had to pry loose the teeth of a burro that were sunk into the arm of one of the wranglers.

It costs $150 to enter the race, which in most cases is provided by business sponsors in different parts of Nevada. The majority of sponsors are in conventional lines of commerce, but among the names that appear regularly on the burros' saddlecloths are those of Vickie's Star Ranch and Ash Meadows, places that cater to human frailties by providing the services of attractive ladies who do it for money.

And it is the existence of these ill-famed and tremendously popular establishments--prostitution being allowed in Nevada by local option--that has caused the men in the basement of the Beatty Exchange Club to start clearing their throats and mutter uneasily among themselves.

One of these gentlemen, whose gambler's mustache now begins to resemble that of a Presbyterian minister, addresses himself to this delicate issue. His voice has a deep and courteous Western resonance that goes perfectly with his big hat.

"None of these, er, houses are actually inside the town limits of Beatty," he says. The other men nod confirmation, not altogether happily. The Presbyterian Lion continues: "Of course, these establishments are not legal, they're only condoned by the citizens."

Nobody at the table seems to know--or is willing to admit he knows--anything about the girls and what they charge. "Doesn't the Cottontail have its own airstrip?" says one, who seems immediately to regret this undue exhibition of curiosity. "I hear tell they've got jukeboxes," says another. There is a silence, one of many this evening, and the subject is allowed to drop.

"I was looking at your town hall," the stranger says. "It's really an authentic Western building, with that false front and everything. I'm glad to see there are still some of those old places left in this part of the country."

"Mighty nice of you to say so," intones the chief Lion. "We're tearing it down. Fire hazard. Gonna put up something really fine." Another silence, interrupted by the clunk of a body hitting the barroom floor above.

"Our ambulance and fire service is ninety percent volunteer," announces one of the group. "We've got fifty students in high school, ninety-eight in grade school. Six motels, one hotel, eighty rooms in all. We had five thousand people for last year's race."

"Where did they all sleep?"

"Outside, most of them. On the ground in sleeping bags, tents, campers. All over. Folks put up tourists in their yards. Tourism is real important to us."

There is another heavy thud from the ceiling and the men look at one another questioningly. "Guess someone fell over," a Lion ventures. "Sounds like the band's started up again."

It is decided to bring the basement meeting to an end and everyone troops upstairs toward an ever-expanding volume of sound. Between the thump of drums, the aggrieved moaning of a steel guitar, the rattle of slot machines and a roar of voices can be heard an occasional phrase of Okie from Muskogee. It is performed by a magnificently third-rate vocalist who fights a desperate and hopeless battle to attract the attention of the crowd inside the Exchange Club.

Some of the people who can still stand upright are feeding slots with the intensity of religious fanatics doing penance at an obscure, mystical shrine. A few inebriated bodies have been filed horizontally in convenient niches between tables and walls. A girl has fallen asleep on the John in the ladies' room and her escort, a gigantic Marlboro figure with an eight-inch waxed mustache, leather chaps and a crumpled derby, makes several unsteady trips between the door and the sidewalk, where he has left his horse in the care of an individual in cutoffs who has the Zig Zag man's head tattooed or painted on his bare leg.

"Thanks, pardner," says the cowboy, taking the reins and trying, unsuccessfully, to get his foot in the stirrup.

"Far out," replies the man with the tattoo, who lurches back into the bar, where he passes out across a table occupied by a group of wranglers whose faces appear to have been carved from concrete. One of the men guides him gently to the floor and resumes drinking his can of beer.

"Forty-Four!" screams a sport at the crap table, flinging the dice against the rubber wall at the far end. "Loser seven," comes the droning response, and "New shooter coming out." A burly Indian who has had half an ear torn off in the distant past--he is probably a Paiute, since the other regional tribe, the Shoshoni, are said to be gentle, peace-loving people--throws a look of venomous disgust at the losing shooter and shoulders through the crowd to the bar.

Cards are flicked deftly across the blackjack baize (two tables, beneath one of which lies a pair of discarded cowboy boots) and a frogfaced, middle-aged man in bell-bottoms and a body shirt pushes his winnings toward two Las Vegas dancers who sit at the other end of the table chewing gum.

The bar--an elegant, lengthy counter of mahogany with a large mirror on the wall behind--is barely accessible because of the crush. A girl who drove up from Los Angeles alone in a Porsche is having a quiet discussion with a local youth who cannot take his eyes from the soft and unrestrained swelling of her breasts.

"I didn't say you were a shit-kicking Okie motherfucker," she informs him, "I said your dumb asshole friend was one." The youth nods solemnly and squeezes a tempting nipple with two gnarled fingers. For some reason, he has a nickel stuffed into each ear.

At the opposite end of the bar, near the men's room with the three contraceptive machines, two gray-haired old men sporting Remington whiskers stand with their heads close together, one foot propped on the rail. One of them holds his head on one side, popping his lower denture in and out of his mouth, while listening to his companion's explanation of the international monetary crisis.

"Your dollar ain't worth a dollar. It ain't worth a dollar in Kansas City and it ain't worth a dollar no place else. It ain't worth even sixty cents." His friend ponders this for a moment.

"How about I give you seventy-five cents for yours?" he cackles, and they both lean over the bar, wheezing mightily at a joke that is probably older than they are.

A few feet from the stage, a trio of flamboyant belles is hemmed against the bar by an assorted crowd of cowboys, wranglers, dopers and other males who have homed in on the scent of professional game. One of the girls, wearing a hot-pants outfit of bright yellow, with high-heeled yellow shoes and a yellow purse, is a red-haired Amazon who towers above many of the men. Discussing the day's activities, much to the interest of those within earshot, she has a strangely little voice for her size.

"First I fall down in the boulevard, then I fucked these three guys in the camper, my legs stuck in the air. This guy won't quit, but he can't get started, neither, so I say, 'C'mon, buddy, you're holdin' up the line out there,' but he keeps pumpin' away, my back sore as hell. I figure I must have lost a hundred, waitin' for him to finish. What the hell you think you're doin'?"--a remark addressed to a small reveler who has in some manner contrived to sink his face into her left breast while she is talking. The man mumbles something about looking for his dog and the big girl pats him on the head, saying that she's taking a break but will be ready to look after him in another half hour if he's still interested. "Bring your friends," she squeaks.

"What do you think of the big one?" a man along the bar asks.

His friend shakes his head. "Looks like she got hit in the face by the southbound express."

"Think so? Looks kinda cute to me. Great ass."

Although there are two other bars in town, the South Seas and the Beatty Club, the Exchange is the main communal center during the race. This is where most of the crowd goes at night; some seldom leave, as the club is open around the clock. Wholesome and inexpensive meals--steaks and mulligan stew--are served in the restaurant section at the far end of the club's single room, which also contains the gambling layouts, bar, dance floor and stage. Altogether, the interior is about 100 feet in length and 40 feet wide. The walls are adobe with a plaster façade (the building is one of the town's originals, dating from 1905) and a wooden Indian stands by the side door.

Those customers who cannot get inside stand on the sidewalk or sit along the tubular-steel hitching rail. Sometimes a cowboy tries to take his horse into the saloon and is politely ushered outside. Last year, a man rode a unicycle up and down the bar counter, drinking steadily while teetering skillfully at the edges. Nobody knows how he accomplished this remarkable feat, because, when they lowered him to the floor, the trick cyclist was incapable of standing on his own feet.

On the dawn of the second day of racing, the Exchange Club is still going strong, even though the night's casualties have thinned the ranks. There have been no fights or other ugly incidents, but it is said that in one of the other bars across the street, a woman got into an argument with a man and thrashed him.

Back at the Exchange, the fellow with the large burglar alarm attached to his belt has finally stopped ringing the gong every couple of minutes; and his friend, the one who has been imitating a wounded bear and wears a Dracula Sucks T-shirt, has passed out in a pickup truck.

A solitary culture buff recites aloud the poem that hangs in a frame on the wall at the end of the restaurant. This piece of work, attributed to one Doug Zanders, Beatty's poet laureate, with artwork by José Sanchez, is titled Main Street, Beatty, and the first verse runs thusly:

Some call it lonely Boulevard

The stars look down and weep

The moon's half hid behind theclouds

Tired eyes won't close in sleep.

Twelve stanzas follow, but someone at the bar drowns them out by stuffing a fistful of quarters into the jukebox, proving yet again that versifying and wild burro races just don't mix.

Soon after breakfast, the race officials and wranglers gather at the starting line for the final race. Those wranglers who have managed to wake up stand in small, quiet groups, many of them looking like they just recovered from major surgery. Very few appear to be actually prepared to drag a wild burro the remaining 20 miles across the desert, even with the scheduled lunch stop in Rhyolite, but that is what is expected of them, and that is what they have come to do.

It must be admitted that although the race itself is promoted as the reason for Beatty's annual celebration, its significance seems to have been overlooked by some of the people from out of town who aren't particularly disposed to pay any attention whatsoever to events that take place outside the precincts of the saloons.

So they will miss the fireworks display, topless whiskerino contest (bearded men without shirts), World Championship Wild Beer Drinking Contest, and the presentation of prizes--$750, $350 and $250, respectively, to the top three wranglers.

There is also the parade, dancing to the Johnson Band and the Desert Sun Band, exhibitions by the Las Vegas Skydivers and the Wild Burro Polo Game for the Nye County Championship of the World, which is played between two teams identified in the program as Beatty vs. U. S. Government. The Feds are supplied by the Indian Springs Air Force Base. They usually win.

The starting gun for the final race is scheduled for nine, but the schedule has by now lost any precise meaning. They start when everyone's ready, and as soon as the last burro and wrangler have disappeared in the direction of Daylight Pass, it's back to the bar for those who bothered to leave and to bed for the visitors who have started to go blind.

Some people drive out to the hot springs north of town, where they peel off and leap into one of the two pools--male and female, husbands, wives, lovers and lookers all mixed without regard to niggling proprieties. Afterward, they might poke around in the bare ruins of Rhyolite and explore the museum in the Railroad Depot, where they will see the golden slipper that once belonged to Diamond Tooth Bertie, along with a collection of bottles, spittoons, gambling chips and other dusty relics of the Rhyolite boom.

Sometimes, strangers are accosted by an elderly lady in a shawl who strolls along the main street of Rhyolite as if she were going shopping, though the ghost town's main street today contains not a single building. This congenial apparition is fond of cornering visitors and divulging to them the cause of the Civil War, which, she maintains, was instigated solely by the greed of European munitions makers supported by a covey of English bankers working in concert with renegade Mexicans. Other notable personalities in the district, such as Badwater Bill, who moved south to Goldstrike, and Seldom Seen Slim, who went off to the big assay office in the sky several years ago, no longer contribute to the richness of the local scene; but Panamint Annie, a formidable, grandmotherly type, attends every event associated with the burro race. Her trombone voice is frequently heard above that of the m.c.

As international sporting competitions go, it is true that the World Championship Wild Burro Race, Beatty's special gift to the athletic arena, leaves certain things to be desired. But its most ardent supporters would say it is this lack of finesse that makes the occasion worth while; only the most computer-minded would disagree.

It is unquestionably an international affair. "See that big feller over there?" says one of the officials, indicating a bushy-haired, bearded wrangler. "Come all the way from Ter Han, Persia. That's in Iraq. We've had wranglers from Germany, Canada, England and Australia. People come from all over."

This time the race is won by Joe Spearman, who hails from California or Nevada--nobody seems to be quite sure--and his time is six hours, 46 minutes, 17 seconds. Gentleman Jim Gorrell, who has entered every race and was favorite for this one, came in fourth. He would probably have won, people say, if he hadn't stopped on the trail and helped another wrangler who was having trouble with his burro. But that's how Gentleman Jim got his name. It is enough for him to know that of the 34 starters, he is one of the 15 who finished the course.

Beatty, with its population of 457--as it stood at the last census--is little more than a stop sign on the road from Las Vegas to Reno, a green smudge of cottonwood trees and fruitless mulberries on the dry brown floor of the desert. One of the rarities of the American West, it is a ghost town that made a comeback, or at least makes the attempt once every year around the first Monday in September.

The people who go there for the race may not know it, but they are engaged in a gesture of solidarity in this effort. Without them, perhaps Beatty would be poorer. Without Beatty and the spirit of lunacy that inspires humble men to pointless, admirable ambitions, the world itself would be bankrupt.

"People come from all over," said the Lion, scratching his head in wonder. "I suppose it's because they can't see nothing like this no place else."