Fletcher Tweed, Onyx Miner

Fletch, Right, Showing Visitors His Workroom

Fletcher Tweed. Onyx Mine. Trona, Calif.

He may be the only miner around here with a business card. He certainly is the only one who also sings opera. And his mine isn’t in Trona, but high on the west slope of the Panamint Valley. An old plywood sign leaning at a precarious angle along the road first aroused my curiosity. In faded letters it said, “Welcome Visitors”

Visitors don’t actually see the mine. He’s pretty cagey about its exact location. What visitors do see is his work area and “showroom”.

When I walk in to the showroom, I see an older fellow, a bit portly, with thick white hair, dressed in faded dark slacks and what once was a sport coat. He’s not looking too worse for wear considering the ravages of living in the desert. Fletcher and I get to talking. He tells me he’s 76 years old. He’s says he’s been here for more than thirty years, and most likely will die here.

He offers to show me around. The workroom is a long shed of corrugated metal, open to the desert sky in places, and piled throughout with samples of his onyx work over the years. Onyx

Mojave Journal

in dozens of shapes and colors and in various stages of completeness, from huge, unworked chunks down to delicate onyx beads, gemstone jewelry, and vases. And it is all for sale. He’s got dishes and bowls. Telephones mounted on onyx bases. Tables topped with beautiful onyx of all patterns. Broken wooden crates spilling out hundreds of onyx blocks, each about the size of a deck of cards. Breathtaking translucent onyx slabs lean against the walls, half an inch thick and as tall as a man. Fletch tells me that many Hollywood mansions and prestigious banks are outfitted with decorative onyx interiors and tables worked right here.

Fletcher Tweed

Now everything is covered with a heavy coating of dust. I get the feeling he just stopped working one day, and left everything to sit.

At the far end of the workroom is an upright diamond-tipped circular saw he uses for cutting stone. It’s about eight feet high, and run by a long continuous belt that loops out to a diesel engine sitting several dozen yards up on the hill.

“Want to see how this thing works?” he asks. He flips a switch and the diesel engages with a loud snort. The blade begins spinning up at hundreds of rpm, the cutting edge showered by a stream of water.

“Watch this,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. With the blade turning at full speed, he places his right hand on it.

04/11/23 2

Mojave Journal

I gasp. Migawd, this old coot’s crazy and he’s going to kill himself right in front of me. I imagine blood spattering all over.

But he’s not, and it doesn’t. He explains to me, as I am sure he has to hundreds of others, that the blade cuts through hard objects such as rocks, but soft objects such as hands ride on the cushion of water. I begin breathing again.

I look past him to the wall behind the counter in one corner of the showroom. There are several framed 8x10 glossy photos of the kind Hollywood studios used to put out. One shows Fletch in a tuxedo, obviously on stage. Another shows a striking woman in an Indian costume. Another is of a child, dressed in Wild West gear, sitting astride a horse. A few show the family together. I ask Fletch about the pictures.

“That’s my wife.” He points with pride to the woman’s picture. “She was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. College-educated. A geologist. She could read the mountains like other people read a book. Learned it from her dad. He was a government geologist working on Indian lands. That boy was our son.”

Turns out Fletch and his family are children of Hollywood. Apart from their life in the Panamints, they had a ranch in the San Fernando Valley. His wife was a Hollywood actress in the 1950s with a successful movie career. Wife and boy often were cast in Western movies, mostly because she was Indian and he was an excellent horseman even as a youngster. She used the stage name Delia Marlo; their son was Robert B. “Buzz” Henry.

04/11/23 3

Mojave Journal

Fletch was a talented operatic baritone was in his younger days. He says he used the professional name John Fletcher to sing with the Los Angeles Light Opera and several others, and traveled the world with a touring opera company.

He told me that at one point in 1958 he was touring with the company while the soon-to-be-Mrs. Tweed was prospecting in the Panamints. When the tour reached Japan, he received a telegram from her. It said, “Come Home. I Found What We Have Been Looking For.”

Buzz Henry, Boy Actor

Fletch immediately dropped out of the tour and came home, to find that his wife had discovered a vast onyx deposit half way up the alluvial slopes of the Argus Range in the Panamint Valley. They established a claim. She learned to operate a D6 Caterpillar tractor and used it to build a 2-mile road to the mine, then remove 24 feet of overburden to reveal thousands of tons of beautiful

04/11/23 4

Mojave Journal

gemstone-quality onyx. Together they built all the structures needed to sustain the mine: roads, water system, factory, showroom, and living quarters.

Where are his wife and child now, I ask?

“My boy died in a car wreck,” Fletch replies slowly. “He was working with Sam Peckinpah as a second-unit director for ‘The Wild Bunch’. He was forty. My wife died last year.” He stays silent for several moments.

Movie Poster for Fletcher’s Son

Later, I did a little Internet research on Buzz Henry. He began his Holywood career at the tender age of 3, in the film "Little Women" directed by George Cukor and starring Katherine Hepburn. As a child star, he starred in two B-grade Westerns in the early 1940s, Buzzy Rides The Range and Buzzy And The Phantom Pinto. As a teenager, he appeared in the Westerns Heart Of The Rockies with Roy Rogers and The Road To Denver with Lee J. Cobb, and in films with Alfalfa Switzer (The Great Mike), Lash LaRue, Eddie Dean and others. As an adult, Buzz worked as an actor (Von Ryan’s Express and others), a stuntman, and a second unit director. In all, he appeared in 60 films and worked on another three dozen. He also acted in many several TV series including “Stories of the Century", "The Outcast", "Buffalo Bill Jr.", and "The Adventures of Champion.” .

04/11/23 5

Mojave Journal

Buzz Henry was killed in a motorcycle accident just three weeks after celebrating his 40 th

birthday, on Sept. 30, 1971.

* * * *

A year later. I’m visiting Fletch again at the Onyx Mine. Luckily, business is slow (!!) today in the showroom. I remembered from my last year that he liked good German beer, so I brought some to share. He is delighted and invites me into his small, sparsely furnished living quarters. We talk for an hour in there. Says he’s going to Norway, his birthplace, in January, but then that’s what he said last year when I stopped by. He’s not doing any rock cutting anymore. Tired out, I think, after 30 years of wrestling stone.

Hard to imagine his life out here. Still, it’s not like the old days. Fletch now gets television via a satellite dish, has recorded more than 450 movies, and has several people working the claim for him. He’s got a small fleet of dead Cadillacs parked in the gully behind his house. One works, the rest don’t. He says they make great desert cruisers, all fins and chrome and two tons each. He motors over to Trona about twice a week for supplies and to visit friends.

Trona, population 1000. Kerr-McGee company town, the big town in these parts.

* * * *

1987.

Fletch Tweed is still kicking, but not too high. Said he went through a bout with cancer of the bowels and still isn’t feeling too chipper. “But I’m an old man,” he says. He’s 78.

Did you make your trip to Norway, I ask.

“Nope. Planning to go in March,” he replies.

I suspect he’ll never make it. I doubt he’d leave the Panamint voluntarily for more than a few hours.

We talked about the people who live in the area. Did he know the lady who lived up in Butte Valley, near the old Mormon Cabin? “Oh, Stella Andersen. Yeah, she was a fiery old lady.” He chuckles. “You’d likely hear a load of 30.30 shells bouncing off the rocks around you if you came near her place.”

* * * *

1989.

Victoria and I stopped today at the Onyx Mine. The sign welcoming visitors is gone. As we glumly suspect, Fletch Tweed died, August 17 of this year. When I saw him last year he told me he was 78, but it turned out he was only 76 when he died. The pancreatic cancer had spread

04/11/23 6

Mojave Journal

throughout his insides. The last few months he couldn’t leave his house. Friends cared for him in Trona for his last three weeks. Then he was transferred to a hospital in Bakersfield, where he died three days later. Now he’s buried next to his wife in Trona Cemetery. The plot was free, a gift of the Kerr-McGee Company.

We learn of Fletch’s death from Pinky, the executor of the estate. Her son has worked the onyx claim with Fletch since ’85. He got a quarter of the estate. Half the estate – including the wonderful collection of photos on the showroom wall – went to Fletcher’s granddaughter in Phoenix.

“We sure loved him,” Pinky tells us. “Now the BLM shut down the showroom. They say we can’t run a retail outlet from a mining claim.”

The big sign out on the paved road is gone now. The sign at the entrance to the mine says “Mine Closed To Public.” Nonetheless, Pinky seemed pleased to have visitors.

“I didn’t know him well. But he sure was good to my son.”

I didn’t know him well either. But I am grateful I knew him at all. To me he was a bridge between the single-blanket prospectors and today’s industrial mining. Shorty Harris died in 1954 and is buried in Death Valley. Fletch first came to the Panamints the same year. He may never have met Shorty, but he probably knew Seldom-Seen Slim, who died in 1968 and is buried across the Panamint Valley at Ballarat.

Fletcher Tweed was never a jackass prospector, but he’s as colorful as any of the lot. He surely was one of God’s most unique works. I’m glad I got to meet him. I feel a deep loss that he’s gone. He is one of the real stories of Death Valley. And so many, many more I wish I could have met: Manley, Mengel, Harris, Scott, Arguereberry.

Return to Contents

04/11/23 7